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When your company launches a new mobile, hands it to you for free and also lets you engrave on it.
5 -
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 -
Product sending an email: Can I confirm feature A is all set for its release on April 30th?
Me: ... what? no that feature is going out with Feature B, that was pushed back to June because of the server issue.
Product: No, the release plan document says April 30th for this.
Me: ... theres 6 copies of this doc now. Someone is after deleting my comments saying "releasing with Feature B". Oh look heres a link to another doc that says this. See Feb14th "Will go out with Feature B". This is because they are touching the same code, we can't separate them now without re-writing it.
*Me to myself*: Ha product are going to hate this, their shitty processes have finally caught up with them.
*next day*
Other manager: So heres my plan for the app release x, y, z.
*Me to myself*: ... his plan? this is my app, I mange this. What the hell is this?
*reads email thread*
*Me to myself*: ... oh so product really didn't like my reply, took me off the thread, sent a response to all the other managers asking for alternatives, CC'ing upper management. The same upper management I had a private conversation with yesterday about how shit our product team are.
*cracks knuckles*
I'm going to enjoy writing this reply.12 -
Had a follow up meeting today to resolve the issue of Product ignoring our comments about possible issues, better ways to do it etc.
New rules:
- We are allowed to suggest to Product that they might be doing something wrong
- We are not allowed to tell product they are doing something wrong
- If Product don’t listen, that’s fine, we will document our comments to protect us later.
Conclusion:
Product are too sensitive to have a conversation with. We are now going to let them fuck everything up, make some notes and say “I told you so” at a later date.
Maturity at its finest ladies and gentlemen.5 -
Dear those who did microsoft sharepoint front-end,
Fuck you
P.S. There is still 3 levels of iframe and table, but I can't show it because it contains data
7 -
Late night thought :
Google is a search engine company having with an operating system(Android) as a side product.
Microsoft is an operating system company having a search engine (bing) as a side product.6 -
ALRIGHT
WHAT FUCKING DUMBASS AT APPLE DECIDED THAT YOUR AIRPODS SHOULD PAIR WITH YOUR
CLOSED
FUCKING
MACBOOK
INSTEAD OF YOUR ACTIVELY SEARCHING IPHONE
PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE SHIT
DEVELOPERS ARE SHIT
THE WORST IS KNOWING THEY ALL EARN EASILY 6 FIGURES
AND ARE ABSOLUTE GARBAGE AT EVERYTHING13 -
You know your product manager is evil when you find this in the official product requirements documents.
7 -
My teams current process is:
1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.
2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.
3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.
4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.
5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.
6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.
7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.
Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.
That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!4 -
When your product manager is too nagger and don't let you work with his questions if you finished the tasks or not.. this what happen to the product.
3 -
Team quarterly capacity planning:
- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.
- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.
- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.
- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.
- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.
- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.
- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".
- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.
- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.
- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.
... so back to step 1
- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.
- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.
==================
PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.7 -
I really miss the days when Windows XP had product keys on stickers stuck to computer cases. If I ever needed an XP product key, I just went to Staples and wrote one down from one of the machines on display.9
-
Product manager: "Programmers are limitted to computer programs, that's why app developers can do mobile devices too!"
Me: "Programmers are not limited to computer programs, its a general skill"
Product Manager: "Then why App
Development is a career?"3 -
Currently in the middle of quarterly planning (its been fun so far). Needs to be signed off by business today.
- My team has ~25 man weeks available in terms of capacity.
- Looking at only priority 0 tasks, last night we calculated the ask from product stands at 64.
- Including P1's, P2's etc. its well over 100 man weeks.
- Email was sent around from business with a list of tasks, asking which can be dropped, de-scoped etc.
Product (non technical) response this morning:
- This one can't take 2 weeks, its not that complicated.
- This one needs to stay, It was originally a Q1 task.
- Can we make this one smaller? (currently only a 3 week task)
- 14 comments on other teams items.
<extreme-sarcasm>
... ah perfect, that cut down the items by less than half. We are now ready for the deadline in 4 hours to have all this signed off on. Great job everyone. Thanks for all the insightful discussions. Go team!
</extreme-sarcasm>6 -
While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."
... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.
How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?
Fuck these people, seriously.8 -
So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.
Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.
I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.
11 -
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 -
Product name: K.I.D.
