An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

Project Management Triangle

Never let customers define the priority levels. It will end in:
- Normal (never used)
- High (used for small text changes)
- Higher
- OMG fix now
- Highest
- the World is ending if this doesn't get fixed now
- different existential plane of priority
- Priority ∞ + 1

Who Is Who

➡ A Project Manager is the one who thinks 9 women🙍 can deliver a baby in 1 month.👶

➡ An Onsite Coordinator is the one who thinks 1 woman can deliver 9 babies in 1 month.👶

➡ A Developer is the one who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver 1 baby.🙇

➡ A Marketing Manager is the one who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and women are available.👷

➡ A Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.👶

➡ A Tester is the one who always tells his wife that this is not the right baby. 🚶

Don't be shy.. Comment which 'who' are you..😂

It happened to one of my friend at work place.

So my friend is a UI developer and was working on a super critical project with very tight deadline. He was waiting for design team to give him mocks and web api team for giving Apis, so he can start his work. Now there are 4 days left for deadline and none of the parties are ready with their work, and my friend is sitting idle. Management is getting anxious day by day. So one program management lady called him the weak link in the standup meeting and started putting blame on him for the delay in the project. Guy tried to explain that it's not his fault and he is stuck. But that lady was not in a mood to listen.

Now come the next day, in morning he got the design ready and complete Apis from other teams. That day he missed the standup meeting, worked whole night and completed the work with two days remaining for deadline. He went to standup meeting after completing the work, and when the turn came for him to give his status, he started with "the weak link has finished the work". There was a pin drop silent in the room. He continued to give his update like this for next couple of days. And finally that lady was forced to apologize in meeting room by him.

Project manager: I thought you said you made sure it was live today! I'm going to have to explain that you're the main issue with why it isn't live to management!

Me: have you cleared your cache?.... (long silence)

I swear it's the new "have you tried turning it off and then on again".

!rant

I know there are tons of Project Management stuff around, but I'm proud to develop one customized for my personal use.

(Also, it's free 😄)

Project manager logic, explained with babies.

9 women can have 9 babies in 9 month. We only need one baby.

Deadline is one month!

Project management isn't so useless a discipline after all

Manager: How much time would the team take to implement this new thing?

Me : Atleast 4 months

Manager: No, we do not have that much time.

Me: How much do we have?

Manager: 45 days

Me: . . . . . .
Me: Who set this deadline for a research project?

Manager: I did, I already committed to the upper management as well.
Me: *fml*
_______________________________________

And this people is why I have to give up on weekends occasionally!
*tries to hide pain*

Last Sunday the boss says:

About this project we are working on, the client stopped paying, so we are not touching it untill we hear back from him.

Spent the whole week learning new technologies, and having a good time.

Guess what happens this morning...
Listen, about that project, they paid and it needs to be delivered by tomorrow morning! shouldn't be a problem, right?

Well actually...

Boss: "Why weren't you in the project meeting? You were supposed to present!"
Me: "I'm not on that project, Bob was before he quit."
Boss: "Yeah, but I assumed you'd take it over. We need you to be working on it."
Me: "What? I don't know anything about it, nothing."
Boss: "Yeah, but you guys went to lunch together, what else would you have talked about?"

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

Dare you speak the Truth!

Project management

Project manager

Act I

Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO

> enter stage left CEO

CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"

Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"

> exit stage right CEO

Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit

Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"

Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

"Next time, well do it properly from the start." - Every team, at the end of every project.

In the project management system we use with our clients I see file named, 'instructions for backup.'

I open the file and all it contains is my name and phone number.😑

Our project Right now 😂

Original deadline for project was April, we're in August and we're still in Shadow :p

Worst experience: had a verbal fight with pm because his poor management overworked me ( I was working on the same project till 10pm every day for 4 days with no OT pay)

Best experience: I stepped up against an abusive pm and told him to fuck off to his face.

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

Story with a 60 hour estimate created by upper management. Completed in one work day. 😐

That's all you need to know about planning practices in my current project. 😄

Started working at a large company with promises of a great framework, stable environment and bleeding edge tools, decentralised working environment, only to find visual studio 2010, no git, no project management tooling whatsoever, all documentation stored on svn, no slack or other modern communications platform, still using uploaded word documents as documentation for projects and meetings, so yeah I can truly say :/

When you are talking with Client and he wants alert that you can't use password because it's already in use...

Q: WHO THE FUCK USES EXCEL FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT?
A: My Product Manager

Excel because she cant wrap her head around using Trello. WHAT THE FUCK!
Some people exist just to make things more difficult for everyone else. Fucking pain in the ass.
This person is one of the most incompetent one I have ever met.

I dont have enough words to express my rage right now.

Cant be bad at project management if theres no project😌😌

TL;DR
Management eats shit for breakfast

Context:
I am the sole Dev on a project.

Stack: Postgresql, redis, nginx,Java with Spring Boot, Neo4j.

I am the only one nearly familiar with : Redis, Neo4j and anything Java.

I'm gonna be on vacation for the next 15 days since they have told me that we where gonna be on a "testing/feedback" period.

My vacation was approved.

Today's meeting: we have a URGENT deadline to meet some criteria that might be the difference between have further investment or not.

Urgent deadline: last day of my vacation.

My face: poker

My thoughts: attached image

Dev: we have two days until go live. We got 20 bugs, 5 stories and two people on holiday.

PM: ok so could we get these 3 stories squeezed in as well?

Boss: here is a mac project, we have not enough time.

Me: what? I didn't not work with Mac and related languages ever!

Boss: yeah, but you are senior developer, this is not supposed to be that difficult to you..

