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Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.
Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.
Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)
Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).
These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.
Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".
The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.
What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?
Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.
Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.
But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.
So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.
On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.
In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.
This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.23 -
Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):
1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.
2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:
3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.
Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.12 -
Manager: I need estimates for your sprint tasks
Me: I've never done any of this before, my estimates have no context and are effectively worthless
Manager: don't worry it's just for the Jira board.
Me: OK *gives estimates*
End of sprint comes...
Manager: Why isn't task X done?
Me: *sigh*
I don't miss my old job :)
3 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
Continued…
The company that I’m working for has done lots of subtle racist things surrounding diversity policy. There was a major blowout between execs and suddenly all went quiet. The guy that was hired against my recommendation was gone. Until early January when he showed up at our building to raid our kitchen. WTF. It turns out HR decided to move him to the other office and out of sight so my team wouldn’t see him. He isn’t working on a project and is getting paid on the bench for more than the 100% billable devs.
After I saw him bumming around, I replied to a recruiter that has been trying to recruit me to their company.
The position pays 25% more 😲 and comes with a an amazingly relaxed development environment. Developer time is managed and allocated by someone in a dedicated role. 80% of the time is sprint work and the rest is self-driven projects or learning. Teams are stable, mostly local, and there is very low turnover. Developers get Mac or Linux computers.
I’m doing an executive meet and greet at the other company tomorrow. They will be the ones that will make me the final offer. I feel pretty good about it too because they will let me sign up to start in a month and a half so I can give a long notice, work until the end, and my current company can hire me back as a consultant in a pinch. It softens the blow for my current company and it makes it easy for me.
Worst case scenario I don’t take the position but use it for leverage. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely jump ship when negotiation is done tomorrow.
https://devrant.com/rants/2338969/...7 -
1. Do you know why my computer is so slow?
2. What cellphone do you recommend me to buy? (They always end up buying the cheapest)
3. What do you do at work? (Answer: "I create applications". Anything more complex than that is not going to be understood or they will loose interest)
4. Something is wrong with the: [TV, Cellphone, microwave, etc.]. Could you please take a look? (Believe or not, if something works with electricoty, my family thinks I can fix it).
5. Is it true that if I send this WhatsApp message to all my contacts I will have more options?
6. I need to build an application that (pretty much The Matrix), how much time do you need and how much would cost? Don't you dare to give me wrong numbers. (We have to see the future)
7. (Continuing the previous point, a non-technical client) I don't think that would take so much time/money. (Every time)
8. I want to use the latest Front-End frameworks. I want to see all those beautiful animations in my page and that it runs smoothly... I also need that it runs in IE 5.
9. So, you have been working in the back end? If you don't have a screen to show to the client is like you didn't do anything in this sprint.
10. Why haven't you built and million dollar application? Everybody is doing that right now....
Yep, those are only a few downsides of our profession if we count family, friends and even co-workers. But I can't imagine myself doing anything else.6 -
We were still using python 2.7 waaay into 2020 - It had been heralding the impending doom since 2018 and finally end-of-lifed in 2020.
That's when I finally managed to be the loudest asshole in the room and allocate a team (myself included) to refactor shit up to 3.6 (then somewhat more modern) for a month or so.
COVID the destroyer may have helped by wrecking havoc on our client's demands pipelines.
It was the third week into "the red sprint" when my entire team (myself included) were beheaded out of the company since we had "not delivered ANYTHING in weeks!" (emphasis in the original).
Frankly, being laid off was by a large margin the best thing that company ever did for me.
I heard from a poor schmuck who stayed behind that they were still using the shitty spaghetti code from before our refactoring - in freaking November 2021 - and that our entire last effort was thrown out because "nobody knows how to use it".
There is tech debt and there is tech bankruptcy.
I may have a lot of tech schadenfreude now :)13 -
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).
I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.
The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.
A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?
A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.
After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?
"I'll try"
That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.
I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.
He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.
The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:
"judgement"
And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.
Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)7 -
I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.
Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.
They have made my life hell.
The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.
Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.
And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.
Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".
And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.
A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.
Fucking toxic human wastes.
There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.
These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.
