I (46M) work in a cloud services team at a mid-sized tech company. Most of our work is backend cloud services, not low-level drivers, but recently we ran into a serious issue with a driver that our product depends on. The driver was originally developed by a vendor years ago, and we no longer have support.
Replacing it would have been expensive and risky.The bug was subtle and only happened under high but varied load. Memory buffers were occasionally being overwritten, causing intermittent crashes. It is the kind of problem where multiple things are happening at once, and you can easily make it worse if you do not know what you are doing. And there was a new feature we were working on that made this issue more likely to happen.
I asked a junior engineer on my team, early 20s, who studied computer science, to help by writing tests and trying to isolate the part of the driver causing the issue. She spent about a week setting up a testing harness, adding instrumentation, and systematically narrowing down where things were going wrong.
After that she asked me if she should push the fix herself. I told her no. It was too risky for a junior to modify a kernel-level driver directly. One small mistake could corrupt memory or crash the system, and I felt it was my responsibility to implement the fix safely. She seemed a little disappointed but accepted it.
I then applied the fix myself, tested it thoroughly, and deployed it. The crashes stopped. I received praise from a lot of folk, my director, and a shout out in the monthly engineering update. Since then I have noticed the junior engineer has been a bit colder toward me and a colleague even mentioned that she thinks I should publicly acknowledge her role because she helped with the testing. I do not really understand. From my perspective she was assisting with testing and I did the critical work of applying the fix. AITA for not letting her push the fix and leaving the credit as it is?
YTA. She found the issue and figured out the fix, you swooped in at the last minute and took all the credit. Even if its true that you needed to be the one to apply the fix for liability reasons, you should have made sure that your junior was included in the praise and received credit for the integral work she did to solve this. If you don’t think the work she did was necessary or deserving of credit, you should have done that work yourself.
OK, so it’s nothing to do with the title and more about you taking 100% of the credit without doing 100% of the work.
YTA.
Typical higher up taking all the credit like he did it all himself. YTA.
YTA. You have to let go at some point and train the next generation. You could have still let her do it under your supervision and direction. She worked hard on it and you stole her glory (double AH).
You need to write a companywide letter and let everyone know that it was not you that fixed the problem and that it was infact her.
Also, expect to lose a lot of respect from your colleagues for stealing her praise like that
YTA you would not have been able to apply the fix without her running the testing. You should acknowledge the work she has done
YTA. Her work saved your ass. Give her credit.
YTA.
I can understand why you felt you needed to push the fix yourself, but I am unclear as to why it is so difficult to give her credit for the work that she did?
YTA, you took credit for her work. If it were me, I would have already filed an HR complaint. You need to start taking g steps to rectifying this situation. Thank her for her work, let supervisors know her level of contribution.
YTA. The hard part of debugging code is determining the root cause of the problem. You had her do all that hard work without any credit.
Then it sounds like she knew the fix to apply just as much as you did given that you said she wanted to PUSH the fix and that you applied the fix.
A fix you only knew would work because of all of the testing she created, which fundamentally means that she’s the one that was verifying this critically important patch was correct.
So other than making the final commit and merging the PR what did you do?
YTA
You stole credit for the work she did.
She isolated the issue, she designed the fix. You just implemented it. It’s understandable you would have wanted to supervise the process, but you didn’t do that, you just took her idea and then did it and took credit for it.
There is a LONG tradition of men doing this to their female colleagues in science. Women like ohhhh Rosalind Franklin, who pioneered x-ray crystallography and worked out the structure of DNA, only for two men to then take credit for her work and win a Nobel Prize they didn’t earn.
You maybe aren’t familiar with stories like that, but I can assure you that your colleague is. And she’s going to be telling her mentees one day about the AH who took credit for her work and condescended to her because she was the girl who fixed the problem HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO FIX HIMSELF.
AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AHHHHHHHOOOOOLLE.
YTA
way to take all the glory on someone else’s work.
You could have easily let her do it and, … I don’t know…, reviewed her work AND tested it with her.
She diagnosed the issue from the sounds of it. Identified what needed to be done, told you how to do it, then asked if she should. She did all the heavy lifting and you snatched the glory without acknowledging her.
YTA.
So to me it sounds like she laid a out a significant amount of the ground work for you and you won’t even acknowledge that she helped you? That’s how you lose the respect of people working under you.
YTA
YTA, just like the last time this was posted. This is either a rewrite of the other post, or y’all are a bunch of assholes in the coding world.