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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 -
GUESS WHAT? HE WANTS ANOTHER FUCKING FEATURE!
AND WHEN I SAID I DIDN’T HAVE TIME BECAUSE CODE-COMPLETE IS TOMORROW, HE SAID HE’LL PUNT IT TO NEXT YEAR INSTEAD OF RELEASING IT THIS WEEK SO I CAN “BUILD IT RIGHT.” MAN, FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENDLESS CHANGES!
THIS WAS GOING TO BE A TWO WEEK TICKET UNTIL HE STARTED ADDING ENDLESS FEATURES AND CHANGES AND SURPRISES. IT’S BEEN FUCKING MONTHS! I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT!
ANSDFKAWHOALIKWEGJFADIO;UGJT;
There goes my Q4 performance review.
> “Accomplishments? Oh, there’s lots of room here. Accomplished: Basically nothing. How embarrassing.”
Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate22 -
PM: 2 months? no thats way too long, do it in 1.
Director: I had a chat with someone else who doesn't work on this team, he says that developer you complained about is a good guy and we should keep him on the team.
Business: No, we don't have time for tech debt, lets build these new features as quick as possible and lets see where we are.
everyone: WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT CRASHED AGAIN??? THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE6 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
My main working laptop has delete button at the top right corner of keyboard just like the normal rest of keyboards on this planet. But some people think it is boring to be doing thing in consistent manner. And so they made this.
Result is 4 times involuntarily went into sleep mode. Gazillion times I swear I can tear the dick out of that genius who came up with this idea and swirl his brain around using said dick. If it was a girl, I'm gonna shove a durain up her vajayjay.
Oh BTW, both laptops brand is ASUS.
19 -
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 -
FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING CUSTOMIZABLE, HALF-MODULAR, MULTILINGUAL, DYNAMICALLY-AUTOUPDATING PAINTBRUSH / CARPENTER / SANDWICH CUTTER / ALARM CLOCK DECEPTICON WITH OPTIONAL SCREWDRIVER ATTACHMENT!
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SIMPLE FUCKING SCREWDRIVER!
FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING EXISTENCE YOU USELESS FUCK!8 -
A coworker found this picture yesterday and it perfectly describes our product a month before release
4 -
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
8 -
Ok so don't answer the question then?
Pretty sure I'm losing braincells while reading product reviews.
11 -
It's fantastic how you blame me, the back-end developer, for the things that the manager, business analyst, and front-end developer missed.
The front-end developers didn't make the user interface and admitted they didn't get to do it and outright forgot about it due to workload, oh it must be the back-end guy's fault for not asking them. You, the manager, have no fault here at all. Why are they overloaded again? And they, as the developers who totally missed out, were just innocent creatures who "were not informed".
The business analyst admits that he thought I was the front-end developer even though I corrected him during the first meeting where he said, "Oh okay, so Rutee is the back-end and <this other guy> is the front-end." EVEN THOUGH every day, we have a meeting and you see my JIRA ticket in all caps "BACK-END". Ever thought about asking? Then the manager comes in there and says, "No, it's not your fault. We as a team should take responsibility. That's how smart teams work." And yet your fucking face, I hate your face, man, and your fucking insinuations. I swear you're all just looking for a scapegoat, now it's making sense why you borrowed me.
While I'm doing my job here minding my own task and knowing that shit has been assigned to the proper person, the manager, business analyst, and other developers who's been in this project for years never bothered to ask for updates regarding the front-end until now. Why is back-end making noise the past few weeks? Because someone is WORKING on it. Someone is RAISING issues. Someone is CLARIFYING the requirements.
I had my own problems. Your requirements are severely lacking, your setup fucking sucks and doesn't fucking work, there were issues and dependencies from several other teams, and now it's my fault that I didn't ask about the front-end? How is that? I create the API, you fucking call it. If anything, you should be asking me about the endpoint but I guess I have to do EVERYTHING and know EVERYTHING in this project where I was just borrowed and I'm technically the new guy here.