Product version: v2
Project duration: 9 months
Deployment to LIFE ETA: within next 24 hours
Tests' status: GREEN
uuhhhh soooo exciting! Hopefully this time deployment tools do not fail, like they did when releasing v1. Thanks God it still ended well.9 -
I built our slack bot messages so that they are prefixed in BIG LETTERS with whatever system they originate from, i.e.:
"DEVELOP: You are a useless product manager"
"STAGING: You are a useless product manager"
"PRODUCTION: You are a useless product manager"
One of these is when a payment is made on our platform. Our lovely product manager proceeds to message me, "did you just trigger a payment in the test system?".
YES, OBVIOUSLY I DID SEEING AS THE MESSAGE HAS THE GIANT WORD "STAGING" IN FRONT OF IT!!!
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=how+to+read1 -
Californian PM: Hi team, can I get confirmation from you if your team will be picking up this ticket xyz, currently assigned to California team, in Q4 please. Thanks
Local Manager: Why would we pick it up if its assigned to the California team?
... tomorrow is my last day here ... i'm not unhappy about this9 -
Product manager: ah ok I understand. So is the plan still to do xyz?
Me: .... STILL?? ... when was that ever the plan? .... ok when you said “I understand” what did you mean?3 -
Company : we added AI to our product!!
What i hear : we added a sequence of if and if else to our product 😂😂5 -
It's funny to see creator of a product not being experienced enough to apply for the job posting related to the same product...😂
https://twitter.com/tiangolo/...
4 -
Friend of mine: so I wonder how do you test your applications in the startup?
Me: testing? *grabs his coffee laughing*
Actually we have a complete build pipeline from commit/pull-request to dev and production environments. No tests. Really. We are in rapid product development / research state.
We change technologies and approaches like our underwear (and yeah, this is frequently). If we settled some day and understood the basic problems of the whole feature palette, we'll talk about tests again.3 -
I can't help but think the red headphones in the avatar are Beats. Those are terrible headphones! PLEASE ADD SOME NON DECREPIT BLACK ONES.
It makes me angry every time I see them.11 -
At a large enterprise-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from outside / bad actors constantly trying to break in. (🧠)
At a medium or small-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from clueless customers or users who can potentially break things for themselves. (🧠🧠)
At a sTaRtUp, you are protecting the code and product from being destroyed by the incompetent owners themselves. (🧠🧠🧠+)4 -
If you guess the product then you will get signed version of that product! By Andy Rubin (Twitter)
4 -
Product Owners are the worst. They literally have no knowledge of the product or what the client needs. All they do is ping after every few hours to get an update which is so annoying!4
-
Normal human: Visits web store -> orders for product -> leaves store.
Me: Visits web store -> Stares at header -> Stares at logo -> Check if colors match -> Scroll to footer -> Frowns at ads -> Scroll back up -> Multi click product item for debounce -> Fuck i clicked twice but it added the product thrice -> Closes tab -> Drives to local store -> Purchase product -> leaves store.8 -
For some reason, I started using Office 365 30 day trial a month ago, obviously, and yesterday, a month passed, but the product registered automatically and says it is a product officially signed with a product key.
Thanks Microsoft!
I <3 you!
(don't report this to nsa)3 -
A colleague and I were asked to build a website to show every product from a chain of hardware stores. Each product (1000+ products) needed a 3D model and we needed to recreate the model ourselves from stock photographs. The idea was the user could rotate a product and it from any angle. We also needed to write a description for each product without ever seeing any of them. There were only 2 of us, a 5 week deadline and it needed to be made in Silverlight. The whole thing lasted about 3 days before we convinced them it was impossible!3
-
Sprint planning:
PO: I have a great idea for a new game changing feature
Team: cool, let’s talk requirements, etc
PO: nah, I trust you can come up with the best implementation possible
Sprint demo:
Team: presents the feature
PO: Why are you guys always doing it your way, instead of following my vision?!
Every single sprint...3 -
would software product companies plz start describing what the product *actually* does on their homepages? if u say ur product/framework/tool will help me leverage this or collaborate that, it's an almost zero entropy statement, because everyone says so. Are u selling coffee or a .net gui library? because both can help me make my software better and leverage whatever it's supposed to leverage .. so, pleaaase, just say what ur product does, if that doesn't sell it, using hyped catch all phrases won't either ...
oh, and stop calling ur products somethingfy or somethingly .. just stop -
Product gets launched in 2 hours. Just casually updating the documentation. Nice chill day. Everything tested and validated.