Me: *moment of silence* just tell me who taught you it and project management. because you are the stupidest shitty boss that a developer could have

Boss and project manager calls me into a launch meeting for a new project. A stock management system for a small furniture company that will work over 11 stores, 4 warehouses and multiple suppliers which will also work as an ordering system. We went over the spec(112 pages) and I told him that it will be an on going project over a year with an initial dev time of 4-6 months. He just said that he's sold it to them to be delivered for testing in 2 weeks and completed in 4 weeks(they signed the contract) and that I'd best get started. I just closed my laptop and walked out.

Project Management in a nutshell.

If your manager asks for a "rough time estimate" for a project, there is a higher than 99% chance that your answer will be written down and be used in presentations of project roadmap to upper management and/or marketing, who will create a hard deadline based on your rough estimate and communicate this to customers/clients, and then blame you for not keeping the deadline when it turns out (as it always does) that the rough estimate was off by several months because feature creep caused by upper management.

So the company I work for had a critical project they needed done in 8 days.
We told our boss it wasn't possible because of the scope of the project but he went on with motivational speeches about how anything is possible. So he hired 12 devs for 8 days.
The scope of the project is already big enough but everyday upper management either add 10 new features, modify 2, or delete some already.
We basically sleep 2 hours a day and today is the last day. 5 minutes ago we just had a meeting that we're supposed to change a core feature. We don't even have a stable system yet and everyone is fucking pissed.

Mate: I think we should use firebase for our project.
Me: why?, I don't think our project require firebase
Mate: I think there should be some use of firebase in our project.
Me: *madly Explains complete project architecture why we don't need real-time database*
Mate: *not accepting* there should be use of firebase, I'll think and tell you
Me: *Flips table* 😡

Everytime.....

Juste design a new algorithm to evaluate the chance of a project (any kind of project) will exceed the budget (time of cost). This algorithm been proven to be right almost all the time.

Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!

Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.

His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".

Week 26 advice - you all probably know this but good to refresh!

Eat healthily

Sleep well

Document clearly

Annotate your code

Use version control properly

Keep yourself in check with project management tools

Your peers are your friends... And competition.

As much as your boss is an idiot respect them and your life will be easier.

With great power comes great responsibility; don't touch that keyboard until you think through what you are doing chances are your first idea is not the best.

Don't write quick fixes and say you will go back to clean it up later on when you have time. That time will never come.

Why is it that people not in development seem to assume that we have infinite hours to get everything done?

I'm so fucking sick of being given 5,000,000,000 tasks and a day to do them in and when they're not done (even after saying there's no way they'll get done), I'm the one who gets it in the neck.

Fucking management bullshit. I can't be fucking project manager for 5 fucking projects as well as lead developer for them all AND manage office shit AND handle all the fucking tech shit in the office AND keep track of what every fucking other person is doing/wants!

A woman can make 4 babies with 4 different fathers in 9 months, right?

Someone decided we need a "rubber band programmer" who bounces around from project to project as needed, and that gets to be me.

So I work on 4 projects, with 3 programming languages, 4 frameworks, and with users in 4 complicated industries, none of which I have experience with.

And my boss wonders why I'm not as productive as everyone who has worked on 1 project for 5 years.

So you need 7 yrs of experience just for jr developer position......
Credit:@code_mouse

Programming is a lot like playing video games. It challenges you to beat quests/tasks and hunt enemy bugs while providing boss levels in the form of large projects with tight deadlines and project managers who like to move the goal posts.

Ok, I am fucking finally pissed off...

My current company, I worked for last 1.5 years, for project management they use slack.

Every Monday we have meeting, and we go over every project and talk what must be done. Every project has it’s own channel with some stupid random code name which is impossible to remember because there is hundreds of other projects with similar name.

If there is something todo for dev he just gets mentioned in in channel.

No to-do’s, so basically u have no idea what u need to do, there’s no way to follow progress. Well, of course u can go over each channel and check if u need to do sth, but it takes fucking time. Also because of that u need keep your boss informed all the time about the progress. In others words it’s messy.

To make it worse, there’s usually a few different channels for the same project (1 for devs, 1 for designers, and others for something else like ux or videos).

I brought up this concern to boss many times, and every dev agreed. So for like a month we tried to use flow app, but still everyone used slack + designers told that they don’t like it. So after trial they said we are going to keep using slack. What the fuck?

Now I don’t actually mind their decision, but there one thing that I can’t stand about current method - slack is free, so all history and files gets deleted as time goes. I can’t even count how much times I needed to re-do some work just because slack deleted some files I had put there for later. Or lost some important information about project, that we needed to discuss over and over every month...

3 fucking more weeks left in this stupid company then I quit.

Have you ever been so alone on a project that even if everything seems easy, you don't want to work on it because nobody cares about it?

Wrote a cpp semester project where i had to develop school management system.
The code was spaghetti and horrible with frightening OOP implementation but it was beautifully written with comments and 🐫 Casing.
Submitted the program and examiner rejected it while saying that i had copied it from else where and i could never write a beauty code like that .

You dumb 💩! Don't you know other basis to reject a person's hard-work

Alright I get the importance of project planning but having a Sprint meeting at 7am is just insane.

When the PM grabs my keyboard to show me how he thinks I should do the task...

I started to work in a new project for a house architect, basically a management system for his studio. Well, guess what? Twenty years ago he programmed some sort of software using BASIC, and of course that means he knows exactly how software works!

Worst kind of stakeholder, like going to the doctor and telling them how to diagnose, because you used a thermostat once.

I'm a lead Dev on an agile team. We were just handed a fixed scope, fixed date project. On Monday, instead of helping push this out, I get to have a meeting to explain how throwing more bodies at it will slow us down.

