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Guess i got a blackout bingo on this one. Oof.
"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?"
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…
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
”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”
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.
“Shift left” by doing all the work yourself
Plan, design, code, test, debug, deploy, handle incidents, it’s all your job!
Special prize for blackout?
A pizza party from 12-12:30, perhaps?
12:15. And you bring your own pizza. Best we can do because budgets been tight after we spent 7 million dollars on the new 3rd party software system. It’s turnkey and will solve all our issues right out of the box though.
turnkey /tûrn′kē″/ noun
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The keeper of the keys in a prison; a jailer.
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A person who has charge of the keys of a prison, for opening and fastening the doors; a warder.
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An instrument with a hinged claw, – used for extracting teeth with a twist.
Sounds about right.
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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.
4 hour planning
I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.