Then some random f**king designer comes barging in vomiting all these "necessary" features to the product owner.
This was yesterday. The designer and product owner are currently complaining to us devs that there are bugs everywhere...
I need a beer.3 -
Sad day when you find out you work for a company who cares more about a working product than a good product.5
-
!rant
I'm a developer turning into product designer guys. But I'll never forget my roots, my development origin. What I'm learning is, most of the UX designer are ignorant about development and developers in general and many developers are ignorant about usability. My future aim would be to build a well communication bridge between these two entities and get designer to empathize with developers and vice versa.13 -
New PM thinks it's a great idea to start micromanaging my team's (private) repo names. Can't wait to hear his opinions on our class and variable names! 😭3
-
Making the customer pay extra for less work is smart.
Making the customer believe that he has full control if the product is smarter.
Making the customer believe he can code the product himself and still getting paid for it is smartest.2 -
Gotta love product owners that don't seem to understand agile.
We delivered the set number of items in the sprint we committed to plus a little extra polish. During the last day of the sprint we're spending the time to push all our work to UAT do he can actually perform acceptance testing...
He decides he should chase all of us up on stuff that we never commited to or even mentioned we'd touch.
Had to explain it to him at least 5 times during the day.3 -
what an absolute condescending garbage post...
"brilliant coder who can't meet a deadline"? well, you're the idiot right there, you just admitted it - they are brilliant and you don't know how to set deadlines
imagine labeling someone who can't meet a workload DIFFICULT! god this is making me fucking fume
"normal management" - yeah this is normal management alright, treating everyone like they don't know what they are doing and expecting them to follow you blindly, sounds pretty normal to me
it's shit like this that leads to cocky ass young dumb managers who actually don't know shit about building a product themselves, but then turn around and think they instead have the ability to manage a team to do it... incredible
21 -
Joined a new team at work 6 months ago. Immediately set upon by a useless PO who was somehow set in her ways while still being around 30 years old. Absolutely refused to change the broken team dynamic or processes in any way whatsoever. Made terrible tickets, never did refinement on tickets so they were always missing stuff and constantly blocked. Generally unlikeable and difficult to work with, incompetent at her job and resolutely refused to change literally anything to make the team function better.
She finally leaves after 6 months and the team dynamic changes immediately. Suddenly we are improving our processes, getting stakeholder input, refining tickets, taking reasonable amounts of work in a sprint. We have discussions without her butting in and getting frustrated when you bring up legitimate concerns. No longer do you have to tiptoe around and appease her ego if you want to point out the obvious flaws in the work she drew up or even just examine it from a technical perspective.
It's insane how much things can improve once you shed the dead weight of people that are just determined to be difficult and won't budge an inch to change their ways. Good riddance.4 -
Fuck product managers.
Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.
I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?1 -
!rant
I just bought a personal license for a Jetbrains product, in this case Rider.
Jetbrains is one of those companies that I'm so happy with that I'm willing to actually spend money on a product of theirs.
So thanks for existing <32 -
Heard this from my professor today-
" Focus on product not on technology"....don't know how true this is.4 -
Product people always have something to say in a meeting 🤦♀️, regardless of beneficial or not. They just need to speak. It's like they have an urge inside to pee, and they have to let it go in a meeting. Always.3
-
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
I got placed with decent salary in core Product based company. Happiness is at its peak 😄😆 .
#campusPlacement12 -
Product manager calls me at 7 PM. "There's gonna be a slight change in the module. You can reuse lot of existing code and I'm sure it won't take much for you to finish. "
Me: Okay, let me take a look at it tomorrow morning.
The next day I saw the spec change.
One and half weeks later, I'm still doing the change.
#FML2 -
Today I had to teach a product manager how to use git. It took about 30 minutes to create a proper pull request. Then another 30 to update it when he fucked the change up.
It was a one line change...needless to say I was internally screaming after the first 10 minutes.2 -
I was asked to come to client with the product owner and the marketing person. They told I just need to answer technical questions. But, in reality both the product owner and the marketing didn't even understand what our product is. I need to explained and carried on all the presentation. And the worst part, while I was struggling explained everything, the marketing and product owner was chatting and browsing random website5
-
Buys a product on amazon.
