PM in daily: your turn. what have you done yesterday?

me: so i finished my PR for feature x and now i'm only waiting for review feedback there, so i can close this ticket today if no major rework is required-

PM: this is not what i asked, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: uhh... okay, also i started working on task x
[note: task x, a task per definition involving a large amount of research, was very coarsly defined and it wasn't even clear to the PM what he exactly expects from me, and we agreed that the scope needs to be refined in the process],
so as a first step, i started doing some general investigations to get an overview of the topic and learn about concepts a and b-

PM: again, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: okay well, i have DONE basic research on topic xy and collected information-

PM: this still does not answer my question, what's the deliverable?

me: ...so uhhh.... i read papers? i researched info online and collected and prepared information and links in a presentation which i'm also planning to present to the team-

PM: okay, can you please split your jira task in subtasks so everyone knows exactly what you're working on? otherwise we have no idea what you're doing.

for fuck's sake, shut up. just shut up

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

PM was on vacation the whole sprint.
this sprint was so much more... convenient. i really liked what i was working on.
Also, team lost some of its bureaucratic discipline along the way.

colleague replacing him, in today's daily: since the sprint is basically almost over, i can really recommend to the whole team to wrap up your work of this sprint, so you have something *done* that you can deliver or show in next week's sprint review.
team: ...

oooohhh boy, let me get a shitload of popcorn for the sprint review when PM is back 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

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

it finally happened, PM/PO/SM is now also dev シ

each standup he now also gives update about his work in progress, with his diligently designed subtasks, perfectly sticking to the daily script, like a good well-behaved employee boi. it's weirdly cute

devs can't await to review his first PR. feeling the strong urge to spank his ass for each minor coding style issue or poorly-named variable...

that really killed me today when i sat in the office

how good can you rant with your colleagues? i don't think i would survive long without this kind of therapy xD

how to become a true scum master:

- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense

- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)

- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.

- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.

- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.

stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^

so management decided that the PM/PO/SM role has to be split and that SM shall be done by someone else.

PM in retro: so i will give away this role because i cannot fulfill all roles adequately, not because of missing skills, but because of missing time. this is also why i couldn't finish my development task for this sprint. so, someone of you guys has to do the job. i expect the future SM to be always available for me in the morning and the afternoon, so due to timezone shift this has to be someone from the German colleagues. I will have to explain to that person what exactly I as a PO expect from the SM and the SM will have to follow this guideline. also, being SM is no excuse for not delivering your stories, it just takes very little time.

...i don't need to comment on this at all, he already makes a perfect clown of himself 🤡

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

brain storming about system design on miro board

at the beginning, all devs add components they think that might be relevant for the system.

PM heavily moves everything around, deletes or changes meaning of added boxes without asking. after five minutes, he is the only one using the board, rest of the team is just watching.
PM: come on, guys. don't just sit and watch, you can also participate.

besides that, the resulting system in the end was complete garbage.

so i had the "miscommunication" meeting with PM today. he criticized me for "not following his orders", allegedly having worked on stuff during this sprint that did not help fulfill his sprint goal, and that i should have aligned my work with him. i didn't even realize this exact goal existed specifically for my user story (even though it was at least mentioned with one single word in story description, must have read over it). however, during the whole fucking sprint, he never mentioned a single time i should align with him. every daily i'm explaining what i'm going to do, every day he sees subtasks that i created for this story, and he never disagreed or mentioned this topic, so i assumed i'm on track. and now suddenly, when sprint is over, he blames me for the misalignment?

he also criticized me for having said something rude to him during a team meeting, but he couldn't rephrase or specify what i had said, he couldn't give any details at all, and also i couldn't understand or remember what he meant. what shall i respond to that?🤷‍♀️

also, aligning my work with that of a colleague and brainstorming with him about how our API could look like for our stakeholders was "not on track / following his orders" for him, even though i had announced it in the daily and he hadn't disagreed.

either this guy has alzheimer's or he has a down on me, dunno what to make out of all that.
and then he mentions i appear "somewhat aggressive" to him.
hmm weird, why should someone become aggressive when they have to deal with this bullshit all the time 🤦‍♀️