"No! We are not code monkeys! Knowing JS and Java isn't the same as knowing our application. Stop fantasizing that it's a simple manpower issue and leave us alone so we can work these fucking nightmare timelines in peace!!"

I'm looking for a better way than that to explain it to the Sr management for the business so I don't get fired.

Project Management Pictogram

You need to answer your manager, but don't have a clue, try these randomly:

I'll circle back to you
I will run the numbers on it
Let's go back to the drawing board
Let's touch base in a bit. Ping me
I don't have the bandwidth right now
It's on my radar
Let's put this on the back-burner
I have too many balls in the air right now
I have a lot on my plate
I'll get back by close of play tomorrow
I'll have to deep dive/drill down into this and get back
I have a hard stop at X hours
Let's park that for now
It's in the pipeline

Something I refer to as the "Lost Cause Syndrome".

Basically you start working on a project enthusiastically with the resolution to write the best possible code. But either one (or some or all) of management, client and colleagues succeed in transforming the project into a comedy (or tragedy, depending on your outlook) of errors.

Then finally, one day you decide that the project is a lost cause and stop caring about it. You end up in a "Let's get this over with and get out of here" type of mindset without making any efforts to improve the situation.

Boss: "Sooo.... How long will it take?"

Me: "Maybe we should agree on some processes and specify your wishes for the new feature first?"

Boss: "Yeah you're right.... But what do you think? Will you get it done til $deadline?"

...

Why am I even trying? Who needs project management anyway?

My boss pays me well and treats me well, but he expects me to do project management (documentation, giving tasks to 2 junior devs, reviewing their code, helping them when they are stuck), coding, architecture and to finish the project in a time record time.

When I told him that this week I will not work on development but will start to do documentation because the project got so big that it is difficult to keep track, and also the other 2 developers are waiting for tasks for me to give them, he looked disappointed.

I noticed and told him that if he wanted to speed up development, he must hire another project manager, or another senior developer because I can not do them both and expect to finish in a record time.

He keeps asking almost every day, "When are we going live?"

Found this in my Software Project Management textbook. Seems right.

The 5 stages of project management:

1 - the Mission:
Receive a project

2 - the Vision:
Over confidence and optimistic time estimation. Tell people how quick you can finish it.

3 - the Climax:
Adding unnecessary features. Try to be innovative. Think different. Feeling like a Rockstar.

4 - the Bargain:
Does not aware deadline is not far away. Reverse all unnecessary or impractical moomshot features. A bit stressed

5 - the Embarrassment:
Unpredicted obstacles or incidents. Late delivery or fail. Feel like a loser.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Signed up on Trello, got everything set up there and everyone has an account.

But my dear PM, why the hell are you still sending out a screenshot of your bloody spreadsheet bug tracker and ask everyone for updates????

Fellow devRanters how do I get (force) my PM to use a project management system instead of silly tables?

I'm a backend (Java, Kotlin) developer and I mainly design & develop services and Android apps which consume these services.

My team in my current organization (I've been working here since past 2 years) just got merged with another team.

And now the new boss wants me to fix some fuck ups in their project which is written in C#, with some WCF and other stuff.

As this stuff is completely new for me, I asked for some time to get familiar with the environment. But the answer was a big NO.

As a result, "I've started looking out for a new job"
😡😠

Fuckin management screws up everything!

In school we had to create a project using Java and SQL we created a library management software.

In India a teacher from other school comes to check your projects and allot marks. (They just take a viva and give a marks)

Out of the whole class he asked me to present my project (they usually don't look at it ) and he checked each and every file asked a lot of questions.

Viva went on for 45 mins (usually 10-15 mins) and when the whole class is looking at you like what did they make.

Yeah that made me feel like a badass dev.

My project management skills in action.

Words of wisdom

Project Manager comments on all my on-going tickets "any updates?"

And the project manager gets awarded "most productive"

While the tickets I've been assigned can't be closed in just a day

smh

A very rudimentary bedroom project management system. Each note is a different section of the program I'm working on.

I do this at night to make extra money, so it's not exactly the best system. It works though.

Have a visual representation of progress somehow motivates me.

I am actually a bit angry that there is no fucking thing to rant about at my new work - no dumb clients, no dumb project managers (I am doing project management with the boss and the company is somewhat startupish) and the project is interesting as well.

So, I recently picked up this book called "The Phoenix Project". I picked it up as I thought it was a project management text book. Turns out its a novel on how this Auto parts company's IT department broke down its silos and embraced DevOps. It's even framed as a thriller - the stakes always get higher! Extremely Exciting!

My Wife, kids and I listen to the audiobook as we drive and do errands every day. My Wife has gotten a very very frank understanding of what my job is like as a result.

I encourage everyone here to get a copy of the book.

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

36.63% of the respondents said they’re not planning to use any new programming languages in the coming 12 months.

But, 18.15% of them said they’re planning to use Python, while 16.83% said they’re planning to use Go, followed by JavaScript with 16.17%.

What about the tools?

Honestly, this was the hardest part of the report since it required very thorough data cleaning, and it turns out developer teams use a wide variety of tools, especially when it comes to testing and project management.

moving to cli only because desktop contains distracshiunns.

can someone answer me some questions?

1) where to download a lot of music (hardstyle)
2) how to do project management in vim?
3) how to tmux in multiscreen?
4) how to use github in cli well (ik how it works, but maybe there are some things that are good to knew)
5) is lynx REALLY my only option for browsing the web?

hope my questions can help some fellow ranters, thanks in advance for answering

SCRUM master asked me to teach him jira! 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

Accurate?