"Intelligent" ML based Amazon backend services: This guy just ordered a product. He might not want to see any ads showing him the exact same product because he already bought it and will not want to buy another until he loses the first one which might take a while.
Result:
User.showAdsRelatedTo(productName)
Meshine learning ¯\_(ツ)_/¯7 -
So a few weeks ago, our PO really scolded my team for not letting him in on our release planning meeting. His rant went on for about 30 minutes, just one long monologue about why he should be invited in the future.
Apparently he wanted to know details since there were some important fixes in the release, which I suppose is fair (though the rant is really not necessary).
Fastforward 2 weeks, we invite him again. He accepts, but never shows up. We decide to start the planning anyway, since we don't want the release branch blocked because someone didn't show up.
Immediately after the meeting, we write him with the new release plan. And he starts ranting again about "planning without him" -.- ..
1) Stop yelling at the team you're supposed to work with. Talk with the team about it - I'm sure they'll listen.
2) If you demand being in meetings, show up - or at least decline in advance.
3) You have no right to rant about "not being part of the planning" when you were literally invited for a planning meeting 2 weeks in advance. No meetings were overlapping, so there's literally no excuse..1 -
Haven't ranted in a while so here it goes.
Head of product took me (senior dev) to a high value client workshop/demo session and over the course of two days found the reason behind why the dev team has been pushed to the limit as of late and sales/product team has been making promises to clients without checking with dev leaders on reasonable delivery dates on massive new features.
I tried my best to manage expectations by differing talking about delivery dates by saying "lets discuss that with the team" rather than giving out dates right now. But as soon as the meeting ends he sends an email to the client confirming delivery dates on features that we have done no research on or even specialize in!
Please tell me this is not how well established businesses work or is that the new reality of things. In either case I wanna find a new job :/2 -
Product owner (who is also the application administrator): please build feature to allow administrators to create automatic alerts to be sent to application users
Me: ok
Feature gets built, tested and deployed to production
Two months later:
PO: I've noticed in our monitoring tool that there haven't been any alerts sent out to users. What's going on??
Me: well have you created any automatic alerts?
PO: umm, no. How do we do that?
Me (inside): 🤦2 -
Dev: We have a data quality problem. Combined with data silos, we can't trust the numbers. We need to agree on metric definitions as a company.
CTO: (Points a PM)Help him on the metrics he has defined. We'll discard any other alternate definitions inside the company.
PM: You can start with these. (Throws a bunch of metrics without their definitions. Doesn't respond to questions regarding definitions.)
After a week of generating aggregates,
PM: The numbers seem wrong.
Fuck I know the numbers will be wrong. Because you didn't give me the definitions and I'll have to deduce them myself.
Seriously guys, how do you deal with PMs who don't cooperate in the requirement analysis?8 -
Why are product managers always so irritating. I mean i understand they can't code, but then why do they have to be so nosy about status updates.
Its not like if i show progress to you it'll get done quicker. In fact more likely than not it will get delayed. Because you'll start realising things you haven't really thought about.
I somehow feel they are there to only make the entire environment just much more frustrating.6 -
Working hard to meet crazy deadline to finish last update before new product announcement to make it look better. Our CEO blabs about new top secret product at some conference throwing away all marketing efforts up to date and putting marketing team into panic mode. Result? They moved the announcement date without discussing it with development. Result? Our efforts and overtimes wasted and we are announcing product before it is ready. End result? I'm pissed so I wrote angry e-mail to our CEO. Wondering what will happen now :-) But with unfinished announced product and crazy deadlines they need me a lot more than I need them.
-
Four and half months,
Hundreds of hundreds PRs and one additional product cluster
By 6 Engineers..
To 500+ micro services
Which has no timezone or currency context,
Created by 250+ engineers,
To launch in a new country...
It didn't make me happy.
But the feedback from customers and drivers is priceless and #heartwhelming14 -
Bought a product using Apple Pay at the grocery store, by the time I got home Facebook was advertising to me the same product. Really? Is there a Facebook+ApplePay link sharing my purchasing data?3
-
First day back from holiday: after 30 minutes of work (excludes start-up, catch-up etc.) The P.O. (product owner) comes to me
Telling me I needed to switch project, ok I thought at least they switched the project from what ever it was to a propper OTAP street while I was away
Few tickets later the P.O. asked me if tickets x could be deployed to our test servers as well as production.. (note the ticket was already merged with our develop branch and he wanted only that single ticket x to be deployed)
WTF is the point of a OTAP street if you're going to deploy it to every server type at once?
