Story 3

I remember distinctly going to my team leader: I didn’t understand the design document I’d been given and I was trying to get somebody to explain it to me. They said they’d get back to me when they had time and I should get on with what I thought was right and so I did. Then I went back to him a month later, and said “Look I still don’t know what I’m doing here. This is what I’m doing, can you at least confirm that this is right?” And they went, “Er, I’ll look at it.”

I didn’t get anything back until I actually went to the Project Head and it’s 70 people to a project and I was pretty junior, so I was a bit nervous, I said “Well, look I’m just trying to find out whether I’m doing the right thing.” And he went, “Sure, I’ll look at it.”

Two months later, I rolled off, six months after that I got my review, and I got slated in the review. I’m A-grade student, I’m not used to this, and I knew that I had done my absolute best.

But I got things like I hadn’t finished my code. My team leader had said that he would finish it and it was fine for me to leave. You know, I was moving onto another project, so I’d passed my code on. I thought that was unfair. I got: “doesn’t understand designâ€?, “didn’t do a good jobâ€?, “doesn’t review her own code properly.â€?

I was frustrated because I thought that I felt if I had got that feedback I would have known. The place that I should have heard that I was doing a bad job was when I was doing the job, not six months later.

So the whole Agile idea of Fail Fast for me has this real resonance. It was very hard for me to get over the bitterness that I felt and to actually take some of the comments on board and look for help to go and fix the problem, because I felt like somebody else should fix that problem for me, should have fixed me earlier.

But I did learn from the feedback, I did get a lot better as a result. I think it stood me in good stead remembering how I had got better when the [next company] let me go as well. I took what feedback I could from it; which was mostly that I needed to communicate better with the people on my team and make sure I didn’t get put in that position again - make sure that they were aware of their responsibilities as me of mine.