For the last 9 months I have been working with two senior developers and a principal team leader and the overall experience is the worst. The work is a nightmare now. I am not sure how to handle the situation and I need some advice.

Pro tip: These are my biased opinions, but I try to give some concrete examples to give you some idea.

One of the senior guys is the “tech lead“. He doesn’t know basics of online services and he acts like he knows what he is doing, which is not the case (he picked SOAP over REST because he likes it, he likes to define things static). He gets offended pretty easily if you question his approach. He has this inspirational driven development skills though. Every day he comes up with a new design. Even he changed the design of the system during the design review we had with stakeholders.

The other senior guy is technically strong, but his social skills are out of whack. His mood oscillates often. In case of a bad mood, he treats you like an idiot. I remember him entering my office, taking a chair, sitting and looking at me as if he is going to interrogate. He never accepts failure. If something is wrong, it is definitely someone else.

Team leader doesn’t have much idea about what we are doing. He is more of a manager than a developer. He randomizes developers with the ideas he heard from others. Anytime there is an open question, he talks about his previous project. However, he doesn’t seem to have full details.

Project/system is not performing well or scaling either (each request payload and response is read/written twice for instance). I have been raising questions about certain decisions (which made the tech lead guy hate me by the way), but team leader doesn’t have enough context and knowledge to deduce the actual problems.

I tried finding another job outside the company (I cannot just leave due to visa requirements), I failed. I am looking for an internal transfer now. However, the frustration and stress is killing me.