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.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

I introduced git with hope that our team gets better

I introduced trello in hope that our team get better

I introduced gitlab in hope our team gets better

I introduced scrum in hope our team gets better

I'm losing hope...

Is this the code life
Another scrum meeting
Caught in the the Node life
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the screens and see..
I'm just a dev boy
Doing some debugging
Because there's warnings here
Errors there
Segment faults
Everywhere
Anytime you distract
Takes another hour from me
From me

*piano starts

Mama. Just committed a bug
Merge the branch to production
Did it fast for milestones
Mama. The repo has just begun
But now they going to throw the stack away.
Mama. U u u uu
Didn't mean to code in LAMP
But it's the only stack i know how to setup
In Ubuntu. Without docker
I really don't get vagrant

*piano

It's too late
My team is done
Some dev is working in Nepal
A UX dev. Now what is that?
Goodbye everybody
I've got to go
Gotta leave this lame meeting
And face the truth
Oh nooooo. I i interns
(they have questions)
I want to debug
I don't want to stay till 3 in the morning

*epic guitar

I see a litlle dev over there
Let's code review, let's code review
Did he do the last commit?
Coding in the white board
Very very frightening me
That's bug(that's a bug)
That's a bug (that's a bug)
What the f*ck did you do that?
Magnificcooooooo

I was just coding and nobody liked it
He was coding and nobody liked it, spare his some time to do his debugging

Easy man. Here go. Will you let me code?
A meeting. No,we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
We will not let you code
Never never let you go
Never let you code, oh
No no no no no no no
Oh mama mia, mama mia ( dude, you've gotta let me code)
Screw you guys, I'm gonna code and commit. Commit. Comiiiiitt!

*epic guitar

So you think you can review me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can dump me and erase my branch?
Oh baby, cant do this to me baby
I've just have to log out.
I've just have to log outta here

*epic guitar solo

Nothing really matters
The users will not care
Nothing really matters
To them

Any way this code blows

My boss isn't really a developer. He isn't part of the development team and doesn't know any technical details about the product. He doesn't want to code, "too much effort", he just wants to boss. But he wrote some php in the early 2000's and is really, really proud of his codecademy html/css badge...

And that makes him dangerous.

Today I hear him talk from behind his laptop: "Right, we have this page for creating management groups, but we can't edit them yet. I can fix that!"

This task is literally on the current sprint, but he doesn't know that because he doesn't attend scrum meetings and ignores everything people say to him.

Me: This smells like probable cause, let's look with suspicion over his shoulder.

Boss:
"OK, right-click create.blade.php -> copy.
then right-click directory -> paste.
now just rename file to edit.blade.php!"

I start walking to the office kitchen.

Boss mumbling in the background:
"Now all I need to do is just copy the whole method in the controller, change the post url in the form, and modify the <h4> at the top, so it says edit instead of create."

Boss, looking at me now:
"This is so easy... creating and editing is almost the same thing, you can just copy paste all the code from one template to the other! I don't understand what you developers are always complaining about!"

Me: *Hands him a roll of paper towels*

Boss: "What is that for?"

Me: *points at code*

I work in a scrum team of 6 persons.
We have the same IP address and we get ads based on what everyone else was searching. Sometimes shit just gets akward

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

My boss asked me to do estimates for some tasks.

I did it.

He told me that was too much time.

I told him that those were the estimates taking into account the experience of the team.

He told me the estimates were independent of that.

I asked if an estimate, for the same tasks, for a team of interns should be the same as for a team of seniors.

"Of course they are the same!"

Funny thing is that he even says he supports scrum...

Can I only pick one?

I don't hate a lack of skill by itself. Incompetence, in my book, refers to a lack of skill combined with being in a position of responsibility.

The junior/intern in my team writes pretty bad code, but that is OK. He asks questions, I give pointers and bounce back his PRs ten times in a row, and he keeps fixing things without complaints.

My boss however... still writes PHP as if he's living in the 90s. He doesn't visit scrum meetings because he "isn't a developer". He thinks of a new feature while pooping, writes it without telling anyone, and throws it into production without making a PR.

My scrum team was discussing about how our workspaces are basically the size of a large coffin. Our scrum master then chimed in to try to calm everyone down and said they are much larger. Closer to the dimensions of a prison cell he says.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!

Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!

You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.

We're building some pyramids.

What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!

Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?

We require a giant pyramid.

For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.

The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.

Now go build already!

This happens nearly every sprint.

