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Search - "product owners"
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1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.
2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.
3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.16 -
No matter how much product owners claim "bugs have priority over anything else", "we value high quality structured code", and "we do test driven development"...
...Once a big client wants a feature to be developed before they sign up, dirty code will be written from napkin specs, and that code will always be refractored "soon".4 -
Dear Product owners / Company Owners / Whoever requesting a feature:
Devs like to know they are adding value to whatever product they are working on. Every time you request a stupid no value added request, you kick the dev's soul.
After several hits the developer will stop caring about the software and eventually will get the job done, but oh boy, the amount of tech debt/trash code the dev is gonna leave behind will be horrendous.
Then the next developer, not only takes the hit from another stupid request, he/she will see the crappy code the past sad developer left and will take a double hit. Of course all of them start proactive and try to fix previous blood trails but sadness will catch them eventually.
If you want you're apps/products/reports to be good in a long run don't make stupid requests.
BAs, Stop being Expensive Email Forwarders and challenge a request, understand the process and then hand it to the developer.
Us developers are sensible cute ponies. Treat us well or expect poor quality projects8 -
Product owner:
Okay we have users and groups. Users have roles, roles have permissions, but groups can also have roles or permissions. Clients have users and these client-users can have special kinds of permissions. Now we need to add projects which have pages and special project users who manage the projects, but only the client-users can set rights for which project owners can manage pages. Pages are coupled to roles, and assigned to workflows, unless the client-user already had the permission to... wait where are you going?"
Me: "Fetching a new SSD. I ran out of hard disk space trying to model the database design. Could you please start from the top when I get back?"5 -
I'm getting so fucking tired of frontend development...
I still like part of it, but I really hate CSS, browser compatibility, stupid users, dumb requests from product owners and fucking weird designs. And to top it all, it's the frontend team that handles all the pressure when the deadline comes up and the project's late, even if it was the product/design/whatever phase that took too much time.
Being a frontend developer is very stressful and has so many annoyances and I'm getting sick of it.
My company's been promising giving me some backend work because there are some backend-heavy projects coming up and they know I have the skills, but they just keep giving me frontend work. Also, one of our frontend developers is on leave, which means more work for the rest of us.
Why did I ever decided to do frontend development?6 -
Fuck startups.
Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."
The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"
Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.
Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.
So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".
Fuck startups.13 -
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 fucked3 -
Something that really irritates me is when someone requests a read receipt for an email. My team of 4 including my team leader has several apps that we own with several different product owners. Sometimes one of the product owners or someone who works for them sends an email and requests a read receipt. I feel like that is very cocky, like they are trying to exert control over me or something deeper. Maybe it's just me.5
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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 -
"Impossible deadline experience?"
When product owners promise delivery dates.
One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.
We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".
It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.
So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.
Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.
Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.8 -
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
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The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."4
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Let's start by saying: God do I love programming and hate work!
My dream job would be a place where I get to write quality code for something that's actually useful and makes sense to people (or a group of people) without all the usual job bullshit; all the politics, fucking useless hours of meetings, the pretentious ass holes, and the useless mindless product owners with good pay to live comfortably and some organization (not being a complete disaster). It's only a dream though...5 -
Some "engineers" entire jobs seems to only consist of enforcing ridiculous bureaucracy in multinational companies.
I'm not going to get specific, the flow is basically:
- Developer that has to actually write code and build functionality gets given a task, engineer needs X to do it - a jenkins job, a small k8s cluster, etc.
- Developer needs to get permission from some highly placed "engineer" who hasn't touched a docker image or opened a PR in the last 2 years
- Sends concise documentation on what needs to be built, why X is needed, etc.
Now we enter the land of needless bureaucracy. Everything gets questioned by people who put near 0 effort into actually understanding why X is needed.
They are already so much more experienced than you - so why would they need to fucking read anything you send them.
They want to arrange public meetings where they can flaunt their "knowledge" and beat on whatever you're building publicly while they still have nearly 0 grasp of what it actually is.
I hold a strong suspicion that they use these meetings simply as a way to publicly show their "impact", as they'll always make sure enough important people are invited. X will 99% of the time get approved eventually anyway, and the people approving it just know the boxes are being ticked while still not understanding it.
Just sick of dealing with people like this. Engineers that don't code can be great, reasonable people. I've had brilliant Product Owners, Architects, etc. But some of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.7 -
Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.
In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)
I present a rare look into our national archives!
This document features two exhibits:
Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles
Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles
Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.
I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"
Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.
Just kill me
Happy friday ☠️7 -
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 -
Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.
I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.
I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.
Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...
In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...
Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.8 -
Creating a stripped down version of a product is a big red flag to me (e.g. "easy/light mode").
It means the main product is too complicated; it handles too many things. Instead, shift the focus back to the core of the product by removing features.
In the our day-to-day it is completely normal to stumble upon things that used to work but now have been changed: they have been deprecated.
