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So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
A guide to estimations.
1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.
2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.
2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.
3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.
4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes
5) calculate time
6) now give an educated estimate.
7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.
8) if scope creep occurs: goto:15 -
My estimations before devRant:
PM: how long will it take to implement this?
Me: one day, tops.
My estimations after devRant:
PM: how long will it take to implement this?
Me: one week, tops.
Thanks @dfox for making me so productive.3 -
Less rant, more story.
Tl;Dr: Disney uses "Magic Bands" to track every action of every person within their parks.
So I took my family to Disney World this past summer and we got these "nifty" little things called Magic Bands. These things are little wrist devices that basically handle everything for you in the parks. It unlocks your resort room, it gets you into the parks, you pay for meals and souvenirs with it by connecting a credit card and/or your meal plan. It makes things real simple as it's like putting on your watch each day.
At first I kinda enjoyed how easy it made everything on the trip, but then as we were exiting a ride the couple in front of us noticed the digital signs had their names on them, I looked around and noticed mine too, a sign that said "have a good day $myName." It suddenly clicked. These "Magic Bands" are people trackers. Suddenly everything about the park that I had been enjoying, was part of the system they had in place using these bands as human cattle tags. The ride wait time estimations were perfect, not because of a good algorithm and estimations, but because they had actual real data telling them when a person entered the line and got off the ride.
Using a BLE scanner app I was able to see that they have hundreds of APs throughout the parks tracking every single band on every single person withing their compound. I started to think about all of the data they're collecting and the thought of it was overwhelming. The amount of assumptions they can make about people based on their actions within their parks and what that data would be worth to additional advertisers. By the end of the trip I was cynically pointing out everything to my family about the cattle tags and how much I hated wearing it and yet it was required in order to do anything.22 -
ESTIMATING FUCKING HOURS.
Well not literally, that only takes 10 minutes.
But software estimation... anyone pretending to be good at it is a dirty liar. Adding a button? Uh, let's say 2 hours, I mean I gotta poop in between as well, and it's probably some broken bootstrap theme with hacked custom margins.
Building a commenting system coupled to an ancient CRM? Uh... maybe one day? Maybe a month? I don't even know what the CRMs looks like? You won't show me because "that's irrelevant"?
WELL THEN I DON'T FUCKING HAVE A CLUE.
And in the time we spent on discussing time estimations, I could have written like half of the feature... or zero... because you still haven't fucking shown me what the CRM API looks like.
YOU KNOW WHAT I'LL GIVE YOU AN ESTIMATION. ME. VACATION. DONE IN 6 WEEKS.6 -
In our company the estimation is done by customer / PO. Usually, the deadline is set to the day before yesterday after the issue arrived. Always highest prio.
Oh, almost forgot: when a developer does his estimations, the resulting number gets divided by 7 by the PMs. Buffers? Who needs that. QA? Pfff. We are EFFICIENT.
Deadline not met? Bugs in the release? The developer must be bad.
8 -
So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.
As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.
This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.
One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.
This function had a very peculiar structure:
Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function
But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.
SomeVariable = 1
Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.
And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...7 -
Product owner: "I want these 6 epics delivered in 12 months"
Me: "can't to that with 2 devs, need more"
PO: "how many?"
Me: "can't say, you haven't spec'd them"
PO: "how do you know 2 devs can't deliver them?"
Me: "educated fucking estimations you fucktrumpet - at least 2 of them look like 6 month projects for 2 devs, so you need to pay for more resource!"9 -
- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.
PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.
He fucking signs the contract.
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.
PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.
The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.
NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.
We have 3 days left.
Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.
Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.5 -
Scrum Master: Let's estimate the task. Chose your estimations individually, then we will reveal at the same time and discuss
- variety of votes, ranging from 1 to 8
Product Owner: I don't agree, this should be a 1 or 2.
Dev Team Lead: Agreed, this is why I chose 2. Let's vote again.
- All votes now are 1s or 2s
Good fucking job 🤨11 -
pm: why this things are getting late in development.
me: no, I'm not late, on track, this will be done by end of the next week.
pm: but my estimation was for today EOD.
me: you never asked me for the estimation..
pm: we are here for that.
me: then do this yourself..*asshole* -
A few weeks ago, I was joking with a friend with how PMs aren't able to understand how weird are dev time estimations and how much they love meetings.
