Background

Team: test automation developer

Position level: (lowest level, I would say entry, I have not been promoted after working almost 3 years for the company)

Team size: small, 3-5 people (including myself and interns)

Note: I am by far the least experienced on my team in terms of education and working years. My lead has double digits level of experience. Also, I believe that perhaps English being a second language for all the members, may play a part in this problem (we work in a country where English is the first language)

Summary

I am mainly confused about the differences of responsibilities of the team lead and the amount of delegation happening on my team. I am a junior but, it feels as though I am partially managing/on an island just doing my work. Reading the full problems experienced below, I believe/feel as though my team does not pick up their slack and only portrays that they are doing something to other people within the company.

Problem

This started about a year into my job. I had been put on a project that none of my other team members had experience in (neither did I). I would reach out for support from my team lead but, received virtually no help from my lead (excuse being that they have never worked on this before and have no prior experience, they still haven't read any of the documentation or they are too busy right now and need me to remind them in a few days again to look into this).

Eventually, I started attending all the meetings for the project, asking the right people for help, doing research in the codebase to understand the architecture and design of the product, reading the documentation and standards to understand the needs and wants of the project. It seemed as though I HAD to do this, given the fact that my lead would then pressure me to complete things (even when I had made it explicit that I was blocked on a few things since I did not have answers for them).

When the above started happening, my team lead essentially 'gave up' on that project. The behaviour of my lead had drastically changed. My lead had stated they would automate two tests while I was on vacation (for 2 days). This was not completed for more than 2 months as the deadline for the project was approaching, my lead then delegated this work back to me. My lead asked me to send them questions through email. The questions never got answered even after asking my lead for a follow up for 2 weeks consistently. Eventually, my lead stated they would not get back to me on my questions. My lead refused to read any of the documentation associated with the project which, results in me repeating information at least 6 times (I still have to repeat it since my lead refuses to remember it). It got so much worse when I had to dictate an email that was being sent by my lead to the owners of that project.

Since my team (only me mostly) has to perform continuous testing for that project, my lead still insists on having their hand held throughout the whole thing.

Now, this behaviour has somewhat permeated to other projects. My lead has not reviewed most of our MRs in 2-3 weeks. They only now review MRs that are visible to external teams, the rest have been handled internally by other members (this also being delegated and leading to my lead being out of the loop). Another infuriating experience I have with my lead regarding a MR related to a project they are familiar with. My lead explicitly asked us if we had any MRs that needed their review, I sent them a link to a MR in which I had asked a question/discussion as well. 5 minutes later, that MR was just approved without addressing any of the concerns raised in said MR.

Another annoying habit that is just present in my team is, my code is barely ever reviewed/merged now (especially related to the project that the other members insist on having no clue about).

It just feels like the team is technically off the rails or there is barely any management happening (other than when I step up and introduce more streamlining in the process). For example, I introduced templates for our MRs, labelling to address the problem of my lead asking which MRs are blocking our work and using Issues to track problems.

I have tried everything: documenting in code, writing detailed MRs, communicating and explaining the same thing over and over and over to my other team members, corresponding with other people to get things completed and most importantly, conveying this information to my lead.

This has lead to extreme frustration when working with other members on my team and interacting with the lead. Unfortunately, I cannot switch my position/company yet due to some personal circumstances right now.

I would like to explicitly ask for responsibilities that our team has (especially my lead's), without offending them, to confirm that the above behaviour is absolutely unacceptable and eventually report this to upper management.

Note: The owners of the project are actually very pleased with me and my work. They have a good opinion of me and appreciate my work (they have made it verbally explicit).