Deprecating and removing features should be added to any product iteration. Thus being "normal" and a common occurrence in any changelog; just like features and bug fixes.
This gives non-tech product owners "permission" to remove bloat. Devs stop whining about "the big rewrite". And end-users don't suddenly have to learn yet another tool with "basic" features missing.
I think the best example is google (https://killedbygoogle.com/) and the worst is the amazon shopping website (what a mess!).3 -
So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.
I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.
I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.
Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".
This is going to be a great year.4 -
So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.
I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.
The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.
Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.
2 lessons to take away from this story:
- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.
- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?4 -
Scrum is such bullshit. You are made to report to idiot product owners who were promoted from customer service reps.(that is who they were in my previous job). A few years answering phones and all of a sudden programmers are made to report to them who don't know jack about coding...Made to work in high pressure projects by setting 2 week deadlines. Then when there are bugs in code, you are penalized for bad code.5
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Fucking product owners. Churning out retarded requirements every sprint and then complaining about how the requirements haven’t been met, just to add new retarded requirements the next sprint.
Hot tip, if your product owner is obsessed over apple events, tell the cunt to go buy a new Apple Watch and suck on apples trillion dollar market value. Fucking goofy cunts.2 -
As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.
I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.
I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.
As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.
And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')1 -
On wednesday we always work from 10:00 untill 20-21:00 because of weekly meetings with product owners who have a full time job besides being a product owner..
Its okay, we get free food and often have a couple beers, but the last weeks its been killing me...
Other people bail out because they want to do something with their friends that evening but I always feel like its a commitment we made as a team so as lead dev I should be there..
Think next week im going to bail out for a time2 -
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 -
Fr-Agile
Francium Agile Methodology is characterized by lack of proper planning, and constant interruption during the development process as specs are pulled out of product owners asses ad nauseam. Fr-Agile methodology is known to result in an extremely radioactive team environment.1 -
Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.4
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Is it just me, or is form autofill in the browser just a major PITA for shop owners when people get to the checkout screen? I've had two clients in the past week with problems where users didn't pay attention to their autofill outcomes, or where the form absolutely has to keep a certain value that we've autofilled for them but gets overwritten by their browser. Now there is a shipment of product out in the wind that is going to return to sender and be delayed in a correction cycle. If you've been able to halt this type of nonsense, I'd love to know how you did it.
function ignoreAutoFill() {return browserSitDownAndShutUp;}10 -
The company i work for is getting into scrum. Hired consultants, product owners and scrum masters. First action was 'lets spend 2 days in meetings estimating the rest of the project'.
Agile as fuck3 -
So today we had a meeting with the owners of a product we're supposed to deliver a frontend for.
They started by stating their requirements, "we need this to be animated, we need this to be an image, we need a button here...."
Then my colleague asked the one question you should never ask to a person using need that frequently, "what browsers do you intend to support"
"We need to support IE6"
.... FML1 -
Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.
I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..
We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..
Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea
We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.
Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..
Guess who has to do it in the end..
Many question marks about this project -
I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.
It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.
But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .
When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.
But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"
I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .
the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.
ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster5 -
I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!
I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..
Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.
Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.
Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..
So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...
Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!
Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!
I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..
Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??
I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.
You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!
I’m just a mug and they know it!
So fucking angry!3 -
I don't know maybe it's me. I'm sure that at booking.com they have hundred of GUI/UX/UI experts, product owners, A/B testing and whatever.
So, please, can you explain to me in a professional and scientific why, why the fuck, when I search for an hotel in a place for a date, by default, they show me UNAVAILABLE properties?
Like, "hey sorry, there was this great hotel, right in the center and very cheap, but you missed it!! hahahaha, you poor moron"
And every time I have to ACTIVATE the fucking filter myself "only show available properties".
Excuse me? Who want to see in first position the hotels that are NOT available?
Are there some users out there who wants that? If I were hired at booking.com as Product Owner or UX/UI expert, I think the first thing I'll propose is to quit the fucking filter whatsoever or at least to enable it by design.
So why is that? you want to show off? slap me in the face, with your hard cock-list of hotels you have anyway, but not for me?4 -
first experience:
Crucial touchpoint with product owners;
- me doing my business on the toliet
- me cleaning up
- me brushing my teeth
** Yes I agree! That feature could****brushbrush****take some time to ***brushbrush*** do** -
I’m so glad I work at a company without a dev ops... it’s so much smoother and money isn’t wasted on a non engineer, or someone who can’t jump in and assist where needed.
We have a weekly team meeting including the mech, elec and software guys... then we have a weekly open issue meeting per project only those on the project go to. We all know what we need to do individually and we just get it done... no need for the middle man dev ops to divide up tasks and shit.. we hear the issues straight from the product owners and get to work... we don’t have defined structured scrums and burn downs...it’s very agile tho.. much like how engineers 40 years ago achieved things. It’s quite awesome.6 -
Alright so when I take over the world in my dreams I will burn all non modifiable devices (so many new Samsung phones and every Mac product, though that is for separate reasons, etc) in a cleansing blaze. And possibly their owners because they are witches, but the church of Aquarius has yet to ratify an official position on witchcraft. Also we are fairly green so the cleansing fire is more symbolic than anything.
