At one company I worked at, the team never did their paperwork, so the manager would delegate it to people in other groups, who weren't on the project, didn't know the technology, hadn't attended the meetings, and had no idea what they were doing.
Then when the report was a disaster, missing essential information the author(s) didn't even know existed, the manager would reprimand them for not being professional. The team that worked on the project whose job it actually was to do the paperwork went unmentioned.
The manager tried it with me, once. I wrote a completely complete, and accurate report. Of course, since it wasn't my project, I didn't have to worry about upsetting anyone, so I cheerfully explained this was behind because the database group didn't understand the format, and that didn't work because it was imported from the product team who hadn't tested it, etc.
It turned out that the manager had explicitly told the team not to mention any of those things to upper management, because "they don't need to know". The result was a reprimand of the entire team for blowing the budget and hiding the real status from upper management. Well, if the team had written their own damned reports, they could have kept it secret.
This led to the amusement of the manager trying to reprimand me for exposing things to upper management that he didn't want known. And since any reprimand would have to be approved by said upper management, he didn't get very far.
Oddly enough, I was never asked/ordered to write up reports for other teams, ever again.
I was about to say that managers never properly read reports anyway. But you absolutely MUST flag up problems particularly if you need help to fix them. This is what managers are for, solving this kind of problem.
You're an army of one, Bob!
even when you have team, it feels sometimes like this
Smells like it’s time for the I in ice cream. ‘Bye. 🍨
At one company I worked at, the team never did their paperwork, so the manager would delegate it to people in other groups, who weren't on the project, didn't know the technology, hadn't attended the meetings, and had no idea what they were doing.
Then when the report was a disaster, missing essential information the author(s) didn't even know existed, the manager would reprimand them for not being professional. The team that worked on the project whose job it actually was to do the paperwork went unmentioned.
The manager tried it with me, once. I wrote a completely complete, and accurate report. Of course, since it wasn't my project, I didn't have to worry about upsetting anyone, so I cheerfully explained this was behind because the database group didn't understand the format, and that didn't work because it was imported from the product team who hadn't tested it, etc.
It turned out that the manager had explicitly told the team not to mention any of those things to upper management, because "they don't need to know". The result was a reprimand of the entire team for blowing the budget and hiding the real status from upper management. Well, if the team had written their own damned reports, they could have kept it secret.
This led to the amusement of the manager trying to reprimand me for exposing things to upper management that he didn't want known. And since any reprimand would have to be approved by said upper management, he didn't get very far.
Oddly enough, I was never asked/ordered to write up reports for other teams, ever again.
I was about to say that managers never properly read reports anyway. But you absolutely MUST flag up problems particularly if you need help to fix them. This is what managers are for, solving this kind of problem.
This is my life.
Just let go of our other developer.
It's me full time and a part time co-founder giving me work to do.
I'm not just the technical Co-founder anymore. I'm also doing marketing and support and just about everything else.