Im accused of being a micromanager. Higher-ups want to build team capacity at the expense of quality
Tags: management, leadership, career
Published: 2024-05-30 04:52:08

# Im accused of being a micromanager. Higher-ups want to build team capacity at the expense of quality

I'm the defacto tech lead in my team, of 6 people, where I've been working for 4 years. We don't have a designated lead, but me and another experienced dev make all the important decisions by consensus.

Higher-ups have always voiced a strong opinion that building team capacity is more important for our company than to ensure perfect quality. However, they recognize that certain areas are mission-critical, where quality shouldn't be compromised.

When reviewing PRs I have generally tried my best to have a balanced criteria: On one side I try to prevent introducing regressions, particularly on critical areas; On the other side, I try to provide junior devs the opportunity to gain experience by not expecting all their code to be perfect.

However, some junior devs feel very empowered to own certain critical areas, and tend to make large PRs with changes that may be risky, or require extensive reviews, or refactors on architecturally significant code. When this happens I've usually handled the situation by requesting changes, and sometimes PRs require several reviews before they're merged. Sometimes these juniors are difficult and we've had frictions because I hold my ground and they either disagree, or ignore parts of my reviews, or repeat the same undesirable behavior in future PRs.

The other senior dev in the team has a more carefree and agreeable personality and has a much more lenient taste when reviewing PRs. His code quality isn't as good as mine, and his performance on architectural design has been sloppy in the past. He doesn't like confrontation and doesn't like to say "no" to people.

He has accused me of being a micro-manager, of being an obstacle for the team's scalability, and of not giving devs any freedom, of expecting perfection, and says I consider any code that doesn't match my personal style to be bad code. He also spread these unproven accusations to the higher-ups. Now there is a myth surrounding me, that I'm all these things.

I had a call with the higher-ups where I brought this up. I prepared a thorough presentation where I tried to debunk these myths, and made the claim that the accusations were biased due to his carefree personality. To my demise, they seem to have a special preference for the other senior dev. He's been at the company for longer, he has more charisma, and people like him because he's nicer.

I feel like these people (The senior dev, and the higher-ups) don't know how important I've been/ I am, for the team. I'm the backbone of the team, and I'm not getting the credit for it. I make all relevant engineering decisions. Before I was involved, their development lifecycle was so bad, the app was always crashing because every PR had regressions. Over these years, I gradually turned their pet project v1 into a stable and serious app that now has a chance of becoming profitable. I feel like the team doesn't deserve me.

I would like to hear some feedback in general.

Should I look for another job? The main reasons why I've liked 
working here are that it has mostly felt like a relaxed working environment, and they prioritize team harmony more than strict deadlines and results. But I feel like I'm a more competitive-minded person.