I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.8 -
Im going to fucking murder the QA team if they don't stop sender bullshit issues!
QA: hey dev, there is an error with attached files.
Me: okay what's the issue?
QA: it's just a random file that gets attached. Can you fix it by the end of the sprint(tomorrow)?
Me: I need to investigate it a bit before I can tell you how long it will take, how can I reproduce it?
QA: idk, it was just there.
*several hours of testing later*
Me: I've tried to cause the 'issue' on my local server, the test server and the live server. But I haven't seen it and I have no clue what could cause it.
*30min. before I go home*
QA: dev you have to fix it before you go home! Because we have some other important issues you have to fix tomorrow!
FUCK YOU AND YOUR IMAGINARY ISSUES I'M GOING HOME1 -
!rant
This might be the most ambitious project I've ever started up till now, teaching my girlfriend everything college isn't.
As some of you may know my uni isn't the greatest and lacks in professor quality, my girlfriend (who's taking the same bachelor) knows this and when she knew I was starting a new little side project she wanted in.
At first I was skeptical, this could be just an excuse to spend more time with me, so I told her:
"if you really want to then I'm all for it, it'll be done my way and the first few weeks will be tough, however I promise by the end of it you will know 10x what you do now"
She agreed and so our journey began 3 weeks ago, my goal: make a kick ass project, do it in record time and teach her enough to cope with a IRL job.
I've setup the project so by the end of it she is well versed in the following: scrum, Django, MVC, python, HTML + CSS3, git, GitHub, PostgreSQL and Docker. In about 4 to 6 months.
We are into our third sprint this week, she had two small breakdowns because she couldn't believe how much she was missing out and felt she lacked talent, this is our third week and I'm glad to see that she's actually enjoying herself.
2 -
Long rant 😤😤😤
Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.4 -
Client: we are using Scrum. Next week we have sprint review organized by the project manager.
Me: it’s not Scrum.
Client: in the next sprint we work on a mockup not releasable in production.
Me: it’s not Scrum.
Client: sprint backlog is changed again, at the end we must do everything that is written in the contract with that fixed amount of money.
Me: definitely not Scrum.
Client: we are using Scrum.
Me: Ok.1 -
RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?
*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*
DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.
*3 week later*
DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.
DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.12 -
Wrote a feature that took a week plus to complete that was reviewed, approved, merged and already in production.
Guy who approved comes in and says to make changes now with 1 day to end of sprint saying to refactor stuff. It won't make a difference other than some logging changes but I found the effort to be large plus the QA would need to retest everything.
When I brought up my concern, he tells me it is very easy and to get it done.
Now am feeling so stuck rushing on this work cos he called it 'easy' and I don't want to look like a fool...
Why review and approve code only to come back last minute asking for changes.. Not the first time and always last minute followed by calling it easy. I am almost forming a phobia to merge approved code..4 -
That I am not good enough for this shit.
Recently left my job because anxiety, a lot of it.
Tbh, I should not burntout myself, because:
- salary was a shit
- the scrum was a lie, there was no end of the sprint, so no retrospective meeting ever done.
- They change the """sprint""" task pile at any moment, usually adding more tasks for the same sprint.
- previous project manager was an idiot who said "yes" at EVERYTHING the client asked, even if the request was outside tje scope of the project.
The project was heavily delayed, and I was the only developer left on the most hideous backend you can imagine (the code was just tje very definition of "what not to do"). NO UNIT TESTING at all.
My task: clean the mess so we have a """stable""" release (with the tests), add the new features and re-do the backend again, but this time properly.
8 months of develop for this shit and they wanted the stable-shit-backend in a month and the new backend in other month "because everithing was already done in the shitty one". Do not forget the new features too.
So, I was doing the imposible to try to do tje task, overdoing hours and reading the docs of the project (because I was new in it), but it take me.a lot of effort to simply correct bugs because of complexity of the code and not understanding fully some parts of the project.
Then the comments like "why this is not finished yet?" Or "I do not understand why this is taking so long"
So, I had poor sleep, I was anxious because my inhability to do the imposible and in the end, a feeling kind of defeated because I quit.
So... that.
