- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn’t select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you’ll have to start this whole process over.
Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"
Let’s not forget “We need this right away!” then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren’t actually ready for it yet (if they don’t change their mind and decide they don’t actually want it at all).
It’s actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says “Well, it’s a simple task. Are you having difficulty?”.
It’s an obscure and weirdly specific law.
(This is a joke, of course.)
I have spent the past 20 years cultivating a variety of tones in which to utter my standard reply to such nonsense:
“Cool. You do it then.”
That’s a great way to handle it.
I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.
When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.
If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)
I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.
God, as a true scrummaster - one who believes in actual scrum - where the devs make the rules - not management… this hurts. This hurts so goddamn much.
- 4 hour planning? PMs shit the bed.
- Story points = hours? Micromanagement
- Estimate with that much accuracy? Micromanagement who are also terrible with managing their own schedules.
- It’s a simple task. - How would any business person know how long or expensive a dev task is.
And on and on, and of course you all know this. The term “Agile” has been so bastardized from it’s conception by management who think it’s a micromanagement tool. It’s quite literally the opposite. It’s mean to put the power in the hands of the developers - so they can be efficient and keep management out of their way. Management just couldn’t handle handing over a tiny bit of power though. Have to break the fundamental pillars of agile, like dictating what a point is, or how long things should take. Ugh.
I remember when I first read about AGILE. I was like “this is pretty cool - but there’s no way corporations will actually adopt this methodology without completely turning it into just a set of new names for the same shit they’ve always done.” Naturally, that’s exactly what happened.
I’ve had about three companies do agile correctly. They were either less than 10 people total or did not care at all. Any company with middle management dipped their toes in, I think because they need to prove their existence
My job uses Safe. It’s the bastardized scrum you speak of.
Are points the complexity, effort or time? Yes. No. No. Maybe. Yes. Who knows?
They also sum our teams capacity as if we are interchangeable cogs doing the 1 same simple task.
We have endless meetings. Daily 1hrs. Follow up to the follow up. Meeting to plan meetings. (I wish I was joking on this next on) Planning meetings to plan for the upcoming planning meetings.
It’s chaos.
It’s hell.
I get 5% as much actual work done as I used to. Not even joking. It’s bad.
Im not in the industry and the answer to my question might be part of the problem: have you tried to say something? / what was the outcome of you criticising the whole planning and meeting mentality?
Not the person you’re answering but usually these are not a root problem but only a symptom. The answer will range from being told that you are the problem to “let’s schedule a meeting to discuss that”.
The mentality usually stems from higher up, and you don’t really get to speak to people originating policy.
Yeah, if middle management micromanages you, that’s likely because their boss makes them answer some uncomfortable questions, if anything goes wrong.
Except traditional management is about removing as much power from the people that actually do the work as possible, so that’s why this bingo even exists.
PO: “Why does it seem like it takes a really long time to develop new features?”
Dev: “I’m glad you asked! We’ve got this piece of code (points at smoldering pile of spaghetti) that literally has to be changed every time we do anything. The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years. No one knows how it works and it’s central to the entire application. I would estimate that this easily doubles the time it takes to work each ticket. I’ve created a set of stories to rewrite this code. We just need your approval to bring it into an upcoming sprint.”
PO: “Can’t… Hear… Breaking… Up… Bad connection…”
Dev: “Uhhh… This isn’t a Teams meeting. You’re sitting in the room with us right now.”
PO: …
Dev: “We know you’re still here even if you’re not moving.”
PO: …
The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years
Four years? You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
I recently learned that a web app I wrote in 1999 (for Internet Explorer lol) is still in use by the company I wrote it for. And this app was basically a graphical front end sitting on top of a mainframe application that dated to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe POS is still running, too. My app was written in Classic ASP and Visual Basic 6 - I truly pity whatever poor bastard has to keep supporting that shit. They probably have one ancient PC in a closet somewhere acting as the server for it.
One of these is wage theft. Don’t enable that shit.
Yup. Not getting paid? Don’t work.
Forced to? We have a word for someone who is forced to work for no compensation… The word is slipping my mind, but I’m pretty sure the USA fought a civil war about it.
Does 5 time trackers count as 5 points ?
who are these time wasters that just put bugs in their code. I mean come on.
It’s me, I do it. But only when I need something to do to stay awake in hour five of today’s meetings to address the “quick turnaround” patch that I finished coding three weeks ago, but now they want a label to change and no one on the six teams that have somehow become involved seems to know who owns the package that the field the label represents belongs to, but they’re absolutely certain we need to programmatically retrieve the text in case the package owner changes it at some point, and someone remembers that the original developer wrote code to get the label text 16 years ago, but it was removed from the program two years before the project started using source control, and they have an old installer around here somewhere that we can decompile or trace with Wireshark to get the right RPC name (sharing their screen while they have a rummage for it, natch), and someone else volunteers that they might know how to get a version of the server application from around that time since the client and server versions have to match, but it’s technically the intellectual property of a different subcontractor who was just a guy in Alaska who passed away five years ago, but they’re sure they can convince his estate to burn it to a disk and mail it to me if they can just find the contact information…
The “Story Points = Hours” hits so goddamn hard. Like, tell me you don’t fucking understand scrum without telling me you don’t understand scrum.
We had a nice, effective production process on my team until a middle manager assigned to communicate with us started in with the whole “We can’t spare this many points” bullshit.
I just had a contractor tell me I needed to prioritize their request because it’s urgent for the task they’re working on that’s adding a new feature.
they want me to push the changes out by EOD…today…Friday.
I don’t like to do this, but I hold seniority…sooo…I think I’m going to take a three hour long lunch and cut out for the weekend early.
don’t come to me with a request unless it’s actually urgent.
“Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter”
We have the one hour daily meetings we call “standup” 🙄
Right? Minute 55-60 is the 15th minute. Fuck that. If it takes that long then the team is too big for agile or the scrum master had lost control.
”All features are xy problems”
”PM adds new features to the sprint faster than they’re solved”
”Each release require two weeks of testing”
”Each release introduces new bugs for customers despite the two weeks of testing”
Bikeshed? That’s a new one for me.
Bikeshedding is when instead of making important, compex decisions that have consequences for being wrong, someone focuses on the simple, low impact, minimally important part of a project that has no consequences if its fucked up.
I think the term comes from construction projects where instead of finalizing the design of a complex building, the execs spend the entire time talking about bike parking on site. What color to have the roof, how many bikes it should hold, etc.
Bikeshedding is about offloading responsibility while still feigning involvement. You, the owner, avoid the whole part of your job youre paid for, i.e “making the hard decisions” and through misdirection and inaction, make someone else do it. That way you can blame them later if things go wrong, or take credit for their work if they go right.
Ooh, yeah, seen that one before. Thanks for the explanation!
I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.
Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.
If story points are now hours, I hope you’re fine with me putting a 40 on that ticket.
Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
Sources:
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work
They worked well for us
Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.
After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.
The outcomes weren’t noticably different, so now we just don’t spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.
My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn’t want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.
So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.
Somewhat agree, but since Scrum is supposed to be bent to the team’s needs, it might differ from team to team, but it’s fine as long as those numbers are consistently used in one team.