I guess it's a "let's blame the new guy" game around here. You can hire the most senior of all developers you can but no one can ever just guess or read your fucking minds. You can't just put someone in one project and expect them to know all your processes, your repositories, your developers, your fucking uncommitted code changes THROUGH EXPERIENCE and PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY. This has nothing to do about proficiency and being proactive. I can be proactive TO AN EXTENT. I can't do YOUR job for you.
Jesus fucking Christ. This project is so disorganized and yet you can't acknowledge that. Then I would get an advice from someone else that we should have talked while front-end is there. He WAS, he's even on the invite. Every fucking time shit hits the fan, you all get a week to fix something and I get a couple of hours or a day. Issue two weeks ago? Resolved Friday after my shift, yet I managed to deliver the next morning. Issue last week? Resolved Friday afternoon, yet I managed to deliver before end of day.
"This is the first time this happened." I highly doubt that. You just want to correlate my *new* presence to your failure so you can insinuate that the new guy is to blame. Your team sucks. Your management sucks. "Oh, that's just how he manages, he tells you the end goal and it's up to you to THINK what you have to do." I did THINK but why the hell do I have to THINK for them or for everybody else?
So yes, another rushed deadline. Another excuse for the slacking pieces of shit, "Oh, I can't do my job because back-end doesn't have this other endpoint I need for this one. Guess I'll go home." When did you say you need another one? "Just now. But you should have known earlier if you asked." IF I ASKED. At what point of my life would I randomly ask, "Do you need this endpoint that isn't part of the requirements but does this/that?" where "this/that" is some functionality I know nothing about because it was never discussed.
Seriously, fuck you and your fucking requirements. You fucking lazy pieces of shit cunt whore motherfucker. I hate all of you. You ruined my entire fucking month. How do you expect this to be less chaotic when you defend the slackers and punish the ones who actually do their jobs and use them as scapegoats?
Three more fucking days, man, and I'm out of this shit. When I get back, I hope you don't bother me with this shit anymore. Your mom's a hoe and I'm accepting calls from recruiters anyway.25 -
You know your product manager is evil when you find this in the official product requirements documents.
7 -
Eh ehe hehe he eh ehehe
On top of burnout, codebase issues, spec issues, burnout, the product butt that keeps on crapping, burnout, burnout, loathing for my employer... My local Apple SSL cert expired. I can’t finish this and push it anywhere for testing. I can’t even run my own specs anymore. And I don’t have permissions to make a new one. I can’t do anything at all.
Ehe he hehe
Deadline is in two days, and I’m just sitting here laughing quietly to myself. I might finally be going crazy
I found a loose bit of tangle, started to pull, and the world decided it was time to fall apart. Reality said it’s time to go. And I wasn’t even a good screwdriver dev. Byeee ~12 -
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 -
Just trying Visual Studio Code because of it's first product from Microsoft that are totally free😂😂😂
12 -
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
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
Managements definition of an MVP:
- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.
My definition of an MVP:
- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.9 -
When you find a tool / service online, go to the pricing page and it has a "get a quote now" button.
You can already tell its a massive rip off, but they feel the need to explain to you why.1 -
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 -
You fucking son of a bitch!
First you make me do a project in two fucking months, and that's a fucking job-load for only one dev to deliver a SPA with payments and whatsoever.
Then you pushed me to accelerate deployment date and there I am, getting tired and using time I don't have.
But oh no, you prick, that wasn't enough, you had to do just one thing. YOU HAD TO DO ONE FUCKING THING!
What's that? Oh, sorry, I thought I overheard that you wanted to accept online payments but YOU'RE NOT FUCKING SIGNED UP, YOUR BUSSINESS IS NOT LEGAL UNTIL YOU REGISTER IT.
Motherfucker, I can't do anything, you better fucking register your bussiness if you want this to work the way it's supposed to do. -
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 -
Dear Product Owners,
If you tell me how I need to architect my software again I'm going to ask you to provide a network topology of the architecture you want me to build.
I'll also need you to request the new servers, work with the ops teams to setup credentials, provision the NAT, register the domains and document the routes that the proxy will need to use.
then I'll need you to hook the repo up to our non-existent pipeline so that I can make sure I won't do all that testing I already can't do.
I hope you're paying attention, because that framework you told me I needed to use is going to be a pain to setup correctly.
after you're done with that, please attach any documentation you shit out to the ticket you never created.
