Let's clarify:
* Github is not Git
* Android is not Java
* Unit test is not TDD
* Java is not OOP
* Docker is not Devops
* Jenkins is not CI
* Agile is not institutionalised total chaos
* Developer is not Printer Support

Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

Agile my ass. Stand ups should not take 40 min.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

I'm 54 y.o.

I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.

I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.

Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.

I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.

I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.

I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.

Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.

I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.

I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?

As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

The new guy told me he doesn't want to make the code future proof as it's not agile.... Congrats goes to the management for successfully hiring as asshole...

We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!

Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!

You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.

We're building some pyramids.

What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!

Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?

We require a giant pyramid.

For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.

The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.

Now go build already!

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

So I resigned. After a long and torturing 1 year at my current company, I decided to leave. I wish I would made that decision in first four months.

The company is full of problems. I will explain them as much as I can in following rants. But I can name all of the stupid and dumb things I have seen here people do. If i was writer, I would wrote a book - titled as "which companies not to join EVER". But I am not a writer.

Overall the company was being ran by bunch of idiots. They did not have any experience with product development. But they like to micro manage everything.

I have seen death of agile and then it came back as a evil zombie named "micromanagment".

I am so glad, I am going to be free of all these things in few days. I can't wait to show them middle finger.

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

I think I figured out why so many companies jumped on board the Agile approach. Companies heard Productivity Bonus and Put Stuff into a List Of Things to Do, and left out all the rest of their responsibilities. One of my past companies was like "We're going to take an Agile approach to everything! Except, we're not going to shield developers from everyone who has stuff in the backlog, and we're going to have other meetings during the day on top of the scrum meetings to check on your progress, and we're going to measure points in time instead of complexity".

I feel like the creators of the Agile Manifesto would be really upset at all of the poorly implemented processes. Because all of us developers are pretty upset.

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

Manager: "Can we get an accurate report on how many containers we have on the Kubernetes cluster?"

Me: "Well not really since Kubernetes is designed to be dynamic and agile with the number of resources and containers being created and deleted being subject to change at a moment's notice."

Manager: "I want numbers"

Me: "Okay well if we look at a simple moving average over time, we can see how the number of containers changes and then grab a rough answer from that"

Manager: "These numbers look a little round, are you sure these are exact?"

I'm going to throw myself into a pile of used heroin needles and hope i get stuck with whatever the hell this guy has to somehow be a manager while also being this retarded.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I'm a lead Dev on an agile team. We were just handed a fixed scope, fixed date project. On Monday, instead of helping push this out, I get to have a meeting to explain how throwing more bodies at it will slow us down.

"No! We are not code monkeys! Knowing JS and Java isn't the same as knowing our application. Stop fantasizing that it's a simple manpower issue and leave us alone so we can work these fucking nightmare timelines in peace!!"

I'm looking for a better way than that to explain it to the Sr management for the business so I don't get fired.

I can understand (to a point) when non-devs use meaningless tech "buzzwords", but please, as developers, can we just agree not to spout nonsense?!

"Electron is so amazing, it's such a lightweight framework!"

"Django is incredible, it's so agile!"

Agile is a family of development methodologies, and Electron is about as heavyweight as a desktop application can possibly get...

No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.

I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.

I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.

I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.

I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.

I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.

I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.

I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.

Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.

See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?

Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.

Hugs and kisses,

Platypus

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

I think I'm falling in love. With TDD.

I used to be very skeptic about it. You know, the usual reasons: it takes longer to deliver, constant "flow" interruptions, etc, etc. But ever since I've tried it I'm nothing but happy about my choice :)

I'm moving forward, I'm not making any regressions, I'm no longer afraid to make any changes in my code as I know tests will show what exactly I break,.. And most importanty, I have all use-cases with corner-cases defined and "explained" in the code... No more do I have to search in Confluence for how this exact scenario should behave. Everything is here. Everything's in the tests.

It's amazing!

Yeah, it DOES take longer to deliver so if you're hardcore Agile living by "Ship it as soon as it compiles" TDD might be too slow. But if you prefer knowing when your code is covering all the use cases w/o any errors -- TDD is the way.

Boss: this is different from the old console I don't like it

Me: but this has been approved by product management and the team already made estimates and committed to the feature

Boss: Well this needs to change, our existing users will not like it

Me: This is far from agile to be honest, and the change came from user feedback analysis

Boss: You are not doing your work *swears and curses* this is against the team direction!

Me: then why was this committed on this sprint? All I did was facilitate the needs of the team to proceed development.

Boss: *runs out office and starts calling other bosses to boss around*

Runs in 5 minutes later, saying we are not allowed to destroy a feature with enhancements like this.

Me: *Infinite facepalm*

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

First, they came for those who Open Source'd code.
And I did not speak out, because my code could never be used by anyone out of the company, anyway.

Then, they came for the Trade Unionists.
And I did not speak out, because I was not in a union.

Then, they came for those who worked from home.
And I did not speak out, because I was granted an exception.

Then, they came for Scrum Masters and other Agile practitioners.
And I did not speak out, because fuck those spreadsheet jockeys productivity thespians.

Then, they came for in-house Data Analysts and Data Engineers.
And there was no one left to speak out for us.

Yeah, folks. The day finally came. I'm officially updating my LinkedIn and putting a ridiculous sash under my picture, "open to work". The Layoffs came for me, too.

It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.

The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.

They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.

The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.

All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.

It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month.

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

I hate all of the people that think "agile" means "do everything at the same time, with no cost". Or, other fuckwits, think that "agile" means "fuck plans, dev team will figure something out".

Both of these types apparently did not read any publication about the subject.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

Looking at one particular job ad

“Experience with agile”
“Excellent knowledge of agile frameworks”
“Work with agile software development team”

Basically in the first few paragraphs it mentions agile about 10 times.

Then the first bullet point in the essential column

“Must have experience working to tight deadlines”

D’oh

Delivering next 6 month’s product roadmap to CEO, other directors and senior management.

I know it’s all going to change.

They know it’s all going to change.

I know they know.

They know I know.

No words are spoken.

For the first time I am feeling like.... I hate my job.