Sorry if something is wrong typed or so, english is not my native language.5 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
So salty. Just got off from a long day at work with my coworkers after a significant sprint, so we all go to karaoke to celebrate and let loose. But naturally I have to be under 21, and the karaoke place cards, so I end up taking an Uber home by myself, which felt really fucking embarrassing. I wish there were venues in the city that didn't require you to be above the magical number of 21 years of age to have a good time.5
-
Before starting sprint we gave estimations, while discuss with my team, my project manager also part of the meeting. After three weeks my project manager start give list of tasks like this is API and this is front end and also estimations based on our previous sprint plan.
We pissed off. After that we never include our manager in technical meeting.
FYI - If you're using Google sheets for ball park estimations never give permission to your project manager to edit sheet.2 -
The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).
While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.
It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.
I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.
4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.
The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.
One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.
TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.
DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.4 -
Im getting tired of this fucking scrum team.
First of all let me introduce our backend team which takes 3 weeks to add one fucking column to database and in the end turns out they fucked up RabbitMQ RPC implementation so the column is not syncing with our app at all so now we have to wait 2 extra weeks until that will be working. Best part is that backend fucker who fucked up doesnt even feel like hes blocking a feature and would rather sit for extra few days and do nothing until he gets reassigned his pile of shit back to him than clean up his own shit.
Then we have business analytic who doesnt know how to define tasks properly so I have to record each grooming meeting so I would know what to fucking implement because he doesnt even bother to take proper notes. Which results in not fully defined tasks, which results in unexpected behaviours and MR's stuck in limbo for weeks.
Also lets not forget QA guy who doesnt even bother writing scenarios, I as an app dev have to write them myself just to be sure that fucker will test everything thoroughly.
Then we have fucking devs from consultancy agency who apparently have 6 years of experience (I have barely 2) and these fuckers are spamming me daily with the most basic questions. After each grooming they rush to assign themselves tasks which are not even defined properly yet and not even in this sprint, but fuckers are lazy so thy want to reserve easier tasks for themselves. Pathetic.
At least I have a decent senior on my team, but sometimes he patronizes me so much that I start asking me what I am doing in this team.
Fuck this shit, I asked for a 43% raise and if Im not getting it in 2-3 weeks im outta here. Fuckers.5 -
So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.
So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.
But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.
My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.
Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.
I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(2 -
Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...
Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.
Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.
Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.
Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.
"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.
"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.
As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.
In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.
After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...
---------
It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.
My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:
"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.
I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...
Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.
The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.
Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.
Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.
---------
Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.
Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.
That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.
My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.
I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.
Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.2 -
Sorry, long since my last post...
I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.
For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.
A bit of Context
November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.
Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.
December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).
Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.
Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."
January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.
Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.
February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).
Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"
Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.
High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.
March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".
End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.10 -
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.9 -
!dev
I’ve been ranting & posting a lot about my career, relocation, work life balance etc. in the last year.
Just wanna say, relocating was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Professionally and personally..
Although it was a bit scary and I didn’t have any money left after relocating..
It’s 6PM, I’m sitting in the garden, listen to some classical music and don’t spend a single thought on work.
Tomorrow I will arrive in the office around 7:45, I will do my work. My boss recognizes my teams effort and thanks all of us for the work on the end of each sprint.
There are no personal fights in the team, everyone is getting along with the others.
I do some good work, get a good salary and don’t have to mix up work and personal life.
The people here are awesome, everyone is welcoming and supportive.
If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to buy my dream car by the end of summer because the government doesn’t take all of my money. They take their taxes before I get my salary and the money I get is the money I HAVE..
Ireland is awesome.
At this point: thanks for the Irish guys here who provided information about work and life over here! And also to the other devs who supported me here👍2 -
I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.
This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.
However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.
I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.
Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.
My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.
From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.
To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.
There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.
Ganbarimasu.2 -
My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.
-
Have you ever argue with a developer who:
+ have the same level as you
+ on the same position in the company
+ in the same team
+ OLDER than you
+ thinks their code is the best
A few years back, a coworker and I argue about how to implement a feature. I proposed an approach. He proposed a different one. I immediately saw some problems and told him. But hell no, he defended his idea so strongly that I just gave up since I will leave the company soon.
