Colleague Thrown in the Deep End

Question

Recently a developer began working in the small team of 5 that I'm in. I discovered this week that he has been assigned a gargantuan task to perform within a very short period of time. I really can't understate the difficulty of this task, it requires rewriting around 10% of the 1000+ test suite. I'm talking about the sort of task that is arduous to me, even after a year of working on this codebase.What's more, management recently gave him a grilling for his lack of progress on said giga task. This dev is competent, willing to learn but completely demoralised by the situation and worries about being fired... I've politely communicated publicly to management that their expectations are wildly unreasonable and praising the progress anonDev has made.What more can I do to stand up for this individual so that this doesn't happen next sprint?

orangesite · Accepted Answer

One thing the dev in question can do is to send out a daily email to management summarizing the progress they made that day and the work that is still left.
With a week of progress logged it might be easier to steer the conversation with management towards the preparation of a realistic estimate for the remaining work.
If this is not something management appreciate or are interested in discussing it is likely the dev in question could find more pleasant employment elsewhere.