Three months ago I started a role at a new company as a software engineer. Within two months, I helped onboard the team to a lot of contemporary best practices. They didn't do proper source control, had zero testing, didn't have much cloud experience, and built projects in a pretty dated way. Note that I was never a zealot on "best practices" - I was simply asked if I knew how to do "such-and-such" and helped lead the team along the way.
While I'd argue that I'm a senior (I can build, deploy, and maintain a project from start to finish) and feel comfortable managing a team, I definitely have a lot to learn and am not ready to be the lead architect (nor am I paid with a title to reflect that). Either way, this is essentially the role I adopted as I was made the "lead developer" of a new, highly critical project.
The first sprint of this project didn't go well. I underestimated how long it would take to get this brand new program off the ground because I was operating under the following assumptions:
- The learning curve time was estimated into the sprint.
- I wouldn't be managing the team.
- I wouldn't be tapped by the DevOps specialist as a resource on how to do a CI/CD pipeline.
- I would be able to tap the senior developers (with 3-4 times my experience).
These turned out to be false assumptions. The critical failure here is that the senior developers help was, "I don’t remember how I did this, but here's a poorly written application we did two years ago that does it." TL;DR they didn't provide guidance on things they claimed they had done and I had to learn it without their assistance.
All of that is fine. What is not fine is that after a single failed sprint, the director of the company expressed frustrations and now wants the project manager to have daily check-ins with me and me alone to see if I specifically "have any blockers".
I feel extremely insulted after all of the hard work I've done and how much I've helped improve the teams' practices, knowledge of cloud and software design, and how I stepped up into a lead developer and mentor role without requesting a title or salary change. Am I overreacting? How can I communicate that I'm not okay with this?