So day one after my holiday I already needed to fight the P.O. again
At least I wasn't disturbed during my vacation... Witch is a first.8 -
// PSA //
Please everybody, go to your Project/Product Manager, Product Owner or whoever thinks it is a good idea to sacrify the usability and speed of the software/product for sake of faster updates, solutions that are easier/simpler to develop and implement, or new features not even the users itself could think of. Thanks.2 -
At the product backlog refinement the product owner told us (the devs) how the database model must be designed! He said he knows it best, because he knows all the requirements. 🙈4
-
A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:
Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."
Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.
Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.1 -
That moment when you get blamed by product/business for a slow feature...
A feature which the same product person demanded you implement two days before the deadline that the feature was supposed to be released at but you never got told about. You end up doing a miracle and the company avoids a lawsuit but you still get blamed for it being slow. Shouldn't have agreed on the ridiculous deadline and left them suffer from their own bad decisions and communication2 -
I can’t understand why every time I work for a multimillionaire company that sells their product to thousands of companies, when I start to debug this fucking product it crashes because of the absence of simple input checks... wtf
“Can’t divide by zero”
“Null everywhere”4 -
most productive workflow I ever seen.
excel 1 : stock
excel 2 : order
compare stock with order manually 1000+ product.
excel 3 : check history of order generator (shop)
excel 4 : today's price of product + tax
excel 5 : alot specific unit's of product
excel 6 : maintained bill credit/debit
next step : forword to managers for approval
excel 7 : edit's from nanager
process repeat till managers approval
excel 8 : dispatched history
excel 9 : return product (reason's/unit)
excel 10 : stock update return + new product's
and few more excel's
data of 5+ year's
daily 500+ order's
lPO listed company
i have not mentioned account and other stuff
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻2 -
I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.
There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).
Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.
So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.
The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...
... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.
I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.
In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.
I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.
Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.
I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.2 -
So, I'm the engineering leader of a startup. This year, the company hired new directors and with that a new CPO. We've been using Google Workspace and have all our infrastructure on GCP. We never had any trouble with Google products. We also have Google SSO configured in almost every tool out there.
Yesterday, the new CPO, sent me a request to change "just some dns" on the domain. Those "just some dns" were Microsoft 365 mx, cname and text records.
I asked him if he was planning to switch to MS.
He answered: "yes! The team (a new team of marketing) wants to use PowerPoint and Teams".
I don't know you guys, but I hate MS products. They're just bad.
So, yes, it seems that now I'm gonna waste my time switching and configuring everything with MS just because they don't know other tools that are way better than any MS product!
I tried to convince him, this wasn't a good move, but it seems my opinion equals zero at this company.
I just hate this type of product managers that always wants to reinvent the wheel to let others see that they are doing something important when they're not.
Also hate when managers make decisions without ever consulting the people that will be affected by those decisions... But I guess that's how it works in this world...12 -
Today I had my first app preview. It went really well, although not all the functionalities worked as expected, the product owner was very pleased!
Perfect start of this week! -
Product Owner.
Not Product Liaison.
Not Product Buddy.
Not Product Suggester.
Own it. Bend it to your will. Make it better or sunset it and build it again. But don’t be a wet noodle and say “I’m just following orders”. You give the orders, you own it.3 -
"As a Product Manager in this project I need to work with a Front-End Developer so that the front-end side of the project gets developed perfectly"
PM I ♥ you.3 -
Nothing gets on my nerve than microsoft. Just another day being a victim of fucking microsoft trash product called teams. All I wanted to do was login but no, this ass of a product has it's own shit things.3
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Do you know how MySQL got it's name? Well, it's a really interesting thing one should know. Atleast, I find it really amusing.
~Michael "Monty" Widenius is one of the founder of MySQL and one of his daughter's name is My(after whom MySQL was named).~7 -
If I hear the word "platform" one more time...
What you mean are products that support varying use cases.
IMO, it's more difficult to build/support one application that supports 3 different user types, than it is to have 3 different well-scoped applications.