Agile and Scrum can be fucked, but at least there is a work methodology. I was hired by a company being run the old school way.

These guys never heard of git??
- Fuck you. We never used git and neither should you.

Client company does not want to give me push/pull access to their gitlab instance??
- Fuck you, you can use our RDP server for that.

Project planning features be damned, they've got email, Teams and videocalls!

Can I develop in peace? Fuck no, I have to give IT support to the guy who hired me.

Our timeline is defined IN A FUCKING WORD DOCUMENT FOR FUCKS SAKE. I can't connect Issues to milestones in a Word doc

Oh, and the customer is running everything on prem. If there is a need to scale up, FUCK ME. I should have specified 20 machines from the get go or gtfo. We're using 2 machines to run 8 different services that are going to be ingesting and computing data.

They want state of the art on a cheapskate.

And I have nothing else lined up at the moment. Although I am soon to renew the contract... This contract binds me with professional responsibility for a project being ran by people who do not give a single fuck about optimizing the work process.

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.

Developers: Sure.

After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.

Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.

Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.

Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?

Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.

Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.

Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.

Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.

Serious Question/Poll

Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...

Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)

What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.

What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.

Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.

Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.

Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.

Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.

What else am I missing?

Gave the marketing team access to JIRA and gave them permissions to create tickets. Don’t know if that was a management’s design or what. Tickets were poorly written and I had to make frequent follow ups to figure out what the heck was actually being requested. I did get accused of “questioning the request” at least once. It was a big WTF because I think marketing thought they managed dev team but they didn’t.

Marketing also didn’t give a damn about agile processes despite being told some simple rules, such as don’t change your ticket details after a dev has already begun work on it. I would pick up a ticket thinking it’s just html and css updates, then it would change to include an api update. No no no. You’ve just turned a 1 day ticket into a 1 week ticket. I don’t have time for these shenanigans.

I would also submit tickets for code review and marketing would say it’s not ready for review. Then why was that ticket in the to do column for the past two days?! They couldn’t make a decision and would submit revisions every single day.

And they would think devs could do everything. No, never assume the front end dev can pick up back end tasks.

No one on dev team really cared because we were all looking for new jobs anyway. The company was planning to lay us off in a year. Every month a dev gave notice and left.

Why fix tomorrow, what you can write properly today!

Seriously, why does everything have to be [M]otherfucking [V]omit [P]rojectiles and dealt with later when it falls apart, rather then spending that extra few hours / days making it fucking stable now, instead of months some where in the future.

Excuse me, I have yet another foreseeable fire to put out.

Please tell me something wrong with me, and whole world is working like that! It can't be right! Or could it, and I'm just one sad fuck who don't know shit?

So... We've got:
1. Jira reporting (agile style with cards and shit)
2. Task timers (via application integrated to Jira in order to count how much time we spent on a task)
3. End of the day email reporting with description of what we have done today (Jira is not enough?)
4. Daily morning meetings with a team leader to report what we're gonna do today
5. Git merge code reviews for each finished component (that lasts for hours)
6. Weekly status meetings
7. Working hours reporting with a fucking fingerprint

And on top of all of that, the developer is the one who just writes the code - team leader decides how this code is gonna look, what will be written first and what last, what libraries will be used and so on...

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

Agile Coach: you need to take part in the next quarter planning of the work. Work with your business team to create a healthy backlog. Provide your input to the user stories. It’s a collective effort.

Me: why tf it’s not a collective effort when code breaks and only one dev is trying to fix it while taking in all the heat.

Of course I can’t say that out loud without getting fired.

have you ever felt that you enjoyed and loved your job and coding, then after a while all of the joy, contentment and vigor just left together with the wind?

Well I have, and let me tell you the story of my peope and the feature whirlpool drain of death, slowly `agile`ing you to the death of creativity.

First everything was seemingly good, Its your product, a baby that every one is contributing to make, a great idea in the making.

Fastforward after the baby was fully materialize, and you are watching his first step, usually you are happy seeing his slow growth. But ITS A BIG FUCKING NO. He wants the baby to go faster, bigger and stronger, more than what he can chew. Then you watch as the baby grew into an abomination. A monster of undistinguishable and parts. It grew inhumanly large. BUT it never grew and it never matured. The baby sits there, and were just here injecting all sorts of stuff just to make his father happy. But the end of the day he will ask more and more and more, until the cycle goes on. The baby grows but does not mature, and were here trying to make his father accept the baby. But NO he like more. Sadly we have no power over this. we are mere slaves of the fathers bidding. his bitches, tools and nothing more...:(

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

How bad it feels when it work in a place where Agile and DevOps are mostly abused buzzwords.

Forced doing "scrum" with:
- half of the team providing endless daily reports instead of focusing on the 3 questions
- a scrum master that is barely reachable
- a product owner that would not even make a decision
- a sponsor that pushes us to go faster regardless of current technical debt (it's important to look good to other sponsors!)
- doing all possible scrum ceremonies with no value added
- not even estimating stories
- not even having accurate description in stories. Most of the time not even a description.
- half of the team not understanding agile and DevOps at all

Feels so good (not). Am I the one in that boat?? ⁉️

What's the point of doing scrum if implemented that badly?? 😠

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

I googled "scrum sucks" and now I can see a pattern described as an argument against the whole scrum/agile/whatever thing, which is already happening since we started adopting agile: we're consciously incurring technical debt and being allowed to create a mess out of the previously existing code architecture just to "get this ticket out of the way"

We're also refraining from acting immediately on negative user feedback on a feature just released, which I think can wear user perception of the company as a whole, all because it's "not the focus" of the current sprint

Software development lifecycle? Not Agile. Not even Waterfall. Here, it's Adhoc.

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

I’ve been tasked with finding an experienced Project Manager for ‘a sensible cost’ - no specific budget amount shared.
That sounds like “we want the best, but want to pay very little” right?
It’s a massive project, they said “you developed this, did all the documentation and research, you can PM it right?”
“Can’t we just start making progress and adapt as we go?” They asked.
Sure I said (thinking Agile), but they said I just need to get on with it and let them know when finished! So no stakeholder interaction... this is not going to end well...