2 weeks later, when the sprint was about to end, the whole team had to work overtime to fix the mess because of his terrible approach.7 -
We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.
Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.
Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:
Day 1:
We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?
Day 2:
We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.
Day 3:
We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.
Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.
Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)
I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.
Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.
Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.
Day 5:
End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.
Day 6:
Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
Day 7 (Today):
Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.
What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.
Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.
You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.
When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.
Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.8 -
After the end of Sprint, well, the QA people came up with this defect ( mind it 'defect' ) : "The exclamation mark is not very red" [ sic ]
Cancer died a death that moment. -
This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.
The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...
Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.
The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.
It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.
There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.
The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.
They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.
Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.4 -
Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.
- that sucks...
Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.
- oof
But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.
- oof (but fair to the client)
Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.
- But... how... wtf?
In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.
- <smash the door and leave>
Management still is asking if we can do it on time...
- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP2 -
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.
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Few months ago I was working on something rhat wasn't mission critical for the current sprint. Near the end of the month I was asked to help the BD team (which usually do the testing) with testing the webapp as well as the mobile versions. First day of me testing ever, found more bugs by myself than the 5 BD people did in the entire week. Really felt like a boss. Next month they asked me to help again. And again. And again.
This is how my desk looks nowdays (the 3 phones are behind the laptop charging)
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Last day of agile project i get asked for confirmation that the alpha system can handle 100000 records. We have had no load testing requests only feature pushes every sprint.
I see the back-end guys have used EF in a search function that eager joins a bunch of tables. Then the results get sorted and filtered in application code. It works fine for a few hundred records but the customer will do about 100k new records a year.
Yeah this won’t meet requirements. I wish they asked for some load testing before the last day. They aren’t going to like that one person can do a search every 15 seconds by the end of the year when I tell them. FML12 -
So my colleague sees an iPad on a desk that someone has left by accident. He puts in the wrong password a bunch of times to lock it for an hour as a joke and accidentally wipes it!! Turns out it was about to be used for end of sprint client demo 😂2
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It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.
Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.4 -
When you're at the end of a sprint, implemented a cool new feature and only the garbage issues are left over -.-
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From perfectly working scrum team to... Don't know what it is now...
Long story short - our SM left company and our team have ongoing "reorganization", our tester leaving at the end of this month, probably we will be out of tester for next month...
I don't mean reorganization, it's normal thing, but... It looks like it's slowly collapsing under bad head decisions (one of them is the reason why our tester is leaving)... Multiple "side" projects / tasks for ppl in team and problems with delivering sprint tasks on time because of it, context switching etc.
I fucking like this project, it gives me much opportunities to learn new things and design new features - it's up to us how we will implement it. Client is satisfied with our work and we worked for their trust for long time. But if things will be going same way as now, we will probably lose it.
How do you think, is it worth to try stay with this project? Or should I update CV just in case?6 -
Long story ahead
Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.
Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.
I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).
So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”
This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.
Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.
Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?1 -
I need some advice, because I'm feeling like I'm getting ripped off by my company.
I'm a junior developer and this is the first company I've every worked at. I've been here for 1 1/2 year. I said in the first interview that I am proficient with a fullstack framework, for a rather niche programming language, but I don't want to do front end, because I'm not good at it and I generally don't like it.
I'm the sole coder working on a project that costs the client 100EUR/h. There are others, but they just organize the tasks I have to do. This project requires me to work a full stack of retardation server, that's a pain in the ass, not really compatible with this project and required hack after hack to be fixed. Finding bugs in this pile of shit often takes days of emailing around and asking for logs in hope something might pop up. I've had to scavage through threads saying the still bleed form the anus or have PTSD, beccause of this retarded stack. As you can imagine, I'm also responsible for all of the QA and obviously get shit for bugs. I'm supposed to remember every little detail I've done in this project at the end of the sprint, while also working on 2-3 other projects simutaniously.
I've developed some small servers with dashboard and api for apps on my own. I'm supposed to also do all of the QA so that my boss doesn't see any errors, because otherwise our clients have to be QA.