TEAM: So, are you happy with how we are going to make this feature?

Business: Yeah, we really need it! It's exactly list that! Quick build! 🏗

TEAM: You're sure.... remember what happened last time...

Business: yeah, yeah, yeah

TEAM: ☕️💻

one week later....

Business: Oh yeah, that thing, we changed our mind we don't want it can you do something else?

TEAM: ...

Business: Agile!!!!!!!!!

TEAM: 🤦‍♂️

Found out they all went on a 2 day course to learn SCRUM...

One of the dev in my team literally asked us (other student devs, professor, and a guy from the company we were working with) this question during a weekly scrum meeting:

"Who is this Jason you guys keep talking about? He never showed up to any of our meetings!".

A bit of context: we were 6 weeks (halfway) into our FINAL YEAR PROJECT for a bachelor in software engineering...

I thought at first he was joking...

You know scrum is working when the dev team are feeling that scrum isn't working because they have nothing to do because the product team can't keep up with the pace.

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

We used to use Trello for our team boards and was starting to transition to Gitlab's issues for better code integration...

I became aware that my boss was being "demanded" to have a better analytics of our team performance so I started digging more insightful issue/tasks software like YouTrack ( Jetbrains ) and Jira ( Atlasian ).

After 2 months of trial and learning I suggested we go with YouTrack.

"We" are now using it for about 6 months already and it is a fucking mess.

My peers have no clue how to scrum, even after my efforts to teach them and they even spent a fucking 3 days workshop about it on fucking Google (!?!?) without me ( there is a rant about it ).

My boss is a nice person but the dude lacks any trace of competence to manage anyone other than him.

I'm tired of babysitting a man that is 10 years older than me and has a car that costs almost 10x mine.

I'm two days back from vacation and I almost rage quited 5 times.

The names in the story have been changed to protect not the innocent but the very very stupid. So I set up test accounts for each team member in the new test environment for our project building the new web interface for our SaaS product. Each username had an underscore in it like john_smith. I told everyone the news in the morning scrum and got 2 requests for help an hour later from people saying they could not log in with their username johnunderscoresmith.

So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.

Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.

I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

Scrum Master: Let's estimate the task. Chose your estimations individually, then we will reveal at the same time and discuss
- variety of votes, ranging from 1 to 8
Product Owner: I don't agree, this should be a 1 or 2.
Dev Team Lead: Agreed, this is why I chose 2. Let's vote again.
- All votes now are 1s or 2s

Good fucking job 🤨

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

Boss: we follow scrum here
Me: yeah, tell that to those shitheads who call themselves "product managers" and throw whatever features they want at us at the middle of the sprint with a fixed deadline, not regarding the team capacity.

So I studied for a long time about scrum, convinced my boss, his boss and our team to consider it, everyone liked it but seems to don't understand it very well.

I organized meetings about it and everything...

This week the majority of our team will attend a Google event about scrum in another city.

Guess who is not going?

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

I manage a team of engineers.

Toxic Culture Post #2:

Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.

Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.

Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?

Me: No

Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.

Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.

My team has regular daily meetings they all call scrum. Meetings like 1+ hours. I wanna immolate myself in protest!

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

There was this uni project where the teacher gave us a project to work as a team (the entire class, 17 people). We were meant to use Scrum, and deliver the first release in 1 week.

Turns out no one except me did the work, and this went on in the upcoming sprints, even with me telling the teacher what was going on.

Then, one day, a girl (let's call her Rose) did a commit to git, and I thought that something as going to change...She committed and push a new line at the end of a file.

After 2 months, the project was done. I had done 4k+ lines of Java EE + Hibernate + JSP code (which was very difficult to me) and the grading came out. I got a 7... most of the rest of the class got an 8 or 9. They did nothing.

When questioned by me, teacher said (it was a group project...)

TL;DR: I did the work of 17 people in a university project, got the worst grade of them all.

The team of interns I'm working with are all off this week. I was given 2 skilled colleagues to cover for them. We had our first scrum today:

Boss: so what are you working on?
Me: I'm adding new feature 1 + 2.
Boss: and you?
Colleague: I am ... removing the shit

So the same guy who called Ninetails from Naruto a wolf is PM in this project with me

During scrum meeting:

PM: I read the project scope again and I realised there are scopes that we didn't get it. Each time I read the scope there's something new.

Me: *Sure, the scope is fucked with a long 8 feet dragon dildo to start with*

PM: Read the scope 5 times, cause we don't want to miss anything. If QA raises an issue regarding the modules which are in scope but you implemented it wrong then it won't be considered Change request and you have to do deliver it in time even work on weekends with no compensation.