Forced to take a "course" on agile. "Course" meaning 6-7 150 minutes sessions of uselss blabber. Fucking hell this is exactly like the worst of college courses.

Such a massive waste of time.

Giving my honest, somewhat filtered opinion in the dev group, I am in the minority it seems.

"But it's such a great opportunity!"
"<MANAGEMENT GUY> really pulled some strings to get us this course and I am fully confident in <MANAGEMENT GUY>'s criteria."

FFS, he's not in this chat. You won't get a raise by brown nosing him this hard you twit.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

You know what's fun? When your client insists you use an agile process with a delivery at the end of each sprint, then proceeds to bitch at each release at the features that weren't implemented yet. The thing isn't even slated to be done until 4Q 2018 and is on schedule/early. Glad I am not on that team . . . yet.

What are your thoughts on working for a company that give their devs jira tickets that don't have any descriptions? I work for a big organisation (It's actually in the top 3 biggest companies in the country I live in) and I work in a team that has quite possibly the worst agile practice I've ever seen. We get tickets without any descriptions at all. The worst bit is then we get pressure from project management for not delivering things on time. Do they actually realise how difficult it is to deliver something without any business requirements? I have to have a million meetings before I even know wtf the ticket is about. It's incredibly annoying.

I proposed agile training to my company.
I choose a well known coach around here, with good references.

First 3 days were great. After a month he came back for another session and check progress.

This time, he literally fell asleep during the workshop. Several times. He would ask questions, sit down and quietly fall asleep while waiting for our answers.

We were astonished and embarrassed.

He apparently had a very hard working period and could not cope with traveling and working so much. He apologized some day afterwards and didn't charge us for the day.

He never came back. The team didn't take it very well and my reputation was compromised, as well as trust in the methodology I think.

I kept saying that everybody can have a bad day, but it was probably just to defend myself and my fucking stupid idea of changing the world.

A real fucking shame. Still I can't believe when I remember this.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Prepending user story titles with 'as a user' does not make you agile

I love adding documentation in a sprint and then it prevents us from releasing a product because someone did not finish the story. *doing Agile wrong*

I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.

We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.

How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.

I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.

Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...

Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.

Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.

Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.

Ok, so we have the Spotify Agile Model now (tribes, squads, chapters, etc). I have seen it implemented in a few large companies, and they seem to be doing ok.

It's just... doesn't anyone worry about the product that came out of this great way of working?

Spotify is great as a service, but it has to have one of the worst usability/success ratios of any modern mobile / web app. You can almost feel the various squads doing their own thing, not thinking about the whole experience.

Doesn't the product count when considering using someone's way of working? Is the Spotify Agile Model the project management equivalent of Twitter's Bootstrap?

Is there a Developers' Manifesto? Like Agile Manifesto?

If not let's start one here, I'll start:

-We should not be working outside work hours except for exceptional cases, hours != 24/7 && exceptional != 7 days a week
-Death to last minute changes!
-Everyone needs to understand Murphy's Law, it's real!

I applied for a position as an engineer for a nonprofit organization that helped kids across the country (and the world) and got the position. The people across the organization were wonderful and, without a doubt, mission driven to help kids and it felt good to do the work. The agile teams worked well together, every team had their roadmaps, and management always emphasized family first. The organization was making crazy money so we were given all the tools we needed to succeed.

Then, within a few months of my hiring, it was announced that the non-profit organization was being bought by a large, fairly well known for-profit company which had also been recently acquired by a venture capital firm.

The next thing we knew, everything changed all at once. We went from building applications for kids to helping this company either make money or build value for their owners. Honestly, I did not know what my day-to-day work was doing for this company. The executives would tell us repeatedly that we were expensive and not a good value compared to their other teams. It felt like we were only being kept until the systems were integrated and their had access to our decades of data.

You might think I'm being paranoid but a year after the acquisition, we still did not have any access to any of their systems. We operated on a separate source code solution and were not given access to theirs. When requests came from them that would facilitate them connecting applications to the data, it was to be considered highest priority.

The final straw for me was when I was told my compensation would be cut for the next year. We were strung along for the whole year leading up to it saying that the company was evaluating our salaries compared to others in the industry. Some of us figured that we would probably even go up knowing that we were underpaid for a for-profit tech company because we chose to work in a non-profit for a lower rate to be able to do worthwhile work. Nope! We were told that we were overpaid and they talked about how they had the data to prove it. One quick look at LinkedIn would tell you they must be smoking something that had gotten stale in a shoebox. Or they were lying.

So that was my rant. If you think you are protected from the craziness in tech right now just because you are writing code at a nonprofit, you might be wrong. Dishonest executives can exist anywhere.

Non technical Co-founder comes up with some batshit crazy idea and says it’s Agile because he thinks that means you’re not allowed to argue with it.

Dumb people are dumb.

So someone complained to my bosses boss about some internal page where I collected some of our own funny git commit messages, because they were not "meaningful", and I had to take down said page.

Fuck that narrow-minded seriousness, why be so German? If we have to debug multi-threaded C++ programs, we need that bit of fun and sarcasm to stay sane. But probably that someone is a member of some of these "professional" Agile teams that waste a day a week with fucking retros, sprint planning or other mind-crippling meta stuff, then evaluating frameworks and tools, while we are doing motherfucking programing.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

Agile my ass.
What has become of: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"?
A fuckton of rules and processes to do it the 'right' way: tickets, estimations, hours of sprint planning. Yeah, we're so professional we no longer have time to write code.

Note: manifest was mainly full of fluffy business buzzword bullshit (effective sustainable excellence), but one thing resonated:
>Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

(I cherish every line of code deleted or unwritten, so it needn't be maintained)

When scrum master/agile coach sais "I know, I used to be a developer myself." ....

Do they think it makes me trust them and drop my point?

Honestly all I think is "well, plenty of bad devs out there, and there's a reason you'r not doing it anymore"

So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.

Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!

So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.

That was such a fun Friday afternoon.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

My boss uses agile development so he doesn't has to think about use cases he wants to be covered by the application.