I have written a complicated chat system that is distributed across nodes. We've nearly missed a deadline of 6 days for this shit, because I've been put under preasure, because I estimated such a "large" amount of time for this.
Other things I've done include:
* Login/Registration on many projects
* Possibility to add accounts for subordinated, with a full permission system for every resource
* Live product configuration with server validation and realtime price updates
* Wallet & transaction system, dealing with purchases of said product and various other services offered on this platform
* Literally replaced the old, abandoned database framework from a project with a modern one.
I've made some mistakes during the WFH corona times, but this that doesn't mean you can put more preasure on me and pull stuff like this: https://devrant.com/rants/2498161 https://devrant.com/rants/2479761
Is all of what I'm doing and have to deal with worth the 9EUR/h salary?10 -
I have 2 juniors working under me that i need to assist with work. I dont mind helping at all because i was in the same boat. The problem is.. 1 of the developers asks questionsnon the last minute (a few hours before demo of weeks sprint) telling me she doesnt understand and i spend all week asking her, if shes okay, does she understand, does she need help, is the work too much, should we take a few hours to rerun through things and even while explaining things after planning, she just says "yes" and "i understand" and has the body language of "i want to get away here" ans doesnt even let me finish my sentances before interrupting mentonsau "yes" or something in that line to end the conversation. I dont know what to do because its going to start affecting my work and the ammount of work i can take for the week because i have to help her do the work on the last day and finish it just so she can look like the sprint was successful.
Any suggestions to help me help her? I really want to see her succeed but i can tell she isnt taking it as serious as she should or putting in as much as she likes because our company is very flexible woth everything and i don't want to get a project manager vibe around her5 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
I feel a bit like shit.
I started a new job about 2 months ago. Company is great， culture is amazing，project is interesting， processes are what i always dreamed.
This is after having learned the job from scratch at a startup that was all you can imagine. Tedious，hoping to be something that was not yet and so on....
So we are coming at the last week of a sprint. Its Tuesday and most stories are competed. We dont have a culture of jumping on others PR， its kind of like this is my PR kind of mentality. This is not established its more like an untold rule. But coming to the end i figured， especially if i knew exactly how to fix the PR that o should jump in a make it happen.
Person who owns those prs unassigned themselves from those and added me instead kind of like: “well take it if you want it....”
What are your rules regarding others prs and sprints?4 -
me:task assigned is a small fix.Gonna finish Early sit back relax this sprint.
mail(next day):we've moved to microservices.setup as easy as gulp landscape:start
me:cool!shinny new stuff!seems easy!!
project:npm failed..please check module xxx..
me:fine.....
after long mail chain
project:npm failed unknown file not found
me:fine.....
after hours of googling and little github issue browsing
project:server running @ portxxx
me:yay finally happy life!!makes chnages, sent for review.
reviewer:code needs refactoring!!
me:make all changes..waits for faceless reviewer from another timezone!
reviewer:thumbs up.
me:i will make it in time!!!yes!!
jenkins:buid:failure
me:no still i wont give up...
debug finds out new bugs caused by unrelated code...make new PR the end is near,one day more will definitely merge!!!
mail:jenkins down for maintenance!
me:nooooo....waits till last minute gets thumbs up for merge, finally merged in the last second!!
all for 12 lines of code change.
:/
sad life -
When you do work on a front end ticket. You implement the things as UX tells you to, make a few mistakes, fix those as well when QA catches them.
But then UX realizes other improvements they can make , so you toss some of those in and move some of the other shit to tech debt to avoid possibly failing the sprint due to rabbit hole of front end awfulness because you suck at your job.
Then later somebody else a couple degrees above you in job hierarchy, notes a couple tips and things you could fix unrelated to your ticket. But when will it ever end or do. I suck and hate front end work, AY LMAO LEMME SUBMIT THE SAME SHIT WHICH RENDERS DIFFERENTLY BETWEEN CHROME vs CHROMIUM AND EVERYTHING THAT USES CHROMIUM.1 -
!rant got to give an end of sprint demo for the ui my team had been working on for three weeks today, bosses said they were impressed with how much we got accomplished (we're all new college hires and this is only out second sprint) and didn't care that out demo was ran from a local machine rather than a proper web server
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Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?