Me: ...

PM: Now, go through the scope again today and we will hold a meeting after working hours (unpaid, but can be adjusted in monthly avg) and I will ask random questions.

Me: *tf*

PM: And anyone who won't be able to answer them will sit through the non-working hours and go through the scope again

Me: *YOU FUCKTARD, incompetence from your side or from business development team to create a simple understandable scope can't force us to sit through non-working hours.*

I already had an opinion about this guy from my previous rant, his improved a little in between but I guess not

Once upon a time we were normal remote professionals and our sprint meetings were characteristically professional, no more, no less.

Until.

one of our juniors, a Southern sports-bro type, suddenly started saying "SIR" to the scrum master in literally every sentence.

"Good morning sir". "Yes sir." "Thank you sir." "I can do that sir."

SOMEHOW this plague caught on to half of the male members of our team like we're in the military or something. We have ONE veteran and ZERO Indians and I can't think of a logical explanation for why we're suddenly sir-ing each other and people who aren't even high level executives.

Team leader sets up meeting for Monday morning on Sunday. In the scrum group Whatsapp. Ahhhh!

The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.

So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.

Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!

This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.

Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.

Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.

Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.

Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.

At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.

Worked for a team where Scrum was thrust on it to fix/cover up bad management decisions.

Manager is really enthusiastic (to impress his new boss) and gets a bunch of colored post-it sticky notes for stories and shit. Team spends a bunch of time carefully writing stories & etc and arranging said notes on a white board. Come in the next day and 90% of them fell off due to condensation, or such such.

Left the group, with the rest of the senior dev staff, after the "15 minute" standup expanded a minimum of 1 hour each day... and the SM carefully writing down everything everyone said.

A co-dev gave me some career advice - "when the pilots are drunk, it's time to get off the plane."

So, 9months ago my scrum master came to me and asked me to spearhead a "little" API... 2months work, no worries... I started the analysis and quickly discovered that that estimation was grossly understimated...

I convinced them that it was not 3 months but 4. I alerted to the design mistakes that were made, I pushed changes and made sure the entire project worked, was stable and the best it could be... 4 months passed, target proposition donne... Several change requests since then and we have been implementing braindead CR after CR for 5 months... Most CRs came from design issued I raised but we're ignored at the time just to come back and bite them on the ass...

Horrible design, bad documentation, amateur requirements analysis... However, delivered successfully with great acceptance...

What was my reward? They rearranged my team, removing virtually every good performer.

Never did I receive a "good work" or a "thank you"... I don't want one, I am just doing my job... However can you please not fuck me in the ass!? I now have 2 projects to spearhead at the same time and virtually no team... I can only handle so much!!!

Some good news? Ok, just announced I'm the project owner of a new project, that we will take advantage and make a 2 in one.... Great! Some more work for my lap! Thank you for the workload raise!... Ok, timewise? One month! And I still don't if that includes implementation....

TL DR; did my job, got fucked with more work...

Sorry for the vent, just wandering if I should try and not do my job...

​I'm a junior dev in a scrum team with two senior devs: one actual senior and one average dev that's just been around for a long time. At stand up meeting, that average senior lists helping me as one of his task Every Single Day. 9 out of 10 times when I ask him a question we end up asking the senior senior together.

Im getting tired of this fucking scrum team.

First of all let me introduce our backend team which takes 3 weeks to add one fucking column to database and in the end turns out they fucked up RabbitMQ RPC implementation so the column is not syncing with our app at all so now we have to wait 2 extra weeks until that will be working. Best part is that backend fucker who fucked up doesnt even feel like hes blocking a feature and would rather sit for extra few days and do nothing until he gets reassigned his pile of shit back to him than clean up his own shit.

Then we have business analytic who doesnt know how to define tasks properly so I have to record each grooming meeting so I would know what to fucking implement because he doesnt even bother to take proper notes. Which results in not fully defined tasks, which results in unexpected behaviours and MR's stuck in limbo for weeks.

Also lets not forget QA guy who doesnt even bother writing scenarios, I as an app dev have to write them myself just to be sure that fucker will test everything thoroughly.

Then we have fucking devs from consultancy agency who apparently have 6 years of experience (I have barely 2) and these fuckers are spamming me daily with the most basic questions. After each grooming they rush to assign themselves tasks which are not even defined properly yet and not even in this sprint, but fuckers are lazy so thy want to reserve easier tasks for themselves. Pathetic.