"Adding more people to a late software project will make it later." - Fred Brooks

!rant

Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:

"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"

So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.

On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!

We use scrum in our company.
And with scrum I mean we don't have a scrum master, our senior developer is the project owner, we estimate in hours and the estimate is binding, so you are not allowed to work longer on a task than the estimate.

So yeah.. "scrum"

When your PM can't PM their way out of a paper sack

Yesterday, I and my team built a good hospital management system for Trauma centers containing two apps and two websites.So that the system should contain transparency. But unfortunately, we didn't made a place in top 3 but it was a great experience to build this project with my team.

Starting new game development project.

Coder:" ok guys, I think that this time we have to focus much more on sprints management and documentation"

Designer:"Ye, this time we should use better scrum software, like jira or youtrack"

Artist:"but Asana has the unicorns when you complete a task"

Ok , so True is just !False

As a freelancing student my customer (CEO) asked to build a project management system.
I was like: we can smoothly get to know each other by setting up a simple .xlsm
ENGAGE™.gif

On 2/3 of project, shareholder comes in: make it like office. I want the same as ms office but built by you.

Me: sure. Why not. I'll a have a little chat with friends being experts on this.
FuckThisRage.webm

Who does he think he is. What does he believe one single human is capable of. What a jerkTard

Forced a high expense allowance and gave them some gibberish copy pasta, sealed .xlsm containing 3 languages all but macro

#peaceout

12 years in the industry. For significant part of that time, I've juggled leadership roles, project management, customer facing role, testing, hardware debugging, marketing .......
Oh, I also code.
My designation is still a software engineer.

Code freeze is today but what's this in my inbox an updated spec which needs me to redo everything from scratch again.

Kindly go fuck yourself.

Update on ConsoleWidgets project:

Unit system is done, and much improved from the last project. Included a new class which mimics the CSS "calc()" - allowing you to mix pixel (Or, in console terms, cell) values and percentage values. The screenshot shows 100% - 10c

Color system in functional! In the screenshot you see the aforementioned widget colored devRant light purple! Not to mention retaining the original transparent color for the window background.

Next up: style class (maybe) and layout management classes (for sure!)

Q: How many management consultants does it take to finish a project specification?
A: Infinite. And this is not even funny.

Rant about myself. When in a group situation where there is a very dominant coworker either related to skill or status with management. I always start out contributing ideas but after realizing my ideas are dumb or just dismissed I stop trying and just fade into the background and do what I am told. I also become detached from the project and start putting my energy into learning or side projects. I feel like such a wimp and pushover. I get told I don't have passion.

The most recent that comes to my mind is from one of my previous projects. Our team is already overloaded and frustrated​ working for this garbage client. One fine day, out of the blue, the client once again revises the list of go-live critical development objects.

Our project manager takes this issue up with the client, and then with our management when the client does not listen.

The response he gets from our management is along the lines of, "But it's just forty development objects. Why are you complaining? Just get it done."

Needless to say, the motivation levels of the entire team went on a downward spiral soon after.

Learn project management. It'll help you enormously in your career

Code less.

Better project management.

Learn proper unit testing.

!rant

Just started an internship at a well put-together startup and ended up being in charge of project management as well. Having so much fun learning to be more independent and be a likeable manager. The tech stack in the tag.

My project manager one time called me while I was waiting in the bank. He told me that the latest changes in the project I was working on were not deployed to production and they were having a meeting to demo those changes to the client later that day.

I had my laptop with me but it wasn't charged. I asked the security guys if I could use the socket used to power up the cleaning/sweeping machines and they didn't mind.

So it was me sitting on the floor in the bank hall using a side socket to power up my laptop holding my cellphone so I can use the hotspot and get internet connection deploying yesterday's changes to a production server.

Eventually, the client didn't attend the meeting that day!

When company assigned me, an internship student, as only developer for a project that needs data mining on connected hives, back-end alert management, front-end difficult animation management with Microsoft technologies when I was learning C#

First course of "Software Engineering", it is full of project management ...
I'm so disappointed ...

So now Github has their project feature and Bitbucket has integrated Trello [beta].

Any of you guys using those features?

How do you handle your ToDos/tasks?

Picture a small product team, the dev side of it has 1 tech lead, 1 recently promoted senior dev, 1 junior dev.

1 - Offer your tech lead a severance package
2 - Hire a mid-level and a junior dev
3 - Give the product lead role to someone in their mid-20s that has no tech or project management background
4 - ???

The next 6 months are going to be interesting ones...

Sales was about to close what I thought was supposed to be a basic WordPress project with a pretty steep delivery time (two weeks). I thought to myself: "well, ok. It's going to be rough for us to fit it into our existing schedule, but I guess the budget (unusually high) compensates." After I say OK, I find out that they were actually about to sign a FE application that takes data from various document management applications. I lost my shit. I hope there's a special place in hell for sales reps that don't get the specs before accepting projects.

#usr/bin/rant

I'm working on this super fun project in which we can combine the newest technologies, and some not so new but fun to use, we are doing it with docker, ASP.Net core, Angular2, and suddenly the system maintenance guy from the client sends us an email like:

- Just wondering which content management system are you going to use currently we are using WordPress, Orange and Django which ease a lot adding new features and sections

So the PM and me are frustrated and scared that we are going to be forced to use something awful just to please this guy.

Project managers who distribute a task instruction like "add button on page x" into 20 ticket comments (each minimum 1000 chars), 1 pdf from the client, 2 unrelated tl;dr confluence pages, 3 lengthy bullshit management emails (at least 5 people in cc) and end up sending chat messages every hour...