Thoughts? -
Built a little MVP over the weekend and put it on Product Hunt today. Check it out:
https://producthunt.com/posts/...7 -
when a product manager decides to have a product review meeting from 4:30PM to 6:00PM when everyone plans to leave early.1
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Never thought I'd be back here after all these years. But today I thought I would rant about our product owner, who thinks he's priceless to the project. The man walks out of meetings that don't go in his preferred direction. He gets flustered whenever discussions become technical and demands everyone ELI5 the entire thing to him. He clears his throat loudly every time he wants to make himself noticed, like loud grunts of a wild boar. He will find ways to shift blame away and onto others. He does not like being recorded during meetings and does his best to make sure his decisions don't have a paper trail in case they go sour. No paper trail also means he can contradict himself everyday ans get away with it. I wish there was a way to make him resign or switch to a different project. Other managers and even his bosses are already aware of his behavior and yet still no significant changes in his actions or behavior.
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Why can't PMs do a basic user research before wasting the engg effort on building a product they don't even know what to build?????
Everytime my team completes a feature, request comes in to change it because end user does not want this. And when I take a stand to not proceed further without proper UXR, upper management forces me to go ahead without it.
I am fed up of these folks sitting at the top and being childish just to satisfy their own ego. -
Client wants to see his project so he can provide its content.
The product where this is based upon should be a monthly edition of grouped articles.
I've yet to see content for their concept or even legal text that makes sense.
Same person has no idea of the full concept of what he's asking, imho ending up in a Ponzi (which I've switched to a somewhat more logical system, which just might work, but just isn't a get rich quick scheme anymore as he likes to portray it).
Should I just put on a blank page and be done with it, either way?
- Either he gets it, that he needs to fill up the website's content himself
- or he's mad, that I didn't finish the job (while he's the one needing to provide at this point) -
Off late I've been having a lot of debate with my friend about using Flask over Django for prototyping some feature. I side with Flask, since the development time is much lesser than Django and doesn't need to follow a lot of rules.
Issue here is, I prefer flask and he prefers Django.
Need opinion on this sort of problem, where a prototype for a feature in a product has to be built. It maybe integrated into the end product, which is in Django, or may not be.5 -
I've lost sight of the minimum viable product. I've spent months making a product I have to redesign now.
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#Development Story:
No Size for iPad (only mocks are mobile and desktop)
Ambiguous on Close Button (size and position)
#Development:
Me: iPad size, should it be X?
Product Owner: Yes
#QA
QA: Close button is to Small, change to bigger
ME: (ok....)
#Product Owner Review
Product Owner: Close button to big, make it smaller, also iPad size is not that, is Y.
Me:
3 -
Product was not thrilled with our estimates we gave them for the next phase of our project. So they got the veep to give us 2 new team members - a new hire and an existing senior - in hopes that it will allow us to finish a lot sooner.
Because 9 women can make a baby in a month, right? Gods forbid we consider removing anything from the scope of this phase. Mind you, there's still another phase planned after this one before we even release the product.2 -
We often give access to a product owner from the customer on our Jira to keep up a good communication and everyone stays up to date as everything is on the board and not hidden in emails or paper notes on the desk of the guy that is on vacation.
So far, so good
Our customers really like this as they can comment on tickets and they are integrated in the workflow because they can push into the backlog and can review finished tasks.
It is just getting better for everyone so where is the rant?
One project is just a dump of shitty mixed content tickets. But how? They look really neat. There are tickets like "fixes from meeting 20th of may" which are initially well structured with approximately 4 subtle changes to the UI and some explanation and screenshots.
PM says: Good ticket. There you go ticket, into the customer review loop of doom.
20 comments and 13 status changes later. Point 43 from comment 17 is referenced in comment 20 to keep on hold as a third party needs to give feedback, point 7 is still not solved correctly as dev 2 was not aware that it was already discussed and changed in the ticket "Call from 25th of may" where in addition the resolution of points 5-12 were requested with an additional excel file to import.
By now we have the 8th of august and literally 17 of these kind of tickets.
I guess we need to improve the workflow and request a new product owner. But this far I just table flip everytime I get one of these tickets assigned.2 -
Created whole UAM System in Product for client. After the deployment client asked me
"In which table should I run the query to create a new user." -
If you, as a product manager, can't give me requirements on a specific ask, how in the hell do you expect me to deliver anything? "Move thing from system A to system B" is not a fucking requirement.3
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When you rate an app in the app store what do you rate? The app as a tool to iteract to the product or the product itself?3
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Auto-discovery licensing servers are the best invention since sliced bread.
