I feel like asking my coworkers to do their jobs should not be something I need to do on a regular basis. This doesn’t apply to all of them, thankfully, but a few that I work with routinely make me wonder I’m expecting too much of them. I mean, I’m the most junior of my coworkers amongst this cohort of irresponsible adults and yet it often falls to me to make sure that they’re doing their jobs and not letting things slip through the cracks. It would be one thing if it was an occasional slip-up, but I’ve routinely had to go to one coworker for a foundational aspect of his job that I need him to perform so I can properly do my job and the way he reacts every time I do this is like I’m making some kind of horrible, unreasonable demands of him. I get it. It’s not fun stuff to do. He’s not passionate about the maintenance project. But it is literally his job and his job alone to give me the information I need so I can tell if the developers I work with are doing things right, if they’re actually solving the problem, and if they even know what the problem is. And it should not be falling to me to do that. Every single other person in this group is either a Senior rank in their role or promoted high enough that “senior” positions no longer exist. I shouldn’t need to be the person getting the group together to address problems or fill gaps or figure out how to proceed from whatever mess we’ve landed in because no one else did something about a glaring problem I identified months ago but couldn’t get anyone to take seriously because I have no authority and even 12 years of experience isn’t enough to actually get these people to take me seriously without concrete proof of a present and pressing issue.

To be clear, I don’t mind doing this work. I enjoy the organization around it, I don’t mind occasionally being the stern coworker, and I’m good at identifying problems before they’re actually problems. It is pretty natural that all of this work would fall to me considering one of my coworkers is too nice to ever push back against people, another would rather just keep his head down and work, and the last is only ever interested in working on whatever project has captured his attention lately, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem that this is happening. I should not be the one doing this work since it isn’t a part of my job description but is literally a part of all three of my coworkers’ job descriptions. Plus, I’ve got enough work on my plate, and not just from all the times their unwillingness to actively address an issue has resulted in scheduling snafus that take time away from our software work. I should not be the one dropping everything so I can get three adult men in a call together so they can talk long enough to figure out the same problem I identified and pointed out to all of them months ago. Nor should I be the one running the call to make sure that people know what they’re supposed to be doing and have clear expectations about when they need to do it by.

I had a conversation with my boss about this. It required setting up the context of my one coworker not delivering what we need, which he immediately seized on as a problem to solve. I also had to talk to him about the burnout my senior coworker and I are feeling, which he also seized on as a problem to solve. I did not like needing to defuse him from trying to solve a problem I was already dealing with and that would get worse with my boss’s active involvement (my coworker who needs to do his job so I can do mine is not under my boss and the two have butted heads quite frequently), nor did I like needing to justify my overtime when it’s burning me out (though I did thankfully have some shorter weeks previously and a day off the next day that I could point to as me working to solve my problem), but it was necessary to get him to see the actual problem and my preferred solution: the most junior of the bunch was taking care of problems that shouldn’t have even come up, let alone fallen to me to solve and that he should just promote me so doing this stuff becomes a part of my job. After all, most of my coworkers are too set in their ways to change much at all (a lesson learned over nine years of working with them) and the logical choice for who should do this stuff is handing off more and more of his responsibilities to me as he vaguely talks about his impending retirement (that does not have a set year yet and likely won’t happen for at least half a decade at this point). Clearly none of them are going to change unless my boss forces it and that’s going to work out well for exactly no one.

In the meantime… Well, I’ve built out an accountability schedule and promised to bring up the work that needs doing in every meeting we have until it gets done as part of a regular check-in for progress updates so we know when to schedule a review (which is months late at this point). I have absolutely no ability to enforce that, and no way to actually hold people accountable, but you better believe that it is going to be noted in every single meeting’s minutes until the problem’s resolved. I don’t care how long it takes at this point, I am not letting this stuff go again. I am not letting people get away with having their lack of responsibility go undocumented. Sure, there’s also a massive lack of accountability for stuff like this, so it will probably never go anywhere no matter how it plays out, but I am going to make sure that everyone knows that I am writing it down. That’s all the threat I have, all the accountability I can enforce, but maybe it’ll be enough so that eventually someone with actual power can hold them to account for the laundry list of documented willful failures (not gonna document normal failures: I maybe be a snitch because of what I’m doing, but I’m a snitch with standards). That’s all I can really hope for at this point [as evidenced by this week’s meeting a week after the first one where zero progress had been made and no excuses were given]. Accountability someday. Maybe.