Ask HN: What is the right scope of responsibility for two devs?
I’m a swe at an automotive company, and am working on an internal app, with one other developer. Our boss is at the same time the product owner / manager, and I’m struggling to understand how I feel about the team dynamics, given that we don’t really have any set processes, but essentially work on whatever is currently prioritized.
- We are both juniors, fresh from university
- We don’t have any sort CI/CD pipeline, we push to Git and deploy via Github Actions
- One of us (me) focuses on doing the UI, UX + Frontend design, whereas the other does Backend.
- We don’t do Jira, our system tends to be to work on things, show him our progress and he provides his input
- This input can however change the direction of the feature meeting after meeting.
- We are responsible for making everything work - so far it more or less has, as we’ve successfully piloted and launched to users, but it is beginning to feel like a house of cards
- We are also working on other responsibilities, (we are the data analytics / digitalization) team. I also have an intern for the side-topics, though it does take a lot of capacity from my day work.
Recently, I’ve noticed that as the project complexity grows, me and the other dev have had communication difficulties (I think he is a great dev, but the pressure and lack of documenting due to the output expectations leads to me forgetting information about endpoint quirks, etc): we don’t have a set system for documenting things in place, we use our Teams chat but I feel like we can do much better.
Is this situation normal? Would love to hear your opinions / tips on how to navigate this, as it has definitely taken a toll on my mental health recently.