Enragedly yours,
Looking for a new job
PS: get fucked4 -
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 -
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.9 -
If you guess the product then you will get signed version of that product! By Andy Rubin (Twitter)
5 -
Seriously, wtf..
- Getting ready for the K.I.D.
- Will need a red LED light/lantern to see things around w/o waking the kiddo up
- Order a bunch of various models
- Receive some of them
- The another one arrives - it only has white and blueish-white modes
- Reach out to the seller, ask to send me what I've ordered
- Seller replies with:
> Hi, friend
> I am very sorry this light is out of stock now
WTF dude... I order a particular SKU of your products, I need it for its particular properties the other SKUs don't have and when you see you've got no more left you do what? Send me a random product? Seriously, WTF man?!? How about ping me with a message, explain that you've oversold the item and suggest a refund? naaah, too much work, right? Just grab whatever products you still have left on your shelf and send them to your customer instead. /s
WTF MAN?!?!2 -
A: Hey, let's brainstorm for a good name for our new hipster coffee.
B: Ice-Coffee!
C: Cool-Coffee!
D: Karacho!
A: Take my money!
______
I'm not quite sure, but doesn't Karacho mean Penis in Spanish?
7 -
Sad day when you find out you work for a company who cares more about a working product than a good product.5
-
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
-
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 -
I’ll quit swearing when you stop moving user-stories in and out of the sprint DURING THE FUCKING SPRINT.7
-
!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 -
It's 28°C and the fucking (2015)macbook's metal body is running at atleast 70, burning my legs and making the inside temperature even worse ..
And Im only running Idea and Chrome...
Why have you designed a hellish tool like this instead of a normal laptop? What good is it to me that It's so slim and mobile if I have to have it on a table to avoid having 2nd degree burns on a daily basis?!
Seriously, what the fuck... I didn't ask for this shit, but my company requires me to use this "secure" laptop... Fuck everyone that was involved in this laptops design!!!8 -
Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.
Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.
Conversation:
PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.
Me: ok, can you give me an example?
PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".
"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.
Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.
PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.
Me: ... told you what?
PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.
Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.
PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".
Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.
PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.
Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?
PM: Yes, how else will I know?
Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?
PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.
Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?
PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.
Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?
PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?
Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.
PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?
Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?
PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?
Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)
PM: That would have been more appropriate
Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous
PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.5 -
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 -
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 -
Heard this from my professor today-
" Focus on product not on technology"....don't know how true this is.4 -
I got placed with decent salary in core Product based company. Happiness is at its peak 😄😆 .
#campusPlacement12 -
When a customer question gets escalated all the way to the dev team when it could have easily been solved if those escalating the issue had bothered to use the site themselves
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It's fucking fantastic when Microsoft doesn't support internet explorer that is on its own product (Xbox).5
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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 -
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 -
So.. name one fucken case where your database is not a computer backed thing.
Just asking because.. why the fuck? I don't think your database server supports input of fucking math symbols? JUST USE HUMAN LANGUAGE, AS YOU HAVE TO DO ANYWAY!
It's stupid how everything needs to be expressed mathematically ffs. Not that it's hard to understand - it's just more complex than of a very simple wording.
6 -
// 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 -
Find yourself a manager/leader who knows a bit about software engineering. Better still, find one who is/was a software engineer him/herself.
Because software engineering is a form of art. A leader who doesn't understand your art won't be able to properly appreciate it.
They won't be interested in how and why you make/do something. They're only interested in how fast can you get it done.1 -
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 -
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 -
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
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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 -
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 -
#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 -
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 -
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! -
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) -
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. -
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 -
I wonder how much product X weighs ?
I'll just go to the manufacturers website and check..
"Sign in to see product specifications."
Why, it used to be on your bloody product page without needing to sign in !
No problem, I was once a customer, I have my login details here someplace..
"Invalid email address"
Damn it !
FX [ Checks old text files for information... ]
Ah, found it you bastards !
> 5mm 900gsm
More than 10% lighter than the competition, not that you'd ever know it, because they now hide that fact on their website..
