I’m a SWE and I work in consulting. I’m on a project team with another SWE who is brand new, been on the job and into his career for 6 months. I’ve been here almost 4 years. We are working on a small team with a solution architect and a technical manager on a high profile feature.

When assigning points this sprint the manager asked both of us what our skill level was with a certain component. I said I’d never built one, but that I had spent time debugging and making changes to ones that already existed and I felt up for the challenge of taking that story. The other guy has no experience at all with it.

They gave him the story. Ok, whatever, annoying and a bit of a surprise because this is a high visibility, high pressure situation. On Friday this dev and I are in a call and he hasn’t started on his ticket, doesn’t understand what he needs to do, so I tell him if he wants me to take a look I can do that. We figure a couple of things out, I give him a next step chunk for him to work on while he waits for more guidance from the mgr.

I’d worked a lot of extra hours last week so I intended to log off a little early. Maybe an hour later I’m getting pulled into a call where he and the mgr are solutioning out his ticket. The mgr is actually doing a big chunk of his work for him and they want me there for I dunno, reasons. I sit on this call for almost two hours. Then we all logged off. The plan was for all of us to take some steps to familiarize myself with this stuff.

I am three hours into my day. The first hour was meetings. The second hour I started digging in a little to my story. The third hour I am pulled into a meeting with the solution architect about something, then pulled into another meeting with the mgr, the SA and the other dev. The first thing the mgr launches into us wanting to know how up to speed we are on with the other devs story(?). He is specifically asking me what I learned between the end of day on Friday and three hours into Monday about how to work on his story. The other dev is completely silent.

I interject at that point and say that I’ve spent my morning working on my story and working on an issue with the SA. Like, why am I being expected to take the lead on his story? If they wanted me to do the work then why didn’t they assign it to me? If they knew he did not have the skill set to do this, why is it my problem they gave it to him anyways? I mean, I’m always open to assisting and helping out but why am I being called out or expected to be knowledgeable about this or actively doing this work? And why is his lack of competence not being called out or acknowledged?