Currently working on app that is about 10 years old at work. Here’s how today has gone:

Can’t run application locally because the process management engine doesn’t allow access locally, can’t access in development because process management engine doesn’t work here either, can run app in test but waiting on special server access to get the logs.

Make the request to security to access the server - they decline it telling me that the form I submitted is outdated and to submit a new one. Requires three approvals, am still waiting on them.

Every time I make a change and want to test, I have to commit the changes, wait for them to build. Release the changes, build the release project and then deploy it in bamboo.

I can’t wait for my new job to start.

Overheard: "We have no time to be agile, we just need to get it done as soon as possible"

"Don't go too crazy with the design, this is just quick to get it out, this is a one time deal" - management

Half a year later...

"Well if you would properly design components up front, it wouldn't be so hard to extend the code" - management

Well if there were some sort of god forsaken process in place, with assigned tasks, priorities, iterations, and conventions, maybe everything wouldn't be a last second shit show and there would actually be forward progress on a project instead of throwing shit over the wall and hoping everything lands in the correct places.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

We are forced to work on weekends because the management and the project manager loves to kiss the ass of our clients. I was even scolded by working from home.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

ITS NOT FUCKING FAIR THAT WE HAVE TO SUFFER AND SHOULDER THEIR INCOMPETENCE IN MANAGING THIS FUCKING PROJECT.

Damnit. God Damnit.

Management wants me to continue building an internal-use dashboard.
and you've guessed it, all functionality to be added will be discussed on-the-fly (so specs keep changing all the time...)...
So now I'm on a strike for this project until I get clear specs

It was 3 months project, but it takes 9... bad management and the client changed his requirements every weekend. I quit the job after it.

Best team experience?

Well, first I'd like to mention that after some more experience in the field since, I realize that this company had some pretty terrible management infrastructure...

Nonetheless, I think my best team experience had to have been during my first programming job because my project manager... WAS A FREAKING DEVELOPER! It wasn't his job to be a developer obviously, but we were a small team essentially developing waterfall style, and he had to pick up the slack now and then for certain issues. The man was a genius and everyone appreciated him because you could talk to him about anything dev related and he would get it. The rest of my team was also very chill too, so it was all in all just a fun experience, stressful as it may have been at times.

I have not since had such a diversified project manager 😟 but then again, not the PM's job to touch code...

Yes, thank you motherfucker. Please change the fucking specification again one fucking day before the deadline.

These project managers and clients are like little children who can't decide whether they want a lego set or a video game for christmas except little children don't blame santa for their own stupidity.

Guess what? I'm not santa fucking claus and can't do miracles in one day. It's on you little project manager children if we miss this deadline.

My university provides advanced education courses and you'll get certified if you pass them. I'm really interested but I don't have so much time, so which one should I pick?
List of courses I'm interested in:

SQL
IT-Security
Project Management
PHP

I'm curious about your suggestions ;)

So you have an organization that flirts with scrum and wants to be agile. You have non-crossfunctional teams who don't know what agile is. You have product owner who doesn't want to do backlog, but instead acts like project manager and asks for statuses and assigns tasks to peple. He wants the teams to find out what needs to be done and fill the backlog themselves - and then raport to him. You have business owers who noone knows who they are. You have project managers, who don't fit the whole scrum hierarchy. These project managers insist calling scrum masters "team leaders". Also these project managers think scrum is silly and don't want anything to do with it. And then you have higher program management that think this whole scum thing is better than sliced bread and everything is going just dandy!

Oh yeah, also highest organization management thinks that we are on the right track. We just need be more agile but less agile and work more efficiently whitout really saying, what the hell are we supposed to do.

Basically every day is like going to the zoo. Without the fun part.

Am I the only one who thinks studying these types of shit is useless?

- Pigs flying
- Rats singing opera
- Donald Tump not being a bigot
- Our remote office staff having a clue

... all things I have accepted that are impossible

Let's schedule our weekly sprint planning meeting for 10AM on Fridays. And let's chastise those who happen to be 5 minutes late (literally). It's the perfect plan, since everyone is normally expected to come to work between 10AM and 11AM. Makes. Total. Fucking. Sense.

Started using Trello to track project detail and overall whiteboard my project list. Made a list called "Top 5" and shared the board with my boss so her could keep track with me. After our first meeting using Trello, I walked out with 7 items in my top 5. Here's to hoping there visual aid will help him realize there's a problem.

Why python can't into proper dependency management?

I Node.js we use npm. Modules are downloaded per project and packaging is easy.

In Java we use maven/gradle. Never been so easy to build and download libraries and package your project.

But in Python? No, it's not easy. You have to use virtualenv first so pip/anaconda won't download globally, then you must write setyp.py in a million different ways. Packaging and distribution to clients? Good luck with that.

How do you deal with a boss that is not very intelligent, but fights you, your team, executive management and project stakeholders on critical system design decisions?

Everyone else is worn out, the project is long overdue and I'm running out of energy, myself. Do I just do what everyone else does and let him have his way and prepare myself to deal with the imminent problems ahead, or do I keep fighting for a well designed system that customers will enjoy using?

Management directed a 2-month project including 5 developers, 3 DBAs, plus Q&A to replace a SOAP service that retrieved data from a single table. End result, project lasted 9+ months, 5 spectacular failed 3:00AM deployments, and a WCF service that retrieved data from a single table. Justification? Management wanted to eliminate SOAP, because SOAP uses XML and XML is slow. Thank goodness no one opened up Fiddler to see how WCF communicates.

Ok, so we have the Spotify Agile Model now (tribes, squads, chapters, etc). I have seen it implemented in a few large companies, and they seem to be doing ok.

It's just... doesn't anyone worry about the product that came out of this great way of working?