At least I have a decent senior on my team, but sometimes he patronizes me so much that I start asking me what I am doing in this team.

Fuck this shit, I asked for a 43% raise and if Im not getting it in 2-3 weeks im outta here. Fuckers.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

I just met the human version of the zootopia sloth an he is part of my team now... My colleague and i just sit in every daily scrum call and realize we totally work at a way faster pace than him. It is so annoying.

How bad it feels when it work in a place where Agile and DevOps are mostly abused buzzwords.

Forced doing "scrum" with:
- half of the team providing endless daily reports instead of focusing on the 3 questions
- a scrum master that is barely reachable
- a product owner that would not even make a decision
- a sponsor that pushes us to go faster regardless of current technical debt (it's important to look good to other sponsors!)
- doing all possible scrum ceremonies with no value added
- not even estimating stories
- not even having accurate description in stories. Most of the time not even a description.
- half of the team not understanding agile and DevOps at all

Feels so good (not). Am I the one in that boat?? ⁉️

What's the point of doing scrum if implemented that badly?? 😠

Program manager who handles scrum of scrums asked our scrum master to slow down. Our velocity and quality is making other teams look bad...
The problem is, no one from other team wants to learn anything from us on automation/cicd. They are good even though manual.

Not sure what to do. Biz is happy with us...

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

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.

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

Scrum CSM course: it's good to accept that we can't be perfect.

Also CSM course (1): if it's not followed perfectly it's not scrum

Also CSM course (2): scrum won't work in your team unless the whole organization adopts it

CSM course provider after cert: $1k CSM cert isn't enough to practice Scrum responsibly

You remember my team with scrums that last more than hour? They just decided that it is not enough - we will have another, morning, scrum. I am looking for a new job.

I started working at my company a year ago.
Back then I was just graduating from sofware engineering degree.
The position was Junior Web Dev, But actually it is full stack developer.
When I joined I wanted salary X (because I "got offers"), which was a bit above what big companies like Intel gives to graduates back then.
The offered back 80% of it, which was a bit more than was most graduates got in startups.
I settled on their offer and we agreed that after a year I'll get the raise if I'll do good.

A year passed.
The team leader left for a bigger company, and I became the unofficial team leader (and was always the scrum master )
Bare in mind that there are two developers that are in the company for 2-3 years, yet I got the unofficial roll.

We had the talk, and my manager asked me straight away "under what salary would you start to search other jobs? We want to keep you here"
I said that under my initial X salary that we agreed a year ago.
He claimed to have forgotten that we agreed on 20% raise.
I answered that it's the least I ask, beneath it and I'll start looking for another job.

He replied that he'll do his best to make the owner give me that.

A week passed and I got no update....

What should I do in your opinion?

My daily scrum, the team I'm in doesn't care and just blows our 10min daily into a 1hour "talk about anything" meeting

Scrum Master? More like Scum Master.. The nutjob sends a calendar invite for daily stand up for 30 minutes which extends to 50 minutes.. 50 minutes for a team of 6 people ? Fuck off.

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

The panic when there are only two competent programmers in the scrum team, and PM says he is moving one to another team.

What's the best scrum team name that you've heard?

My favorite is "Colonel Panic" (Kernel panic)

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

So, I had to listen very badly in a scrum about my poor code quality. Just because I haven't used the latest version of the library in my gradle build file, I haven't used DTO in the response of few endpoints in the controller class instead I used entity,... Etc was the mistake.

I admit that I have a long way to improve myself and there is a lot to learn, but there should be a proper way to escalate the situation rather than publicly pointing out mistakes rudely.

He is a senior with 10+ years of experience who badly told me in the scrum and not only that whenever there is a change needed in my PR he takes the screenshot and puts it in our dev team group and shows the mistakes and gives the suggestions instead of writing comments on the github PR.

Not only that, if I inform in the daily updates that I took 2 hours for this and that task, he says it should be done in 20 to 30 minutes.

Upper management has given him a lot of respect because he is knowledgeable and knows the stuff but it doesn't mean he is entitled to behave like this and demoralise other juniors.

The matter is cool now but this incident happened to me a few months back and those days were really toxic for me at work.

How do you deal with team members who's not open to criticisms as a TL

Client : you are hired as a developer.

Me : we need more developers as there's more work and less time.

Client : Ok, here's another dev

(Meanwhile me doing my work...)