He's just throwing in a "design" (an image that is probably created with Paint) without any further specifications and inconsistent elements, let the developer work two days on it, see the outcome, complains why it's not how he wanted it to be and then starts thinking how the feature should be integrated in the app and notices that his "requirements" from the image could not provide any advantage or usage at all for the user of the application. Asking for clarification before starting to work just leads to spongy statements or silence when he notices that he didn't think through to the end.

Sad is that this has not happened only once but is usually the way a new feature is developed...

The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"

Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."

If it was so great, why didn't you stay?

We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.

Doing GUI agile testing with the QA before passing my code to test server. I do this 'cause the QA marked in the past a lot of bugs that aren't bugs because he didn't liked the wording (in spanish there's A LOT of ways to say the same thing), the color of a button or an icon, and this delayed the release of the code a lot of times. So, this way I can change things to avoid unnecessary bugs... if the QA is not so busy XD

Agile/Scrum is the worst project management style in software development.

Rather than focusing on delivering a feature or changes on the project, everyday there is always a meeting that you need to attend to, other than the daily huddle. And those meetings are none of your concern or why they needed you there

And my Product Owner and Scrum Master does not know even though how software development cycle works. When you discuss technical details or constraint to them, they either look confused or don’t know what to say and just say “If you need anything, always communicate or approach me” even you already told them the issue.

Or maybe we are doing it wrong. But it is been 5 years when they implement this Agile/Scrum and we are still bad at it.

Just ranting

The team in our office was forced to have, and I'm not kidding, TWO hours long agile meetings EVERY day. That's right, only 6 hours a day for work. Crazy managers

My boss was told that dev team cant do TDD because they are agile and following scrum. Did not know what to say.😏

I love when my lead decides that we need to do "proper" agile after he got talked to by his boss for not running the team the right way.

Even after being talked to, he still hasn't closed out the last sprint, and we are now four days into the current one without any assigned tasks, and he hasn't been in the office the entire week.

I love my job <3

'we have a critical bug'
'Look, it's out of my hands, we would fix it but we do Agile, it needs to wait for grooming, planning, and then get in to the next sprint'
'how long will that take?'
'not long, 2 week maybe, 4 at most'

CircleCI:
- Ensuring work has meaning: "Let's make yet an other dashboard webapp that going to replace all of our dashboard webapps which we made to replace all of our dashboard webapps"

-Solving interesting problems: "Let's make this with java 15 instead of java 14!!!! Also add graphql to ADD interesting problems nobody had since the nineties!"

- Gain meaningful value from talent: 'Bitbucket and the whole pipeline died fourth time this week, I'm going to drink a coffee or two..."

- Developers in flow: "Joe went to have a lunch around 11:00, you probably should not look for him until 14:30."

- Bring buying decisions closer to the engineering team: "The boss tried to bring up the pros and cons between aws and azure... The police eventually had to break the ensuing fight in the meeting room. The survivors reported things got truly out of hand when someone mentioned line-endings"

- Bring leadership closer to the engineering team: "There was yet an other agile coached hired, when she asked how should we measure velocity one of the lead devs managed to actually wake up and told her that the wifi is still pretty fucking slow"

Anyone else here suffering under a tech lead who instead functions as a business analyst and ignores their dev process in favor of stakeholder demands?

Case in point: our tech lead actually said in our latest retrospective (yes, we're running on Agile) that we should align our schedule to business. So wtf are we even doing Agile sprints for effs sake (this we did not say for fear of losing our jobs)

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

I was brought into my new position as part of an transformation of waterfall to agile methodology.

We are now running 4 while projects and need to restart the remaining 29 projects using agile principles. The business management type people love agile, but somehow the people inside the current waterfall practices doesn't.

They are afraid their silo work will either expand or not exist thus making it hard to transform the company. Also the company have been subjected to the dead sea effect.

Therfore, the project that is currently in the space of transformation is making my blood boil because people just ain't passionate enough about software.

Either you craft software, or, well you sit and suckle other's money. People suckling should please grow up and start venturing beyond there cozy 9 to 5 and transform to be a professional software doer rather than a BA, DEV, IT GUY.

YOU BASTARDS GET A SHITLOAD OF MONEY AND DON'T DESERVE IT FOR THE EFFORT YOU BRING.

It is your software, own it, be proud of it. Read up to make it better. And as always, the people debugging your code can be a violent psychopath

Used to be a fan of agile and the wisdom of the crowd, but now I’m not so sure. If the team majority aren’t experienced then the experienced people make suggestions are voted down.
I’m fast becoming anti-agile now

Management: let's be agile... we can all meet and discuss a project that will take more than likely 6 - 12 months but you guys can estimate and create a road map....
Engineer: I'm not sure you understand agile

Why can't people just do their fucking jobs? How hard is it to understand? Managers keep time, resources and risks in check and inform the developers. Developers develop and test the system. How the fuck do we have manager for agile, manager for program a manager for program b, risk mitigation manager, this shit manager that shit manager . For fucks sake with this much management we should be like fuckin bee nest and not an unorganized mess. In the end it turns out that literally there are more managers than developers just because they cannot fire an incapable idiot and they hire the next one. It is plain fucking simple - if you are not fit for the job get lost or make yourself fit. For fucks sake.

It really makes me wonder are there any well organized companies out there?

So my team got this new clueless "Delivery manager" who doesn't know ANYTHING ABOUT AGILE!
Her favourite timepass ? To eat development team's time asking stupid questions just to make her presence felt. And she does that by visiting each developer personally. MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY !
Why can't you leave the team and let them do some actual work??😑

She would join our scrum meetings to ask questions like "what are story points again?", "How do we calculate team velocity?"
Dear miss Clueless: It's not cool to be dumb! It's cool to take up an online agile crash course if you insist to contribute.

The other day, she suggested a QA guy to "test properly" with a smirk!
I mean seriously ? Was that actually necessary to tell them? This team was working just perfect without you. How about you look before you leap?
I try being nice to her but at times it's just too much to take.

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

I want to read a good Software Engineering book. A modern one, which contains new agile approaches, useful diagrams, etc. Not the classical, not so useful, class diagram.