Not that I'd buy from them again since their idea of protective packing is a plastic bin liner around an item that has to travel half the world and arrives as if its already been to Mars and back.. -
What in the actual fuck GitHub?!
Why can't I edit a file direct on the web UI? I was able to this morning! If I can't edit against master then why the fuck is the icon there?!
Also, why did you add the unnecessary step of "add tag" when I am fucking CLEARLY adding a new fucking tag.
8 -
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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How to sell a useless product
Include those words: #blockchain #cloud #AI #chatbot #machine_learning #bullshit ..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 -
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. -
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." -
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 -
Any advice on transitioning into a Product Manager/Product Owner role from a Tech Lead role?
I've decided that I want to give the PM/PO track a shot. I'm currently a Tech Lead, and have 6+ years experience as a Software Engineer. However, I also enjoy the product management/planning aspect of software and would like to give it a try.
I've been a CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) for 2 years, and I'm about to renew my certification again. I have previous product management/ownership experience, but not as an officially titled PM/PO.
My current company has offered me the option to transition into a PM role, however, I'd like to explore opportunities at other companies as the product organization at my current company leaves some things to be desired (as does the company as a whole.)
I believe that the major barrier to entry will be my lack of "official" PM/PO experience (with the official title of PM/PO.)
Any advice on how to successfully transition into a role like this?4 -
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 -
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
-
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 -
I've lost sight of the minimum viable product. I've spent months making a product I have to redesign now.
-
When testing things..
Product Description: Expensive Imported Turkish Pen
Product Image: A bag of Snickers
The "asdfghsjgllhdk" text doesn't look very appealing. -
I finished school 3 months ago, Ive had a traineeship for those three months. Now Im employed at that company and they want me to be the PO of a project already. Ive never been PO, any tips?
In this Project I will be both PO and mentor for interns and Im gonna have to write code for the project as well.3 -
When you hear that the "advanced hollistic security" product the client bought is a basic firewall...1
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!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" -
Youtube: Here's a new dark mode! Oh and it's not complete so we're reverting to GLARING white and old UI when you upload stuff.
-
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 -
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
-
Sooooo many recruiters at this presentation/competition where we were showing our study product.
Damn -
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 to become a UX/UI designer given my situation?
So, I have worked as Software Developer for 3.5 years now. My work has involved mostly Backend, Java. For sometime I worked on front end but I am not aware of the front end architecture etc.
I am a graduate in Computer Science.
So right now, I have a good salary in a big MNC. How can I become a UX UI Designer for a good company?15 -
Got rejected for an UX designer position turns out they were realy looking for a UX tester with project leadership skills 🤗 does that even mix bro???
Note to self 🤔 never apply for jobs there in the future 🤔1 -
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 -
My product has just been hunted on Product Hunt by Chris Messina:
https://producthunt.com/posts/...
Pretty pumped.2 -
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 -
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
-
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 -
Got Product of the day at Product Hunt for something around ten lines of JavaScript. No webpack, no React, nothing.
Feels good.
https://producthunt.com/posts/... -
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? -
Couple months ago I mentioned that the product group needed to involve engineering when making promises to the business. Otherwise they were going to write checks our asses can't cash.
Welp, now the situation has happened and I pointed out that a lot of things have been promised for delivery that we haven't planned for or even seen in engineering. And things that I have been harping on haven't even been accounted for and, unlike business promises, these are legal requirements. Now I'm the asshole because I pointed this shit out in front of the whole team.1 -
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
-
The client asked you for a MVP of his idea and during the work he adds little never ending features like ......
-
Google got documenting right. Any product from google got a solid documentation — change my mind.12
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When doing a project from scratch, what would you prefer?
Code Quality + Time = Product
Bad Code Quality + Les Time = Product7 -
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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- 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. -
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/... -
Working in a internal beast of a product maturing over the course of 15 years with lots of history, "good enough" fixes, sensitive areas that cannot be touched without it falling apart it's what I have to deal with everyday. Specially when the documentation is rather faint or outdated5
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The biggest distraction in all issue trackers is the hemorrhaging backlog of tickets that will _never_ be done, or aren't important yet.
This is why I just choose not to even bother opening it and let my PM close them out. :-) -
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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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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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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