Spotify is great as a service, but it has to have one of the worst usability/success ratios of any modern mobile / web app. You can almost feel the various squads doing their own thing, not thinking about the whole experience.

Doesn't the product count when considering using someone's way of working? Is the Spotify Agile Model the project management equivalent of Twitter's Bootstrap?

In my study program the is this last big course everyone is looking forward to because it combines everything we've learned so far. It's a group project where you build a middle-scale-ish application using ask kind of project management like scrum & co.

We had a good idea and am enthusiastic team.

Well, long story short: our assigned teacher was just bad. He barely listened to our proposal, had no fucking idea who we were at the second meeting and he FUCKING FELL ASLEEP in the last meeting. No feedback. No comments on our progress. Nothing. We could've work with the cleaning lady, she probably would've more feedback for us!

oldie but goodie

Got a task named: "Final Changes", made a wünderlist named: "Final Changes v1" just because if PMs thought me something is that the words coming from their mouth and the ones in dictionary have a completely different meaning..

Being forced to migrate an application written to to run on Solaris 9, which uses Sun ONE Webserver, Netscape LDAP Server and Cold fusion and migrate it to RHEL 7.3 ppc64le before the 3rd of January (I was only told about the project this morning), and I'm told I *have* to use the exact same technologies and versions. I'm on leave for Xmas from the 22 until the 5th of Jan. I know exactly where they can put their arbitrary management deadlines.

when your project manager is not from a technical background .. and major in business management.

PM: I need a brand new feature that we haven't had before and it has to have a framework backing it so that we can extend it to anywhere in the future. It also has to have X, Y, Z, it has to be able to tell the future, cure cancer, fly, and have a return on investment for us of 1000x. How long will that take?

Me (or any dev ever): Umm... well, that's kind of asking for the moon. The first few pieces will take as least 5 sprints. When do you need it by?

PM: Tomorrow. When can you have it?

Me: ......

Boss at the start of a new project: "We could hire an intern to gatter some data in an excel list... You can easily implement that in the application later - right? So can you get us a excel list to fill out? "

No... Just no...

You tell me what you wanna see and how you wanna interact with the application!

In the process we will figure out which data is necessary, I will build some tables in the database for that data and then, !!! not a second sooner !!! , I'll be able to give you an suitable excel list, which includes a complete list of columns for the necessary data in a form I can work with it.

It's not my job to know what data a application needs to make YOUR JOB easier! I'm not a magician! I just love programming stuff!

If you look at some of my rants ~2017.12.30 you can see that I f*** up a project's dependency management. After multiple days of failing to fix the issue, I ended up makeing a new project and starting over( with copy and paste, of course). And it works. To this day, I still don't know why It didn't work in the old project.

So I was told to look into a new project management tool to replace our home grown one that must be free, decided on visual studio team services because we all have msdn so it's free. We just got everything migrated and we've been using it very successfully for the past few months and it's honestly made task management so much easier.
Get back from vacation and my company just spent $100k on sales force agile accelerator... 😑 I don't understand how upper management works

A PM who suck-up to a creative technologist. He comes up with ideas while me, the programmer, have to figure how to get it done.

PM expects me to explain how things can or cannot be done. I spent whole day drawing diagrams explaining things, while the creative technologist makes demand after demand.

For me, the worst project manager is one who doesn't take care of their people.

N The worst creative technologist, is one who won't go do their own fucking research and expect the developers to do it.

Both fuckers are management roles. Go figure..

After a management meeting about the companies first e-commerce initiative which I proposed and protocol-typed with assistance from internal and 3rd party resources, I returned with my boss to her office feeling on cloud nine as everything had been accepted / approved and the project was green lit!!!

She turns to me and says “I’m going down to the local sex shop and buying the largest dildo, strap it on, and then they will listen to me too”... I just sat, staring at the floor ...

Queue the crickets...

Rolled out a new application I built almost entirely by myself 2 days ago... But my dev group is understaffed and has a project manager who is literally the most clueless person I have ever met, so as a result, we don't have a functional/useful dev/test/prod framework and no standards for how to deploy apps. So my past 2 days were comprised of fixing bugs in the live system that could probably have been caught if I had the time and resources to get everything thoroughly tested. It's stable now, but damn our management for being generally idiots. Our motto appears to be "Fuck it, we'll do it live"

We are 4 students doing a project for a company during our internship. Talked to the boss yesterday: "This will be great guys! I've already spoken to the management about using this project as reference for other upcoming project!" No. Pressure. At. All.

Emailed my PM a new project spec, the next morning he emails me back saying, to stop wasting time and get back to "real" work.

A few days later we had a Skype meeting with senior management and the PM who rejected the spec to go over that same spec document among other projects, everyone agrees it's a good idea including the PM :D

FML.

Management approve new project;
Start the project;
1 week before deadline project += 146 new features;
In dev mind: suicide || kill them all;

When you have to build a startup product using enterprise project management methodologies, and corporate practices.

R.I.P Agile

Am I the only one who is working on a different project every day? And they're not small projects. All medium sized e-commerce sites (Magento 1&2) with tons of custom made functionality.

Soooo counter productive...

For some reason our PM's think it's the most efficient way to do it this way, even though we said numerous times it causes the opposite result. Having to switch to a different project every day and constantly picking up where you left a week ago is so frustrating...

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

If you are the lead developer on a big project, and you want your developers to not hate everything about this project, for the love of God please at least have a build server (it doesn't even have to run tests) and make sure your constant screwing around with Maven doesn't break the build for everyone else.