What do you recommend? I'm currently more into web and mobile apps, and I want to be able to describe my backend and frontend with useful diagrams which describe better to users and other developers my desired design.

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

My employer should burn his DevOps system to the ground: esoteric configuration split on 1000 files, bugs and downtime almost daily, not communicated breaking changes which breaks pipelines, shitty documentation, few opportunities for customization and for everything you have to open a fucking ticket, I love programming but since I have to spend more time on a fucking ticketing system rather than on Vim my motivation is gradually falling to pieces.

So my team (read: not the team at all) has decided that we are going to scrum. Someone ease tell me it's not as fucking tedious as it sounds. Sounds like it's just more meetings. Especially on this team which is actually already pretty agile. And the way our "certified scrum master" describes the retrospective sounds like it was designed by the type of shitlord PM that forces everyone to wear ugly t-shirts to the mandatory company barbecue for "team building". Please tell me he's just a terrible salesman.

Agile Sucks, and do not work

I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.

Three aspects why this sucks:

1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.

2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.

3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.

I'm just tired.

<"Perfect is enemy of good"
>"Excellent! I keep my enemies very close"

I do believe it possible that one can find at least one perfect counter to every stupid folk saying that startup-for-brains suit bags love to parrot.

2)
<"We must fail fast"
>"I already did it!"

3)
<"We must have a long tail of offerings"
>"Can we offer focus on our core strengths?"

-3)
<"We must focus on our core strengths"
>"Isn't our core strength 'having a long tail of offerings'?"

4)
<"We must use agile methods"
>"An agile habit does not make an agile monk."

5)
<"We must be flexible and adapt"
>"Is it a law or more of a rule of thumb?"

6)
<"We must avoid bureaucracy"
>"Can I have that in writing?"

Out of the frying pan, into the fire:
So in my first job, I thought it's just us operating so crazy: meddling with arcane C/C++ code from the 80's, shooting our code to production without testing, fixing hundred of customers data base entries by hand, letting an intern alter some core component (to have more logging) and directly push it to prod...
Silly me.
I mean I suspected, that maybe it's not only this tiny little company acting wild, that also the bigger companies with all their ISO certified processes, agile blabla, professional tooling whatsoever - will also have their skeleton in the closet,.. like some obscure assembler part buried in the heart of your code base nobody dares to touch...
How Pieter Hintjens asked about the state of the industry and all the fads so bluntly put it:
"It's all bullshit."
But we are humans, so we better jump on the bandwagon if we want to keep our jobs... and somehow try to keep that trashy house of cards from crashing down.

I'm not political - but Agile sprints remind me of Soviet/Maoist "five year plans". Agile in and of itself is so fucking oddly soviet...

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

So I was attending a Scrum Master training recently. During the introduction, the coach is making sure everyone understands why are they even on this training and stresses out that for a company to be able to actually become agile and survive the transition, people of different levels and roles/responsibilities should get familiar with Scrum, not only IT/developers.

Coach: I can see we have developers, testers and people from operations in the room, good. Too bad there's noone from the actual business. Anyway, who decided that you should come to a Scrum training and become certified?
Group: Well, the business..

#ironic

*Email chain forwarded by support team to our dev team*
Hi,
Please assist our customer. He is unable to reset his password!

*Went through the emails turned out that customer is asking for password reset request for legacy website for which we don't work at all*

Scrum master sending another reply to look into the matter on High priority.

We again double checked for the customer but he is not registered on the new website.

Apparently, both scrum master and support team and entire company is aware that our team is not working for legacy website.
But No one reads the email properly and keep forwarding to dev team disturbing the entire team.

Some times things like this are done by product manager and her associate, but they keep replying to each other on unnecessary things till they come to conclusion and scrum master try hard to keep up with them with his own agile disciplines.

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

I'm absolutely fuming why on earth would someone try to apply exactly all rules of a theoretical concept. I hate those so called "scrum masters". We can't apply all rules of agile we're not machines. There's real life and theory.

Ever since humans transitioned from hunting-gathering to farming, cats saved an unimaginable number of people. Dogs are fine at hunting and guarding the household, but they’re not sneaky enough to catch mice.
Mice destroying your food stash meant death by starvation for your whole family, no exceptions. Only something as agile, sneaky and alert as a house cat could catch mice effectively.

my boss doesn't believe in AGILE-SCRUM, hence android and back end is always out of sync and I always end up having to rewrite the code in order make it compatible with the back end, even though i have to post a new binary to the app store and play store not to mention get the users to actually update the damn app. How do I get my boss to adapt SCRUM?

I hate project managers trying to stay relevant to a agile development methodology. Our PM doesn't care if we are working and providing value to the customer, only about checking off his Project check boxes.

tech lead CANCELS Monday stand-up becuase they cannot attend. and I work and status and update my tasks in or virtual task board. I forget to send a message mentioning I'll be kissing Tuesday standup. Then he sends me emails like the following sent to me, my manager, and my tech lead: "please remember to notify your team if you cannot attend the standup, and to send an agile status to the team. This is something that is required and not optional. We are trying to firm up all stories and tasks and need to hear a status. We are in week 1 of iteration 4.3. Thanks."

I'm coding and delivering value to the customer. Wtf are you doing dude?

I'm at that point where I want to lash out at our team for not finishing a sprint. I've been doing the scrum master/dev role for months now and each sprint is incomplete since we have started the agile way.

Most of my team members are seasoned senior devs and my team's downfall are caused by not acting as a team. I'm the youngest in the team and have been acting as a babysitter for them.

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

I can't seem to get a job. I know I lack team skills (agile team environmetn stuff) and "commercial" experience. But I had hoped by working on Opensource projects, displaying my ability to write clean documented code, and use of TDD publicly would help get to the initial interviews. But I'm still not hearing back from anyone and it's getting harder and harder to find work when I keep getting questioned about why I haven't been employed for almost two years

Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.

I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..

We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..

Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea

We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.

Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..

Guess who has to do it in the end..

Many question marks about this project

At my school we have 2 projects a year, mock projects to learn how that works.

