Non-mgmt developer and third party developer
I am the only software developer in the company and I answer directly to the owner of the company. We also use the services of a third party developer. The owner is not a developer, but "wrote the software in qbasic" many years ago. He has a reasonable ability for projects. The outside developer does not answer directly to me and my boss is indeed a micro-manager and wants to keep it that way.
An external developer likes to use abstraction layers (frameworks and wrapper classes), but implemented them when I got stuck on monthly projects. When I return, the boss is now wondering why it is so time-consuming for me to do maintenance on projects (including the one I wrote from scratch). I am unhappy with the development of his code and it is difficult for me to understand that I have to learn a completely different interface from the code, which looks much different from what I wrote in the first place. At the same time, the outside developer looks like a hero. Suggestions on how to frame this to a tech / non-tech boss and how to put a lid on this in the future?
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At the risk of voicing patronage, be careful that it's not just your perception of what you think your boss thinks might be pretty far from reality.
Your boss may not want to explain the situation to you because he doesn't trust you, doesn't doubt your competence, or doesn't want to belittle you; rather, understand where the difficulty is so he can make an informed business decision about whether you should redesign that code, or maybe better leave it as it is and move on to various aspects of the project.
By being honest and explaining that you have limited experience with these framework / wrapper classes, you can "buy" your time to not only learn these frameworks (which I hope you will enjoy in the future), but can also mean that you show up to embrace and extend to other developer code, which is good team spirit, if nothing else.
At the very least, ask your boss to ask you if there are aspects of your explanation that he needs additional clarification for. Keeping good clear lines of communication will help everyone move forward faster.
Hope it helps!
Woof
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I don't know if you can handle this with your boss. I could have with mine, but not everyone could.
First, it needs to be done with respect, and the proposal I'm going to make should be within a longer discussion. When it comes to explaining the difficulty of working with this developer code ...
Enter a paragraph in English, ask someone to type the same sentence in some language your boss doesn't know. (Chinese, Spanish, Klingon, whatever.) Give your boss (language) an English dictionary and explain that while you are technically capable of translating this external developer code into something useful, it takes time, time to translate from (language) into English using a dictionary.
This will probably work best in the context of trying to set standards for working with outside agents and potential new hires.
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