Anyway, QUICK. Someone give me a good name for my controlled purge/culling. Bonus points for dramatic sounding names that are secretly punny/funny (haha inside jokes in dark times). This definitely isn't for a novel that I don't want to give you any credit for. -
The worst meeting I was in I didn't know how bad it was until later. It was my first week at a new job, and I mostly just spent that week pulling tickets off of the top of the backlog and getting acclimated to the build environment and the project structure.
The meeting was a "sell off" where we would "sell" our efforts to the product owners, which were executives. After my project mentor went over the things we had accomplished, an executive asked why we accomplished those things but not the things that were asked for. I don't recall everything that was said, the basically our project manager threw us under the bus.
After the meeting, I looked at the backlog, and nothing that the Executives talked about was in the backlog, nor anywhere to be found. Our project manager, expected us to just "know" what we were supposed to work on, and create our own user stories. Apparently, what I found out after, was that the project manager went to one of the executives and complained that we, the developers never did what he asked and that we were just rogues working on whatever we wanted to work on. He was our project manager for another month, and he never created any tickets for us, even after two hour long meetings with the project owners. I honestly don't know what he did all freakin' day. He was always in work early. I'm sure a quick brush through his browser history would reveal some interesting things.
The results of that meeting led to this developer to not receive a bunch of RCUs with the rest of the developers amongst another things. Turns out those RCUs were golden handcuffs for everyone else. He left sometime after that and found another place. I interviewed at that place, too and got the job. Now I have the shortest, most productive meetings ever. -
Product owners not testing/validating bug reports and just passing us the email like
"Here, now fix it"1 -
I've been using boomplayer for years now, and I only recently observed that its notification panel has controls for toggling repeat/shuffle/single state. With bated breath, I clicked on it, half expecting it not to budge. But, impressively, it did
It got me thinking about the devs who worked on it and how much their manager would've insisted the app cannot be released without this *crucial* feature, when in reality, it's fringe and 1% of their (in most cases <5k) user base will ever notice it or be bothered by its absence
Now, I'm not advocating for incomplete releases. I'm just saying it's unnecessarily pedantic for management/product owners to double-down over flimsy stuff4 -
we have been working... we swear...
this is right at the end of a project which was artificially extended because the review process wasn't setup in time. we've had to do certain things the product owners way, whilst shaking our heads and this useful chart is one of the side effects. sidenote, product owner is looking at this chart and showing it to higher ups, trying to show progress being made... i give up. -
Many Indiana entrepreneurs are now turning to loans to find capital to grow their businesses. The ability to obtain a business loan plays an important role in the process of expanding activities and ensuring the sustainability of the enterprise. In this regard, various financial institutions offer a wide range of loan products for small and medium-sized businesses.
To obtain a business loan in Indiana, entrepreneurs can turn to banks, credit unions, and alternative lenders. For example, you can contact https://gofundshop.com/usa/indiana/ . Banks typically offer traditional lending products such as lines of credit, long-term loans, and guarantee financing programs through the Small Business Administration. In addition, there are many credit cooperatives in Indiana that specialize in providing financial assistance to agricultural and small businesses.
However, the Indiana business lending market is not always straightforward. Many entrepreneurs are faced with the problem of lack of credit history or insufficient collateral base, which makes it difficult to obtain a loan. In such cases, turning to alternative lenders such as online lending platforms can be a solution. These lenders typically evaluate an entrepreneur's creditworthiness based on a variety of factors, including the business's financial performance, personal credit history, and the business's future growth plans.
It is important to note that Indiana has seen an increase in interest in business loans in recent years. Many entrepreneurs seek financial support to expand their business, launch new projects or upgrade equipment. In this regard, local banks and financial institutions are actively developing new lending programs, taking into account the specifics of small and medium-sized businesses in the region.
Additionally, Indiana has many business support programs that can help you obtain a business loan. For example, the Small Business Administration provides loan guarantees that allow companies with limited credit histories to access financing. There are also government support programs that provide preferential loans and subsidies for the development of small and medium-sized businesses.
Thus, the Indiana business lending market offers a wide range of opportunities for entrepreneurs. Regardless of what industry the business belongs to, company owners have the opportunity to obtain credit resources for the further development and growth of their enterprise. It is important to choose the optimal loan product and contact reliable financial partners who can offer the best lending conditions.1 -
every fucking time when the product owners start talking absolute shit that you have no idea and you would never need to know or listen to.
ITS A WASTE OF MY FUCKING TIME. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND TAKE IT OFFLINE. -
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...