ON THE DAY OF DEMO :

Me : Here's the demo.

Client: it's incomplete, where's more work?

Me: that's the part of 2nd dev you hired before

Client : I don't care, I fucking need a work!

Me inside: (Why the fuck would the first dev becomes a task/team manager just because is the first one to join the project! Arrrgh!!! Hire a fucking scrum master to manage your fucking tasks/team, am just a fucking dev! )

So our scrum team just bought a collection of nerf guns. We were able to repel quite some disturbances from outside the team.

This is how Scrum works:

Three coworkers are in a Scrum Team. One of them is also the Product Owner and the Scrum Master... The PO decided this Monday that they need to add a new feature for the Tuesday night release, which is estimated at 80 hours. I told the other two in front of a manager that this is not scrum. Nobody gives a shit.

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

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!

Our agile scrum team has finally shattered into two parts.
On the one hand we have front-end guys.
On the other hand we have backend- /dev-ops guys.

The FE guys don't care about the BE guys business.
They don't join pairworking and only noticing things that went bad, when a Backend guy has caused it.
Goodbye fullstack dev-ops team...

I really dislike that arrogant basterds.

Frontend Hobo-Bitches...!

We have this bloke in our scrum team who never does shit. He always says that he spent the week studying technologies and what not. How ever looking at the time he has spent 'studying' he should be the scrum master by now...
Who else has a bloke like this in their team?

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.

I was hired to a working team that is full of experienced people who know how to code but half the team is awfull at solving problems, and all they do is blame each other... why cant they understand we are one team and rather work on solution for 30 minutes they spent deciding who fucked up...

!dev

Childhood trauma has lasting effects and it's our own responsibility to identify them and break our barriers.

I have 2 projects, both of them are stuck because 1. Dependant on other team and I am not able to fix the setup of their service even after seeking help from them; 2. My setup of Android Studio started throwing error out of no where when I am low on time for merging the code to mainline, we need to perform QA and without my build working we might not be able to test a use case.

I have scrum tomorrow, I feel scared to tell this to my stakeholders just because I think they will think it's my problem. Something wring with me. As a child my father blamed me for the mistakes I didn't have any control over, again and again. Whenever I feel awkward in any situation I think that he must have said that how big of a dumb I am. How I don't have any brains to do anything. Those things still come to me. That's why I am scared, people will BLAME me for this. But I have worked on my capacity to solve this. That's it.
That's all that matters. I have seeked help already, now I need to discuss this with the management and not feel scared.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Anyone else ever had a scrum master or a project manager that just drives them insane?

Like they bug you every hour asking "what's our eta?", "are you done yet?", etc.

And they turn everything into a 2 hour long meeting (including standup) where everyone on the team is required and then they wonder where all the budget went.

And you have to explain the same god damned thing to them over and over again at these meetings. I wish they could be just technical enough to understand.

[tl;dr at the bottom]
(Project Team Group Chat)
dev: @Desing team, i have a question, there's a required field missing in you design, can i go to your desktop to get an quick answer/explanation about that?
design team:....
dev: hello..?
PM: [writes a huge text to tell me that i can not interrupt them even if its a blocker and that we (dev team) shoul write them down and tell them only once a day in the scrum meeting]
dev: uuumm ok

-next day-
dev: so about that field, why did you...
Client: WHAT? There's a problem with the design!? oh boy, lets re-check every view right now with the whole team!
(it took like 2 hours, the field was missing just because they forgot that feature)
PM: okay, @DesingTeam, answer any questions from developers when they ask you...

tl;dr
we spent almost two hours with the client just because desing team didn't want to answer me a little question

Worst "hackathon" turned out to be the boss (scrum master type) and a Magento guy (super OCD) working on a tiny tiny adjustment to a email template. They didn't really do anything and expected me to just make it all way better with CSS alone. I built out a robust responsive email in a codepen for them. They acted like they couldn't trust me to be a part of the team because I wasn't contributing - but I wasn't even sure what was happening. Between gathering refreshments and patting themselves on the back... it was hard to see what they had done. The online presentation to the magento people was pretty funny to watch though. If you think you can't have a presentation about nothing - think again. Magento is totally fucked. The word 'hacking' is not really suited to describe 'programming websites/applications quickly' anyway. 'Ninja' and 'hack' should always be considered red flags. 'Magento' should be a triple red flag: Jerk-off Jesus-complex boss, self-centered out of touch programmers, crap product. Watch out!

The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"

Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."

If it was so great, why didn't you stay?