Whenever a product company provides them I just automatically love their product for it. -
Fucking lazy product managers....
Can't fucking care about renaming a word document....
The document says template you moron. You are supposed to duplicate it for your requirements. Not edit directly on the template.
And fuck whoever gave this moron edit access to a global template.
Fuck....3 -
When testing things..
Product Description: Expensive Imported Turkish Pen
Product Image: A bag of Snickers
The "asdfghsjgllhdk" text doesn't look very appealing. -
New Year's day 10am I got a text message from the product owner.
To wish me a happy new year one would guess. But no! She was telling me that the cron job that I developed 2 years ago failed and I need to apply the change on the configuration manually.
What really irritated me was that was no matter of life and death, this could wait for us to get back at the office. Or even worse, she could have done the change herself, after all she was checking emails anyway.
What a b.2 -
!rant
Whoo!! Client's satisfied with recent launch of product!! Still has little bugs to fix here are there, but general feedback was positive, stating it's "much smoother" -
Product needs you to work on a new high priority project ASAP after you finish your current work, deadline ~4 weeks. Also product hasn't finished their side of the breakdown yet.
ugh i just wanna be retired3 -
Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.
From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.
It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product. -
I'd love to be in a place where the act of meticulously engineering a product is highly valued, as opposed to places where they just want to get things done.3
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For any product of two non-trivial primes, it is *always* possible to get the quotient of its factors b/a derived solely from the product of those factors, *without* first factoring the product (p).
Fight me.3 -
I've started my business in amazon with dropshipping. And I'm using the dropshipping tool extension which simply makes .csv file with computed prices and things from the product search I've made in amazon. But still I have to check all the products one by one and delete the ones which are not eligible for selling. And it takes like 1 hours for 100-150 products and after that I only have 3 or 4 products left.
So I've made a program to automate this by taking the csv file and checking the products itself and deleting not eligible products . And now I'm thinking of selling it. Is it better to sell it with monthly plan like $4/month or to sell it for $50?2 -
Why?? just why is it that analytics engineer requires SQL and talking to product managers?
Where is the whole corporate chain when you need one?4 -
Came across a new definition of the word "Implemented" in work today. As far as I can tell, it can be most accurately explained as:
When 1 or more people think about the feature and record a thought about it, without actually delivering anything. -
How would you call this role? Product Owner? Graphics Designer?, Both? Neither?
I work for a small startup besides university and we do need a person responsible for how site looks. But then again we also need a product owner for the frontend. So why not combine these roles? A person who's responsable as product owner for all the frontend related bits plus does the designing. Initially this person would work with just one frontend dev, possibly more over time.
Question:
- How would you call this role/job?
- What would be an appropriate salary?
- How would you evaluate an application to this role?3 -
My office is filled with idiots who would waste money in stupid implementations rather than actual technologies that would help the product. These days I just nod and accept that they are stupid.1
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Featured in Product Hunt's "upcoming" section today. Please have a look and subscribe IF you want to.
https://producthunt.com/upcoming/...2 -
you know you made a shitty product when you need remote desktop to do some usefull work. #surface-rt #microsoft.
I got one for free from my previous employment that is nice. oke i got it but i never use it. it is really the worst product every. now no support what so every. @microsoft: hey let us lock them down so it is secure.... fuck that shit just open the bootloader and let mr use that thing propper.3 -
What would you do if you discover a major security flaw in an enterprise product that claims to be secure and has GDPR compliance? Like a really major flaw in a core feature of the product!9
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Update ( @keigezellig ) previous post is related. We didn't end up winning anything but we got a very positive mark for our product.
Thanks for voting :)1 -
the problem with product based company is the business/sales people, when they are not clear about their own product, the amount of re-work comes to n^n!
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Hey, How is the weekend going, super humans?
I am planning to prepare my second product for Product Hunt.
It looks like @C0D4 having a hard time.
https://devrant.com/rants/9228124
Previous Week :https://devrant.com/rants/91403026 -
Hey guys, I'm new to a dev management role. One of my responsibilities is to write tasks and do code reviews for the team. I keep getting issues in code due to the lack of contextual understanding of the codebase. How much detail should I include in a task? Should I expect my team to understand the context of the task/codebase?3
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My product has just been hunted on Product Hunt by Chris Messina:
https://producthunt.com/posts/...