He: "Well, we can make a meet to estimate the hours of doing that"
Me: "Or better: We can make a meet to estimate the meet of estimations"
Three days ago, we are with the PM on the weekly meeting. In a part of his lovely speech, he asks:
"What if we meet the Thursday to estimate the weekly meeting for estimations?"
Obviously we laughed instantly, and he 'forget' he spoke that.1 -
Send help..
The project we're currently working on:
- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should
- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated
- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations
- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible
- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..
- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on
- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.
I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.5 -
Why management has such orgasmic attachment to numbers?
Example 1.
Mngr: split this into tasks
Me: done
Mngr: now estimate these tasks
Me: can't. Team is new and codebase is unknown. Any estimations would be subjected to huge error and I will not commit to anything if I'm not at least partially sure.
Mngr: but we need some timeline
Me: so give it yourself. I'm not doing it
Example 2.
Mngr: we need to measure how your knowledge sharing sessions impacts our organisation
Me: how?
Mngr: e.g. amount of bugs lessen in next quarter
Me: bugs can go up and down because of hundred other reasons. Also, knowledge sharing is just to inspire people, it's up to them if they keep educating and growing. Me sharing knowledge 1h per week, I can't guarantee they will understand and apply this new knowledge.
Mngr: but we need to measure it somehow, otherwise it is useless.
Me: <speechless facepalm frustrated>22 -
The best estimations are the team based estimations. Do a planning poker, but don't agree on the average or median, just sum up all the estimations! 😉1
-
Cunt: hey i need you do to Thing
Me: sure, send me the details
C: yep! How long do you think it will take you to finish it?
Me: yes2 -
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 -
Me with estimations:
*enter the supermarket
*take a small basket because I need just one or two things..
*realizes I needed more things, basket get full, me getting tired.. oh shit..
Boss asks some changes
-ok boss, one hour at most, it's just adding few lines..
*then I realize that it's not that simple1 -
We as developers often get a lot of pressure considering the deadline for $someProduct™.
But sometimes it happens to me that I need less than half of the estimated time for development of $randomFeature or $product™.
Do you think it is fair to (rarely) procrastinate a bit in order to not show your boss that it needed much less time, so he will not lower his time estimations for future stuff?1 -
anyone having the same problem of mine? I was asked to give an estimation but I suck at giving estimations!
I once gave my boss an estimation of three weeks, and completed in 1.5 weeks + including unit tests for my work O_O4 -
I see a lot of rants on this platform complaining about their boss/management.
About how they don't understand how complicated the development can be of seemingly simple tasks or how they would prefer small estimations over realistic ones.
Is that really the standard in this field of work?
Am I just that lucky to find basically the ideal boss on my first try?
My boss really understands how difficult some tasks can be even if they don't initially seem like it. He listens to my ideas as if they are at least just as important as his own. He can almost think like a real developer and is prepared to give us all tools we could want to evolve.
It is a very small firm and I'm basically the only real developer on this project, but I would follow that man to the ends of the earth.
Can some people please clear my conscience and confirm there are still good managers in this field who really care about their project and their employees/colleagues?6 -
Why is it most companies think being “agile” simply means “let’s say we do work in two week blocks” but without planning or showcases or reviews, without estimations, with ad-hoc tasks inserted continually, priorities changing, tasks moving to the next “sprint” over and over …
But yes, these companies proclaim they are “agile” and do “two week sprints” when it is nothing more than chaos and rhetoric.6 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...
TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it
FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.4 -
Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!
April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!
July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....
August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...
September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'
somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..
I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.
Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.
Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.
Can I?8 -
Agile my ass.
What has become of: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"?
A fuckton of rules and processes to do it the 'right' way: tickets, estimations, hours of sprint planning. Yeah, we're so professional we no longer have time to write code.
Note: manifest was mainly full of fluffy business buzzword bullshit (effective sustainable excellence), but one thing resonated:
>Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
(I cherish every line of code deleted or unwritten, so it needn't be maintained)4 -
In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.2
-
Once when the marketing guys validated an offer with a client without taking the technical team estimations..
When someone gave me the work and I find the time is not enough, I said: whoever validated this, he can implement it by himself. -
If I need 2 weeks to implement a new feature, I need at least one more week to find better solutions which make the code easier to read. Then I would like to spend yet another week to think about other solutions to make sure I can't find one that is even better..
I hardly ever get that time but when I do, I create something beautiful..