For this project we have to use php, agile and we have an actual customer. Since several groups work for the same customer , the customer can choose the best result. (if your product gets chosen then there may or may not be a reward)

In every sprint meeting the customer confirms my thoughts on how much I hate customers without any knowledge.

I'm good at dumbing things down for less knowledge people. But no matter how I try to dumb down demo, she doesn't get it.

I'm so super frustrated!!!!

And she's asking for a feature that she'll probably use once, and I'm not convinced she knows what she is asking for. But will take me several hours to implement. It feels so useless.

To give you some context, in the past year we have change managers 3 times. Obviously our process (we were trying to follow agile) has suffer the most with all these changes since it seems the managers that have been assigned to us are not really IT people.

We are using TFS (I know...) for our builds and for our scrum and kanban boards, only use developers and QA are really using the board and all the benefits that it provides and the managers are oblivious to what TFS is. I have tried offering them training and workshops but they just don't want to learn.

And now they want us to keep the requirement information on word documents and Excel instead. I'm not sure I can continue my battle against Word/Excel...

I understand they are valuable tools but... Is it really difficult to use a tool that was made specifically for that and it's as easy as filling some text fields and click a button? Why is it so hard to understand that if you want to know the status of a task is as simple as following a link where you can find all the related information?

I think I'm loosing it, even the other developer on my team is in support of using Word... of course the guy doesn't know agile and his cards on the board are shit making him work with QA all the time....

Feel like I'm alone here....

Impediment to the agile process at my job: systems not understanding what review and retrospective is for. I mean I don't know what it's for, but it probably isn't for yelling about how testing is conducted and why it's hard. I would assume that's for the planning meeting. Not to mention apparently they still don't know the fucking schedule. Since they seem to think I'm done with a task, even though I don't have, like, the data I need to integrate with and it's on the schedule that I won't get the data til, like, the end of the month.

Random recruiter from LinkedIn sends an “opportunity” in a well stablished German company in Madrid ..

.. has three entries in requirements for jquery, associated with, and I quote “OOP, Object Programming, and other frameworks” ..

Goes on to require knowledge of “css, scss and saas”, along with “Don HTML” ..

And requests “experience with the principles of agile user interface methodologies” ..

And Angular 1 ..

How would you respond to this one!?

I actually did, corrected the mistakes, told what other mistakes were at the differences between libraries and frameworks, .. and that I don’t like Angular and I’m not interested in learning the old one at all ..

Estimates.. First, part of the team makes "high-level" estimates which are based on informal, incomplete, still-evolving specs and an unstable back-end. The project people report the estimates to the client and elevate the status of these inaccurate estimates to that of commitments.

Then, before the "sprint", we review our initial estimates *ahum commitments* in greater (technical) detail. Because there are still a lot of unknowns, we tend to estimate more buffer here (back-end is often not ready, always ping-pong between project people and dev-team about unclear specs, more work than originally expected, and often late modifications to the original spec).

When an estimate becomes more than 50% extra time at the "refinement", we are told: "sorry, we gotta do it in less" and when it doesn't work out, we're kindly asked to spend part of our weekend catching up at 100% pay rate (legally it's 150-200%).

FUCK THIS SHIT

*quotes used abundantly because these terms belong to "agile/scrum" terminology but we're only pretending

Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.

just a little pool here, do you, yes, you, do you think an inexperienced intern should take an epic story?
(not that there we work with agile, that would be great, but it's a task equivalent to an epic.)

I’m currently working 2 jobs with over 60 hour work weeks in addition to my own SaaS company.

One job is full-time 40 hours, where I am a mid level developer and I just do the waterfall of tickets that is assigned to me. This place is unorganized and has almost no communication within the team.

The second job I am the Senior Dev and project lead. It’s a contract position that I put 20+ hours in on the evenings and weekends. Agile methodology, with a modern tech stack and I promote excellent communication as well as documenting everything.

I’m in a unique position because I’m able to see these differences and compare them side by side. My full-time job doesn’t really know about the second job. I get my work done, and that’s all that matters. This place is a mess. The project lead (CTO) is a helicopter boss that sticks his nose up at any type of formal documentation and practices. No tests are written.. no SIPs or deployment docs.. no stand ups or anything. I must also mention this team has 5 developers and a QA.. my team is only 2 developers and a QA. We get through tickets much faster.. it helps when I go over every single ticket that is created and add requirements and images..

I guess my point is... I’m about to be a full-time contractor because I can’t take this unprofessionalism anymore.

Just because these formalities technical take longer. It does decrease actual time spent developing a project. Spending a couple of hours on tests and requirements can save you days of back and forth in the future. Not to mention... document.. everything.

There is so much confusion in the world of programming right now, at least for me. I bet there’s only so many concepts going on and that these concepts are realized in certain ways. E.g. programming following certain paradigms and practices, also different workflows, containerization, agile, devops etc.

When searching for tutorials in different subjects it’s horribly aggravating to learn to use the tools. Not because they are inherently hard or bad in any way. There’s just so many different tutorials, some badly given, some that are great but which bring up to many foundations you already know so you find yourself getting bored to the point that you just stop listening. Many tools are used for so many use cases, sometimes overlapping each other, they use concepts to that you’ve heard hundreds of times before. Many times they want to do things in a special way so even if the concepts are the same you still need to fucking listen to the same old thing while learning how to write a command a slightly different way or how some tool is supposedly better than another.

I’m realizing that what I’m so sick of is the lack of TLDR information about new tools with some short description of how to use. Where you didn’t have to re-hear stuff you already knew or had heard so many times unless for a very good purpose, such as to show exactly how it’s done differently than another relevant tool. In a dream world the TLDR information could also remember my skills and remove the parts I didn’t need to know about any new tool.

How the fuck do I handle self-called senior developers who do not want to do testing (writing unit tests and manually testing) in an agile environment where there is dedicated tester anymore?
They behave like fresh programmers out of college only wanting to write their code and nothing more. We had a dedicated tester role but that guy left the project.

Any of you are annoyed by your non-technical manager work practices?

Every release I feel like our manager's goal is to have our planning and results look good in front of higher management, no matter if it is true or not.

Oh this big task could not be done because we had to plan 4 months in advance with no info and poorly done requirements? Well let's just push it to the next release we can't have unfinished tasks logged in.