Pretty pumped.2 -
SonarQube is obnoxious in it's moronic ideas that demonstrate lack of understanding of the languages it's analyzing.
In C# there exists a special kind of switch-case statement where the switch is on an object instance and the cases are types the instance could polymorphically be, along with a name to refer to that cast instance throughout the case. Pattern matching, basically.
SonarQube will bitch about short switch-case statements done in this way, saying if-else statements should be used instead. Which would absolutely be right if this was the basic switch-case statement.
This is a language with excellent OOP features. Why are your tests not aware of this?
I can't realistically ignore the pattern because that would also ignore actually cases where it's right. And ignoring the issue doesn't sit right with me. How does it look when a project ignores tons of issues instead of fixing them? -
Exploring dedekinds and kronecker products (script at - https://pastebin.com/dDuT3dTp)
and the thing I immediately notice, if you output the matrix is that it is a lower triangular matrix. I don't know a lot about the kronecker or matrices in general, but if dedekinds can be generated in this manner, shouldn't some standard approaches like back substitution or forward substitution be applicable here or am I off in left field on this?6 -
When doing a project from scratch, what would you prefer?
Code Quality + Time = Product
Bad Code Quality + Les Time = Product7 -
When you think about an app idea that you could potentially build all on your own, Do you get demotivated when you find out that about 15-20 apps are on the market doing the same thing ?7
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Most of the product managers seem to explicitly mention user metrics with unique. Say # of unique users for the day, # of users ordered and so on. While being explicit is good, I'm wondering is there any metric that doesn't require unique counts?1
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The client asked you for a MVP of his idea and during the work he adds little never ending features like ......
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- Dictate the user experience of the product
- Get it built automatically by IDE - backend, frontend, whatever, everything.
- Customizability options - make changes to UI, backend structures, database schemas and models
- all of this by just talking in normal human language. -
I'm planning to get out of engineering and into tech. Can I expect to make at least 60k in an entry level position? Will I need to get more skills or take a significant pay cut in order to change careers?18
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Hey,
So, a startup wants me to join them, it is a product based company. They want me to setup their SAAS product on the server which is purely built using open-source software with some pretty small tweaks in the code
They need it done in a few days
I just wonder that's how a big product based company is built
Please help me in making the decision, I am really so confused
Thanks9 -
This quarantine has been killing my neck. I’m always looking down at my phone and finally understand the real effect of Text Neck.
However, I found this new app on product hunt that notifies you to hold your phone with good posture and it is a LIFE CHANGER!!
Check it out: http:///www.producthunt.com/posts/... -
Yo guys any advice or tips for product dev/product management (internship) and all would be awesome1
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I don't understand when applying for job .. companies just post their product .. ask for improvements, bugs etc, :( Do I need to look over that I just skipped that types of jobs . Is this worth it to study their product and then apply ?3
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when you gotta generate some product ideas and work for the first time at a new company when you've spent your career as a heads down code monkey
bruh i dont know any of the stats or data, or the product yet -
Building an AI enabled image transformation product similar to Cloudinary with better functionalities, pricing and flexibility. Targeting B2B clientele.
What is your opinion on this?3 -
There is such a thing called "building wayyyy too many features in the product that 99% of the user base won't even care about"
I think that management does it because of this mentality, "The more features we have, the better our product would be".3 -
Building an experimental prototype but not allowed to talk with fellow dev community about it because we need to be stealthy to protect our idea / ip
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The feeling you get when the people in charge of packaging and installation of the product can't give you an answer to the question: "How is the product packaged, so I can include the new features?"
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How is it being a product manager (PM) for the blade/piece of product that you develop?
I might have the opportunity to be a PM and a developer for the product I've been working on for the past 3 months. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the product, but definitely don't know all the customer needs/wants (which I assume will come with more knowledge/experience with the position). Is there anything I should be wary of if I get the promotion? How much of a raise should I expect or ask for? -
Best part about being a dev is easily the fact than when something about a product bothers me, I can either build a better product or stuff it!
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Currently our team is in a cycle of blaming the PO (indirectly) & feeling bad about it. He's really a nice guy and is doing his best! (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞
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