The last time I was able to reduce > 2000 lines of code to a about 50 lines generic service which is easily extendable and understandable.
Do you include stuff like this in your estimations? -
So I'm on PTO for a week, and there is some feature for which I gave the estimations to the other team. That team thinks that eastimates are high and I'm getting pinged to think about it.
First of all they did the overriding of some feature which was required by our team without our knowledge and now when we got know what they did, they are asking us to do the work. I have an estimate and yes they are higher than expected because this feature is on their systems and I don't have complete understanding of it. This is ridiculous though but still I think that I'm wrong somewhere but I know this work is not easy for me, that's why estimations are high.
I'm on leave, I'm not supposed to be working anyway even if it's a small clarification.
Adding more here, that guy tagged another person from my team to do the work as I'm on leave. This guy did some work before too. But this is insane. HOW THE FUCK YOU EXPECT US TO DO IT FOR YOU!! YOU FUCKED IT UP!!!
I feel scared, what if the other guy can actually do the work, people will think I'm just stupid.:(((8 -
I really feel lost in the world of freelancing, I mean I literally have three jobs on the go so barely any pressure and yet I'm cocking up my time estimations and mixing up code for each site, and giving incorrect predictions for completion, so basically I keep ending up working for free. Freelancers of the depths of devRant, please help! How do you manage to maintain a work life balance? Is accurate predictions and time management just something that comes with experience?
Also huge props to you for being able to keep your mentality!12 -
Did you ever think time estimations are hard? If so, did you ever try adding your actual taken time months after working on a ticket?8
-
My team leader (Indian) asked me, in my second month in the job, to estimate the required time for testing some screens.
I made the estimations based on my experience and understanding of "screen testing" then discussed it with him and he accepted the estimations.
When the time came to start the task, he sent me a document about writing automation test for the screens,which was new thing to me.
The task took more than the estimations (3 times) and I have been blamed because I made wrong estimations.
The team leader was the one who blamed me!!!
Never estimate a task without full description...2 -
Estimations of dev work? I don’t do such stuff. But if you ask: Time it takes normally times a very very big number 😅
-
I finally found out what is agile: You get assigned to a ptoject with fixed estimations of the tasks, but you have 30 minutes daylies in which you get micromanaged to do more work. The added AI blockchain value is that these dailies count as dev time for you, while for others it counts as TL, PL, PM, PC, Front office time.
And now for final deep learning, inovative, DevOps, java, javascript cutting edge, bleeding edge business aspect.... THIS IS A FUCKING SOLO PRoJECT!!!1 -
I have a great chemistry with this coworker.
He lacks some depth of android knowledge but is always very interested in adding new google libs to the project, so we often discuss and come up with the safest, scalable solutions.
He is SE2 and I am SE1.
But one thing that is interesting about him is the way he gives estimations for the tasks. He takes usually that much amount of time that i would take, for a task, but he would quote half the time estimates.
the bosses usually come on the last days to check the feature demo, but QAs gets the first build when a task is completed. I have seen his first builds that goes to QA and most of the time, boy it has some amazingly stupid bugs.
dude would just put a util function, then run the build, if everything compiled, he would just give the build to QA directly. he wouldn't even check that the util function gave an expected output or not.
He is simply wasting QA time n efforts, and risking product quality by not testing enough, but he almost always gets a clean chit for this behavior just because he did the work super fast.
Dude is super cool and i don't envy him for his good luck, but rather think of him as an inferior dev. However bosses think of him as a better dev and my TL even once told me to "be like him"
So i guess this is how corporate works. I will try to apply this in my next role in current/next organisation.3 -
Project manager is against that we pick our own tickets.... So next sprint, that last 2 weeks, i got 2 days off work and that is already generous estimations.
He will be off for the next 2 weeks. -
As experienced developers, how do you do time estimation in spite of things being stuck and new, unexpected, stuff coming at you with no extra time? This has happened to me and it's depressing and frustrating to have to ask for an extension again and again. Plus, the code and tests for it get boring.7
-
Question: How many people on here agree with the following statement - Engineering requires sacrifices in the form of compromises and estimations to be made for the sake of developing a product that is practical3
-
Just discovered "git hours" (https://github.com/kimmobrunfeldt/...) and it's as simple as awesome! I'm gonna start using it in combination with RescueTime to check how accurate are my estimations... Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences on this, guys?
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