@lazyDev reminded me of the time my bid for a project was rejected because I'm a white man. Never mind the fact that I have built my career around data management, visualisation and modelling and the only other competing bid was from someone who had experience in mobile development and little else. I checked up on the company and the project just now, and they've posted the project up again. I've made a bid just like I did before, only this time I've tripled my price. Let's see if they change their minds.

When you have to manage a team of n00bs.

When you and your team invested a lot of their weekend time into the project to meet the clients unrealistic deadline and get not even a simple "thank you" from management...

So, in a school project we use BaseCamp for project management.
When discussing about using it I was about to say that I know the guy who built it - but then I remembered he was just in the devRant podcast and I actually don't know him at all!

Project management 101:

1) For a new project, pretend it is similar to a project in currently in development
2) Proudly state that everything can be copied from the older project, so the schedule of the new can be tightened
3) Calculate the new schedule based on the "just copy and paste" effort.
4) Now the new project will be finished before the older project
5) Enjoy the applause from upper management for the successful project that hasn't even begun yet.

No, this does not belong in the joke category.

That's gonna be fun...

How do your companies do things? Does your development team have much autonomy from the non-technical side of the business?

I work in an agency and we have yet to actually get a proper workflow in place for things, its getting quite irritating.

So, we have a ticketing system in place and its not used anywhere near properly. In theory you could design a whole project in Jira and use that to handle all of your status updates, the PM's would just, you-know... read it.

In the morning we have "stand-ups" where for some reason we will have project/task briefings/long speeches lumped in before developers get onto talking about what they're working on and naturally if they have any blockers. Then at the end of this "stand-up" everybody has to write down what they just said onto post-it notes so the PM team have an idea of what everybody is working on that day.

So essentially, every developers day is micro-managed from the business side with exactly what they're working on.

Throughout the week there may be bug tickets that come in, these tickets are thrown into developers outlook calendars so they know which day to do them on.

For some reason nobody has considered that you could setup due-dates on tickets and setup Jira dashboards to make all of this stuff very straightforward to manage.

I think the problem is that since nobody actually works from Jira, they just get things thrown at them verbally or via calendar nobody would get into the habit of checking their dashboards on a morning.

Another annoying thing is getting tickets sent to you with estimates already made (not made by a developer either) or with project schedules laid out before any estimation has been done at all.

We also have a pretty insane ticket backlog due to PM's not actually looking at their own projects and attempting to prune or even review the backlog. There have actually been cases where client work totally drops off the radar from the PM side and just never gets finished.

Am I working in an utterly dysfunctional shop or is this kind of crap just par for the course?

- have a look at the project
- brake it down into smaller stories
- estimate the time
- multipy it with 1.5
- add 1-3 days of testing
- add 15% project management
- add a 2 days buffer

= be happy with being done in 2 weeks, present it in 4

Fuck start ups with large projects with no continous integration setup on git... and very many junior devs including the CTO(Not even a googling guru).... for fucks sake we cant deliver spaghettis as iF we are coding a restauRANT... fuck this shit load of a project....

I was doing an asset management project for the CTO of a small company in ASP.NET and the CTO decided to stick his crap smeared fingers into the development because he 'developed' a completely different AS/400 system which everyone complained was like having a dog smear it's balls all over your screen while taking a dump on your keyboard. Fucking idiot would have given me 2 weeks extra work with all the shit he broke if it wasn't for version control.

Whenever you feel the need to rant about your project manager, always remember you'd wish you had one if you reported directly to the CEO.

Rant

I was given a project to lead and develop with 2 other team members by the co-founder, I was told that I will need to deliver an initial demo within 30 days, 20 days in the project and I was told yesterday that they need a final release ready within the next 10 days !! Not just that but the co founder decided to assign one of my team members to another project!!!

I've worked today till 4am.

Guess who's working from home in the morning!

Our approach is to get a loose feel for what the client wants, lift some visuals from Theme Forest then spend the next few weeks persuading the client to use our crappy server rather than their preferred AWS solution. Then once the project is behind schedule we break the work down into disparate tasks each of which gets a single line brief from the PM (such as 'create admin' or 'do css'). These then get assigned to different devs with no consideration of their skillset. The PM is available for 10 mins every day to answer queries, the rest of the time our devs are expected to work autonomously. Meanwhile we'll tell the client that we're back on schedule and arrange a demo for an impossibly short deadline. We have the mantra ”dont worry about it” which the PM uses to quash any dev's concerns up until the day before the deadline at which point we'll swap some devs on to unrelated work whilst others concentrate on getting "just the pages the client wants to see looking right" (we have a policy of making it look like it works before it actually does.) Following the demo we will announce all the missing features we had forgotten about from the initial undocumented agreement and set the project aside whilst we service another client.

YES!! 3 days till deadline and I am in a meeting discussing core descisions that have not been made yt...

So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.

Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!

So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.

That was such a fun Friday afternoon.

Excel is not a project management tool!!!

It's amazing how quickly management can suck the fun out of what should have been a pretty exciting and fun project.

After a long day of project management and endless emails, I would go home and dig through books and online training programs on html and css. A few weeks later I really found that enjoyed the work.

A year later I took the leap, quit my job and went back to school. Great decision.

Me: We need to have a developer on our core product

*We fork our core product from a private repo for new projects

Management: No.

Me: But imma die 5years early from stress and anger overdose of fixing the same problems over and over again in every new project we do and still hit deadlines which didn't account for them when we could fix them once and maintain our core product

Management: everything is fine. Lalalalalala

Me: *wonder why every senior dev has left in last few years*

Where to start...
1) them initially expecting us to do 15+ custom websites at once while also doing the Project Management work (including all client communication) for all projects, for $33k a year....
2) Having to pull teeth to get a feeble raise
3) Rude clients

I joined a a new company .. the Technical team leader .. is coming from a lawyer background.. and feel threaten by new technology and insist on using old technology so he feel relevant !
The project manager has a background of business management which I understand but .....