To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.
Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!
Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.
To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.
Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.8 -
How do you fit QA inside the weekly sprint?
At the end of a sprint, the team should be able to give something deliverable such as a new release.
How could the developers team integrate their work with the QA team along this week?
I mean, should we test individual features with QA as soon as they’re merged or make a pre-release test with all new features together before releasing? Develop 80% of the time and reserve last 20% for tests?
Could you share something or recommend any links?3 -
Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.
Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.
Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.
We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.
Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.
Sick & tired of this shit. -
You might think that getting your work done super fast is a good idea but it's really not. It takes QA awhile to test your tickets and give feedback. If you clear your sprint board, PMs will add more assignments... Then on top of that extra work, QA will give you feedback from your previous work. You now will be super stressed to get all of this done by the end of the sprint.
It is best to take your time and get it right the first time... I've also learned to make a buffer... which is tickets in my queue I've already completed but did not say I've competed yet. This way I can take extra time on tickets that need TLC and the PM team won't surprise you with backlog tickets. -
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.1 -
I want to rant here but I have a lot of backlog. They’re all pretty deep for refinement. So I want to put them all in one sprint. Because I don’t want a marathon of ranting.
But I do realise in IT sprints never end, and eventually turn out to be a marathon of sprints. I came to a point to deliver over 100 story points in one sprint. Maybe I shall write a book instead of exploding this app.
I could have never imagined the dark side of this occupation.
However I love coding so much I’ll brush the backlog under the carpet😏
But you know there are always saviour heros wanted for refactoring. This honour goes to:
The arrogant guys who think they’re a genius when their code compiles.
The insecure guys who want to overpower the next available when their code doesn’t compile.
The egoists who like to underestimate and show of, where their faulty biased googles display a little girl instead of a developer.
The aggressives when they are invited to the reality and kindly offered to sit back on their place.
I hope this rant wouldn’t ouch anyone. If it does, not sorry, the message is delivered.
If there’s an offence or reaction to this refactoring job, the 4th one would be offered to clean the mess.2 -
I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..
Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.
Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.
Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.
Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.
We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.
I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.
Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.
I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.
So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people. -
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. -
What is wrong with these people!!!
Last minute changes are pain in the ass... the design team review gives a go ahead but then pm team doesnt agree and and you have to get the changes suggested done in a day??!!!
In half a day you have to get ux review, peer review, module owner review, architect review, pm review and then merge publish bump and test in ci?!!end of sprint is today...
Ugh!!!every sprint!!every fuckin sprint!!! -
In a sprint planning meeting. Getting frustrated. I guess it's my fault. I guess I assumed that attending the same schedule meeting each week meant that we all knew when everything was due. My bad.
Seriously, I fucking hate systems people sometimes. We have 4 major tasks coming down the pipe, but they are scheduled in such a way in which they are staggered. But they want to punt the 1 of the 4 that is fucking done because it is going to cause a lot of testing, but the other three aren't coming til end of next month AT LEAST. So they want to stick their thumbs up their ass holes and wait to test the other three before testing the one that, again, IS FUCKING DONE!!! Are they worried that a super massive black hole will spontaneously form in earth's orbit and cause time to run backwards and somehow cause December to happen in October!?!?
No wonder systems is so fucking far behind. They can't see the forest for the trees. They're so big picture that months and years are at the same level of granularity. Fucking hell how is scrum better than our current agile process again? Besides the fact that it makes me attend more useless meetings and get more angry.
They are punishing the left hand for the actions of the right. Systems wasn't doing their job so now software has to slow down and miss schedule.2 -
Gosh, how I hate meetings at the beginning of the sprint... and at the middle... and in the end! Just fucking give me the requirements!4
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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 -
I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!
5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.
4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.
3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.
2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.
1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)
This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.
Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.
Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.
Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.
Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.
Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay -
When you spend 3 or 4 hours working on a large PBI on Friday and you go into work early AF (6:30am) on Monday so you can finish before the end of the sprint on Tuesday, but they tell you in the morning stand up that the PBI will be abandoned.
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Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.
We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.
I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.
Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).