Oh we don't have time to work on tech debt and refactoring, there are too many features and bugfixes to do. Well maybe that is why there are so many bugs, eh?

Oh your automated test results need to all look perfect, does not matter if your test are even good or actually doing anything in the first place, as long as it passes.

Also, I was promised agile and got a waterfall-like bullshit process instead that barely works.

Anyways just morning rambling.

Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?

Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.

Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.

Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.

Worst developer experiences:

Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.

"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.

I can't deal with this stress anymore

I really like working at this company but the stress is getting worse and worse, too many projects going on, deadlines creeping up, micro management through "agile" and many others.

Not sure what to do, I like the people, the projects themselves but I fucking hate the management!

I think I'm gonna have to leave, I might even need a couple months break just to regain my mental power before I get back to work.

Hi all,
I'm in this company for about 15 months. It's one of the big name company. I'm a senior dev here. In my team we follow agile development. In starting I was just working on my part mostly. Then my manager raised concern to me for not taking ownership and helping others.
I started doing things what I could do. Like code review, API discussion, design discussion etc..
Now, the thing is I usually get upset when people go with 'lazy' solutions because I feel bad design leads to maintenance overhead, and it happened to us in past. We had to spend weekends to make things work. So, I started making code review, design review strict.
Some people didn't like it. But my manager was supportive, or at least I think so.

Some days back manager took me in a one-o-one discussion and told me one of the colleague kinda complained against me.

Now, my manager is not involving me into design discussions and API discussions. There are some new features are coming and I am not informed. I get to know things only in scrum-updates.

Am I about to get fired? I'm not gonna lie, I'm so scared. I can't put down papers as I'm already into 4th company in 7 years.

This thought is just killing me. What should I do? I'm so alone.

Are there some good external portable macbook pro monitors that have the vertical/portrait functionality? Also, it should be rechargeable and should not get power from my laptop when there's still a charge. (I use MBP 15" 2018 model)

We are agile at work (all use laptops, no permanent seats) and I need an extra portale monitor because there are no provided external monitors to use.

I was thinking of buying and iPad pro as a portable external monitor via catalina sidecar but it is laggy somehow and very expensive. Thanks! 🙂

as a seasoned systems eng myself, i had huge mental block of "i am not a programmer" whining when starting to incorperate agile/infrastructure as code for more seasoned syseng staff.

leadership made devops a role and not a practice so lots of growing pains. was finally able to win them over by asking them to look at how many 'scripts' and 'tools' they wrote to make life easier... and how much simpler and sustainable using puppet/ansible/chef/salt... and checking in all our sacred bin files and only approved 'scripts' would be pushed thru automation tool after post review.

we still are not programmers or developers, but using specific practices and source control took some time but saving us loads of time and gives us ability to actually do engineering

but just have 2 groups of younger guys that grew up wanting to be the bofh/crumudgen get off my systems types that are like not even 30... frustrating as they are the ones that should be more familiar with the shift from strictly ops to some overlap. and the devs that ask for root now that they can launch instances on aws or can launch docker containers and microservice..... ugggg. these 2 groups have never had to rack and stack servers, network gear, storage... just all magic to them because they can start 50 servers with a button click.

try to get past the iam roles, acls, facls, selinux and noshell i have been pushing. bitches.

Me: Yay! I’m getting more clients which means more income which means my accountant won’t look at me funny anymore when I say I’m still running a business and not a hobby! Go me!

Also me: I need $1400 worth of project management software subscription for 2 years (to get a discount) so I can manage the Agile workload among the developers and writers. I also need to recover $700 of accidental ad spend for that stupid Yelp account I forgot I had a “free trial” on. Guess I’m still running a hobby for a bit.

Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.

My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome.

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

Our project using Agile methodology, we have every day stand-up meeting(scrum meeting) that normally end around 10 to 15 minutes with 7 ppl.
One day The Project Owner came and join our stand-up meeting that cost us like sprint planning
And The Project Owner did not stop there, he come again next day for the 1 week.
Because of that our product backlogs and Sprint Planning goes haywire.
We failed to delivery what we planned for that project.

Have you ever worked for an organization that is not specialized in software development because that is not their main line of business, however, their products are software applications?

If you are, then hi you and me are in the same boat. Currently I have a nice manager and I'm acting as dev lead the strange thing I have a peer that is supposed to be lead as well but I cannot define his position....

In theory he should be scrum master / resource manager which fails at both terribly.

I ended up implementing Agile in the team and deciding what goes and not into the sprint based on quality while this guy just try to squeeze stuff into the sprint, the more the better even with all kinds or problems...

Honestly I'm not sure why he is still in the team since it seems like he only drains the budget, doesn't understand a thing about the products he is working on and every single idea he has is horrible.

Every meeting I have with him I always ended up asking myself "How can somebody be that stupid?" The lack of technical knowledge and even common sense is over 9000 in this one...

It might sound bitter from my end but after two years of dealing with this stupidness of getting people in software development that have no idea what software development is and understand the intricacies of it just because they did an access database or are good at excel is nonsense.

I'm at the verge of quitting and the only thing that is keeping me here is my manager and the fact that the products I am working with are pretty interesting.

Sorry for the long rant but I had to get it out of my chest before it explodes and I directly call out this person.

Not looking for suggestions but if anybody want to chime in go ahead.

Things that annoy me about my current place:

1 - Only 3 people out of a team of 12 developers are allowed to purge akamai, or merge pull requests to master on any of our 200+ websites. Apparently this is because us contractors are not allowed because the permanent employees have to be accountable for the code.

Despite this, no-one actually reads the code. You just throw up a request in the slack channel and boom, instantly 30 seconds later someone approves it, even if its 500+ lines of code.

2 - I've pushed for us to move to agile instead of waterfall, and got declined (which is fine), but the reasoning was that the dev team are not 'mature enough' to work that way. Half the devs here have 5+ years of experience so I don't get the problem here.