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

PM is such a fucking cunt
telling me that my data structures describing the layout of binary data would be confusing for devs, and that we shall introduce

typedef fuckingRetardedObfuscatingName uint8_t;

in our code. everyone is fine with the concepts i provide to describe this binary data, not only at our company but also in other software i've worked on and common standards i've worked with, we work like that and every fucking idiot knows what a uin8_t is.

you fucking braindead imbecile have no fucking idea how we work and you don't care, you don't even try to understand what we are doing.
god i hope you die being hit by a fucking bus or something

funniest thing today: PM asking me to create a Jira subtask for EACH class / data type of the data model that I'm CURRENTLY concipating / designing in this story.

maybe I should write a Jira / Enterprise Architect integrated tool that updates Jira tasks based on my modeling actions, and count minutes until our sysadmin arrives at my desk.

jeez, that guy really has a fetish for kafkaesque bureaucracy.🤦‍♀️

how often does it happen that you have to prevent terrible architectural decisions from being made, because people who are in charge but obviously have no clue, make really weird suggestions and are really confident that this is a good idea?

PM: so please analyze functionalities X with dev Y, since module Y that dev Y develops shall provide these functionalities.
me: as i said yesterday, module Y will use my module X and shouldn't care about how this is going to be implemented.
PM: yeah, but module Y shall be able to... (lists some functionalities)
me: yes, that's what i'm currently working on in module X. my current state of the API can be used in a way that... (lists different low level functions and how a combination of them can be used to provide these functionalities)
PM: okay, hmm... i just realize that module Y will actually be a user of module X...

well.... yeah?!!
i always thought that was crystal clear?? 🤦‍♀️

daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦‍♀️

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

i led yesterday's daily, since PM had no time and asked me to replace him.

in the beginning, i started the round with exactly the same words the PM always used, which made one of the Indian colleagues burst into laughing with muted mic

daily was held.
after the daily, 3 colleagues thanked me and commented on how awesome daily was, which made myself burst into laughter.

my theory is that people like daily standups where they are not steamrolled, interrupted and snapped at all the time.

PM in sprint review, after some colleagues complained about having to develop requirements on their own:
you are software engineers, your main task is to design software systems. this is the tricky part. coding is easy... it's a stupid task, i could do it, my nine year old daughter could do it.

shall i feel a bit offended? also i think, he is wrong... i also design while i'm coding, i'm designing all the time.
also, i love coding :( this is the most satisfying aspect of my job.
but then again, i heard there are people who code without designing... even though i cannot imagine how to work like that at all.

daily.
PM/PO/SM/dev(new!): so i've continued working on feature X, i did this and that (shows screenshot of UI in Jira) and for today i'm planning to do XYZ. anyquestionsnothennextoneplease.
me: sorry, i have a question. did you persist your changes in our repo?
PM: no, not yet.
me: okay, please do this, you've spent several days of work on this. i mean, it's fine if build servers don't build it yet, that's what our feature branches are for.
PM: you're absolutely right, and i will definitely do it at some point.
me: at some point?
PM: yes. dev x, your update please.

Scrum Master? More like Scum Master.. The nutjob sends a calendar invite for daily stand up for 30 minutes which extends to 50 minutes.. 50 minutes for a team of 6 people ? Fuck off.

currently thinking about asking my boss if I can make a training / qualification for scrum master.

when PM is trying so hard to shove *his* scrum down our throats and at the same time tries to block any scrum-related criticism of team members that question his behavior as SM AND PO, then maybe convincing my boss to become the new SM and shoving ALL the scrum down the PMs throat is the only chance to have a (bit more) bearable working environment in this project.
in my opinion, he has too much power.

whatcha think? any SMs here, and do you like what you are doing?

when creating subtasks for my jira tasks, so PM can micromanage me better, i never know if he will criticize it for being "too fine granular, just write it in the comments" or for being "not detailed enough". also, on the one hand he criticizes team members for not having meaningful comments (e.g. "writing documentation"), on the other hand, he criticizes people that he doesn't know what they are doing. also, not to forget that i shouldn't have more than one task in progress ("it should be transparent what you're currently working on"), but then he randomly decides to set one of my tasks in progress even if this breaks his "one task at a time" rule. but i guess it's okay if he does it, because he's boss.

i honestly have no fucking clue how to please this guy lol