So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus1 -
So at the end of our sprint retrospective we (me and one other dev) apologize to the project owner for the fact that QA had to happen on dev for a few days because the database changes were not properly applied by the DBA. It was a one time thing, a little weird but not a big deal.
A few hours later we get a call from a new DBA saying that the project owner said that we wanted the old DBA off our project. So now we sound like assholes ruining a guy's self confidence and made working with him awkward as hell.
Thanks, project owner. -
PO writes a story. We groom it. Point it. Do the work. Finish the work. Dev test it. Push it to test. Tester find a weird edge case. Talks to me. I agree it’s weird. I talk to PO and the PM in the standup. PO realizes the whole business flow doesn’t make any sense. Changes the AC. Asks us to change/redo shit. 2 days until the end of the sprint.
I guess I’m working this weekend. Not that I have to go anywhere 🤷🏽♂️4 -
At the end of the sprint half of the stories didn't get done due to lack of coordination to put 4 people in the same room and get them to agree on the solution.
During Retro my Scrum Master says: Are these stories not done because we haven't estimated them during sprint planning? 😂 -
So, towards the end of a particularly disruptive Sprint, the Product Owner Manager, who asked for A3 pictures explaining the flow to him and had multiple meetings with us and business and rewrote a spec of something already in development and changed priority of stories, wants to know... what is taking so long and business wants all these changes next week.
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I took 2 days off, just to be far away from sprint board and tasks.... And just after 2 hours of my 1st day I am end up continuing on my assigned task 🤦♂️2
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I'm having a weird time with my current project.There are many companies involved and we are several teams coordinating with each other. My team was initially very large, for various reasons we were divided into smaller groups and I must say that the transition has been catastrophic.
We are doing SCRUM…sort of. The customer assigns the tasks to be completed at the end of the sprint, the story points are given without full understanding of the implementation and the deadlines are tights. I always find myself rushing to the release day with code that isn't production-ready but since the customer requests it and there's no objection among my superiors (please note, i tell them the deadline is tight) I gotta rush to deliver.
The customer doesn't know what he wants, but if he does know the deadline is unreasonable, or if he has just an idea of what he wants he still demands it... somehow without specifying what kind of implementations is expecting.
The current senior project developer takes everything (any task) as an emergency, it's never possible to defer to the next sprint, it's quite demeaning.
And I'm here wondering if maybe I've missed something, if the project simply lacks method and coordination, if I have more responsibility than I think, if my project leadership is too absent but I know one thing, at the moment I'm in anxiety about the current sprint due date because there is a task that will take longer than expected.
Any advice?4 -
Definitely my current manager. He is very supportive of our career goals and has us choose both goals related to team performance and personal progression. He supports us having time at the end of the sprint to innovate and research things to bring back into the product. He gives constructive feedback and doesnt breathe down peoples necks.
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Ok the sprint review is tomorrow, there are lots of work to do and qe are half slept, this gonna end well :)
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How does your organisation and team balance PR comments demanding changes and dev time?
Here, while fixing PR comments we sometimes end up wasting as much time as we took in actually developing the feature... As a result, almost every major user story overshoots the estimation and almost every sprint gets delayed.
Yes, to each his own; but talking in general, why do you think this time wasting happens?
Do you think that happens because some of us are not as experienced as the others, the existing code not being up to the mark giving a bad example, or just a skewed review process?2 -
Why do they demand 12-month goals when we use Agile Methodologies?
If we do it right, we don't know what we are working on next sprint, let alone 12 months.
Our goals are to work on the highest priority stories. We are not to work on stuff "in the background", so how can we have any long-term goals?
The only things we can plan are outside of our actual jobs (like conferences, training, pilot programs/hackathon projects, etc.) So the only things we can review at the end of the year are not the most important things we do.
Poor managers love numbers and checklists to hide behind.2 -
What should you do if the project manager is not assigning you any new work after the backlog already has been cleaned up?
I currently work as a junior front-end dev. For the past few weeks, the 2 juniors (incl. me) are lacking tickets. For example, I got 2.5 days of work assigned during our 3-week sprint. We already followed some courses, read some books & created some designs for upcoming features (that have no "functional specifications" written down).3
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