3 - There is zero code reviewing process in place. I just watched as a developer's 300 line merge request was approved within 8 seconds of it going live. No-one is allowed to comment on the code review or suggest changes as this would 'slow down development'. Within that 300 line merge request were tons of css being aimlessly commented out, and invalid javascript (introducing both bugs and security issues) that were totally ignored.

What is your thoughts on these above points?

Am I too narrow minded or is the development manager clueless?

Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:

- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?

- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?

I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?

I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic

- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above

i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.

Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.

So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...

!rant apologies

I am a third year computer science student and I'm interested to see how professionals think I stack up against grads they have worked with straight from uni.

I have spent 15 months at a web company working on bespoke solo products on LAMP stacks. I know html, css, JavaScript and its library JQuery very well (I know JavaScript is massive to be saying I know it well)

I am reasonable at PHP and MySQL. Currently I am studying node.js and building an api that mashes up data from other APIs to build a new service. I'm also working on a C# Microsoft framework bespoke website. I know git to a reasonable level - branches, merges, rollbacks and all that jazz.

I am also studying development architectures to try and be more useful.

So if you guys came across a new grad that knew HTML, css, JavaScript, JQuery, maybe angular js, PHP, basic Linux commands, MySQL, C#, dev architectures, agile methods, node.js, git and has 15 months experience working on small to medium sized solo projects would you want to hire them?

Point to note I'll probably graduate first class (80%+) from a mid range uni.

Sorry, I know this is not the place but I like this community.

What do you think about my sibling observation today (he/she is not in software):

- if you want make money in any company, deal with all the shit: incompetent co-workers, shitty management, unreasonable deadlines, misinterpreted Agile, no test coverage, etc.

- if you want to grow and develop yourself: join some easy startup or make your own app/project

Finally some real vacation. Heavily needed. Can't stand that type of remote work any more. Our dailies and pull requests have become mere dick-measuring contests. Morally puffed statements about THE RIGHT way to do agile and clean code, and architecture. Endless vacuous, monologues, which they only endure so they can start our own - but shit just does not get done.

And then they don't want to invest only a day or some hours to get some integration tests running on more machines, which could save the one overworked tester we have a lot of work. But whatever. I've lost all motivation and hope. Shall they deal with their own shit. Maybe I just need more sleep or some antidepressants, because I'm really fed up with it.

Makes we wonder why I even fought this battle of the last two weeks, when thanks to Apple's changes in macOS's codesigning our new binary wouldn't run on any "real" machine. But according to them packaging and signing is only a trivial issue, nothing to do with code. Yeah, well, then they should do that shit themselves next time.

Running unit tests on a peer review. Why have unit tests if people don't run them? That said: our system guy wants us to start doing agile TDD. This would not be a problem if we weren't a maintenance shop and the code base doesn't really allow for TDD.

I spent 2 hours in an agile workshop with the "I do not think it means, what you think it means" guy.
When finished I could swear that if you asked the people what is agile, they would start crying.

I think that "agile development" paradigm is really bad for programmers when it is directed by incapable people... I mean: "move fast and break things" is not a good philosophy, it is only an excuse for doing incomplete, buggy and "documentless" features that only helps the PM "visibility" (look at all the things that I did, I've been releasing 1 version per week, we have included 3 new features... we are burning 25 scrum points per capita per week)... we have to stand against this stupid way of doing things... Scrum makes that all the responsability is on us, as developers, and PMs can wash their hands freely...

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

So this week is Project Management Week. There was an email with a lot of scheduled online talks sent Friday which I just happened to see.

I forward it to my boss with specific talks I strongly suggest the team join... because it may help with a lot of problems we have (i feel like we're semi/barely agile)

Well he just forwarded the email to everyone else including the full history...

Not sure if this is a passives aggressive response subtly telling me to just keep my mouth shut about what I think everyone else should be doing...

worst mistake was probably introducing an infinite loop in the category tree for e-commerce site...

in the vein of true agile and considering MVPs and what not we had not yet automated everything. the client would send category updates as a spreadsheet and i had a script to generate the sql and jam it into the site. having run the script several times in the past I thought I'd just throw the update into production and call it a weekend...

it wasn't long before I started fielding calls that the site was unstable. no page would load and the server kept crashing under trivial load. well an entire frantic weekend later I discovered the category load hit an edge case I hadn't considered and I had introduced an infinite loop in the navigation of the site.

i'd like to say I learned my lesson and never just threw changes into production again, but what can I say - I like living on the edge. I did however learn that loop detection can be a valuable thibg

Yesterday, I attended a seminar about agile methods, Agile Islands. I attended it last year too, and have previously attended more or less evangelist lectures about agile so my expectations were frankly not that high. But, I have to say...WOW! Now I finally get what agile is all about! The reason that I haven't been convinced until now is that we've been doing it all wrong :)

!rant

Agile devs— do you attend sprint planning?

I want to, but my boss told me not to go (waste of my time, he says). Only leads attend them, then they come back with tickets for the rest of the team. But a few other devs I’ve spoken to found that absurd, since attending lets you choose your tickets to a certain extent.

Do you attend yours? Is it crazy not to? Am I missing out? (I ask bc ours is happening right now— and it’s so empty in here!)

Robert Martin says in clean code, or maybe clean architecture, that one should separate the tests into what is hard and easy. GUI tests are hard and therefore brittle and so we should test against view models.

However on clean agile he says a story is not done until it passes automated acceptance tests which in my experience are always brittle and grow so large and brittle that things grind to a halt.

What am I missing? Are stable acceptance tests possible on the GUI? Should we test only an API?

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?

When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.

When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.

A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.

Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).

Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.

Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.

Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.

I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.

For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.

But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.

I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.

So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)

But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.

But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)

So just in general, what do you think?

So let me start by saying I get so much more done when I am not in the office, so I have my top annoying co-workers

-The number one person. This person was a "developer" but I say that loosely and now she is a Agile champion / Scrum something. She is the biggest PITA constantly going around talking about how great Scrum is.

-This other developer, I actually like the guy, but he just walks over all of the time to ask me stuff. He will grab his laptop and just pop it on my desk to ask me stuff.

-I will go ahead an lump a few together, the ones that have "been doing it a long time" but don't understand the architecture of their own systems. <smh>