It's been 3 days and am asking my self if I made the right choice by joining such company ...

Stayed up coding all night to make sure things worked nicely. An hour before I left work yesterday, received 5 other never spoken off tasks.

none of the communication went directly by me, I just had to hear out the nonsense, but did a complete integration half a year ago

managed to do 3,8 of those task after working out and finishing the first set. became 5am.
might be because I went mental and have synced up 2repo's with idem dito codebase to be up to date to eachother (don't ask me why this is setup this way, I don't get half of their logic, hence why it doesn't work until I silently patch stuff out)

overslept by an hour.. yay me.

inb4 being fired
(no time for a capitalisation and spellcheck on this rant either, 9.30am now, tired af)

I will never work on something interesting within a company, it's always going to be either making a site for donuts or some recommendation system type of capitalistic bullshit.

Maybe, I could become a PM and do category theory at work instead of drinking coffee at the balcony

I know why group work sucked in school. It was a missed opportunity to teach project management and accountability. We’re almost always left to sort it out ourselves.

Trying to manage and develop five massive projects does not leave much free time and does not do much for my sanity.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

"Could you send me the project specifications and requirements?"

*sends 3 edited screenshots*

Hey, first time poster :-)

Working alone on a C++ app that has to control a GUI, camera and electronics on the side... but between the test cases, switching between classes and helping colleagues on unrelated issues, I find it hard to keep track of what connects with what, what needs to be done, what IS done...

So, how do you guys and girls keep track of your projects ? Stuck with To-do lists for now ^^

I can't help but smirk when my company gets a project that requires knowledge on something I warned them about over half a year ago. This happens regularly but every time we have to get that knowledge during the project, costing the customer additional money.

When will management learn that training your employees will benefit them :(

One week ago I've made a work plane to divide features development day by day, obviously procrastinating
This morning I realized the project release was today
I made an entire mobile app with a plethora of features without bugs in an afternoon.
Never worked so hard in a so limited time without problems.
Loved it.

Worse than an incompetent colleague who can't help me fix technical issues is a demanding, confusing, beat around the bush, boss as a project director.

Project Manager is away and Project Director steps in to take over. Starts barking orders and when I try to actively contribute positively to get the project going, he stops at me, barks that I was asking the wrong questions or doing the wrong tasks. This isn't my first project rodeo. I have had plenty of project experience under my belt but he belittles me. I know what needs done and get the project done and over with.

I guess I know what I'll do. Avoid proactively contribute and just hang back until I get orders on what to do. Because fuck progress. Or until I hear more from my original Project Manager.

First meeting of new project. My management partner:

"First of all, we sell it"

🙄

When the PM doesn't stop the customer from requesting a bad feature (in terms of user experience / design)

Best project management tool for webdev, for small/medium sized teams (5-10 people) and projects? Must include quick project setup with checklist templates.

Today, for a feature that doesn't need to be released at all, we had to choose between delivering 2 months later so we could pay the technical debt, or release on time with even more technical debt, and 96% sure this will kill the project.

Guess what?

Ever suggest improvements and get shot down at every turn? I was discussing automating our release process today and suggesting that instead of having to do everything manually and babysit the build, we should let Jenkins deal with releasing and the attitude was that we shouldn't even try because we'd spend more time maintaining the automation and wouldn't gain anything. Obviously I disagree, but it seems like I'm always coming up against shit like this.

Our requirements gathering is another point of contention; I think we could be way better at it if we invested more time talking to customers before a project starts but the attitude is to get straight into development and deal with that later.

I don't know why I even bother sometimes...

Don't worry yourself about it.
Your mounting sense of doom does not cause us any concern.

When one PM hands you off to another PM and neither has any idea about the project I am supposed to be working on...nor do I have access to the Trello boards, the repos, etc...

Happy Monday 🤦‍♂️

First time coding in a team for a larger project. Any tips on how to handle this? We're six programmers and its really hard for us to work together :/
It's my first rant. I love the community :D

One of my other dev colleagues believe that just because I don't want to work in a particular project and I don't like the decision of management, I'm being negative.
Where the fuck is Logic?

Hey management,
Please assign me that Node.js project that I'll get to code from scratch and I'm stoked about.
Regards,
Frustrated developer.

Finally leaving the """innovation lab""" where I worked and was a fucking garbage.
I can now expect a correct project management and a real task list

Identifying when to start a project over because it has gotten out of hand with workarounds and memory management issues.

How is it to work on an open source project?
Can anybody add something and who checks if the added feature works correctly?

Here we go, the winter is happening #BecauseItsAlreadyComing

The Fcuking Stereotype of MDFK Projects Deadline was not achieve, everybody starts throwing blame words, the management had their heads burned, aaannd... This is nearly 11pm I'm enjoying my chicken Satay and I don't give a fcuking damn with this situation. #MyCodeMyAdventure

lets have a junkie dinner my fellow devRanters! 😂

Had our 3rd party vendor finally check their code into our github. Great.

Checking the recent commits, they only add changed .CSS files. Hmm..odd.

We use less so why did they update the compiled CSS file...? Did they forget to checkin the Less changes...?

Nope. Backend sitecore developer updated the bundled, minified CSS files and checked those in along with the fucking node_modules folder.

Didn't even know what LESS is.

The vendors PM swears the frontend developer did the changes. I don't know what's worse.

How accurate is this guys ? I came across this reading comments on youtube. The moral of Star Wars rogue one ^^ and project management at its finest...