We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

Product owner and scrum master prioritized a not important user story. We are just new to the assigned team without proper turn over, KT, vague user story(one sentence) and no time to prepare our local environments. Then after sprint 1 the client wants a demo by next month but the PO and SM had prioritized the wrong user story so now they are pressuring the developers on finishing fast the other correct important user story. They mismanaged it and now they say the development was slow thus blaming us?! WTF. We hit the deadline of the first user story with unpaid overtimes.

The other PO was always asking us on how to fast track the development lol.

I'll tell them all their faults in the next meeting. As usual we are just high paid corporate slaves with golden hand cuffs trying to escape the rat race.

From perfectly working scrum team to... Don't know what it is now...
Long story short - our SM left company and our team have ongoing "reorganization", our tester leaving at the end of this month, probably we will be out of tester for next month...

I don't mean reorganization, it's normal thing, but... It looks like it's slowly collapsing under bad head decisions (one of them is the reason why our tester is leaving)... Multiple "side" projects / tasks for ppl in team and problems with delivering sprint tasks on time because of it, context switching etc.

I fucking like this project, it gives me much opportunities to learn new things and design new features - it's up to us how we will implement it. Client is satisfied with our work and we worked for their trust for long time. But if things will be going same way as now, we will probably lose it.

How do you think, is it worth to try stay with this project? Or should I update CV just in case?

I like our daily stand-ups, but our team only does it when our scrum master is present, if he takes a day off, no one cares about it
I think it's healthy for scrum teams to have that every day

What do you guys think? Are you also doing scrum? How bug is your team?

Started a new job at a big firm (previously came from a startup). Both do "scrum". Still have my mind blown because at the new job, we have people join the standup of which NOBODY in the team knows what their role is on the product...
Does this happen often in big corporates?

Yesterday was the last day at my job.
We had a nice review party (the team pushing back to Scrum)
After it they have said some heartworming words, I cleaned my PC and left .

I was amazed to hear all the good words, as I felt the team think the opposite of me.

For example, I felt the team thinks I'm pushy, they said im modest.

Newbie Agile Team: "Hi Scrum Coach, we studied and implemented the Scrum methodology, but we are late as before and our software is buggy and shitty as ever, how is that?"

Agile Coach: "Scrum Methodology is easy to learn, but difficult to master!"

Newbie Agile Team (chorus): "Oh coach, Fuck yourself daily, with your coffe thermos, standing up and once per week retrospectively. If you'll come at the next review meeting, we will gangbang your ass in front of the stakeholders"

My boss was told that dev team cant do TDD because they are agile and following scrum. Did not know what to say.😏

So I go on a 10day holiday and when I come back I realise the scrum master commited a whole bunch of messy code straight to develop and didn’t even bother to run lint or build or test or anything. WHYYYYY??? Everything worked before that. Why is a scrum master who doesn’t have experience in front end allowed to touch my code and commit directly to master?

I know why. Because the whole team does it all the time and they just keep breaking and fixing things over one another and all commit directly to master.

Kill me pleaseeeeeee 😭😭😭

currently thinking about asking my boss if I can make a training / qualification for scrum master.

when PM is trying so hard to shove *his* scrum down our throats and at the same time tries to block any scrum-related criticism of team members that question his behavior as SM AND PO, then maybe convincing my boss to become the new SM and shoving ALL the scrum down the PMs throat is the only chance to have a (bit more) bearable working environment in this project.
in my opinion, he has too much power.

whatcha think? any SMs here, and do you like what you are doing?

customer claims they do scrum but they have quarterly planning events (2 full days) where we need to estimate and plan everything for the next 3 months.

Manager: "last quarter I calculated your velicoty so now you get 4 story points per sprint per developer"
Team: "But you started us off at just 5 per sprint that's too small"
Manager: "Ok but if you only did 4 why do you now want 20"
Team: "Because it's arbitrary and we say we want to"
Manager: "1 story point is 1 day"
Team: "story points aren't time"
Manager: "4 story points is 1 sprint"
Team: "but a sprint is 10 days"
Manager: "the junior dev can do 4 story points per sprint and the senior dev can do 4 story points per sprint"
Team: ...

Java Dev: "Does Josh's team own this java service?"
Scrum Master: "They did the dev work but we own it."
Java Dev:

Scrum master sends a team wide mail and Apple Mail thinks it’s from a mailing list. Ummm.. wut? How come? What’s the algorithm to deduce whether a mail is from a mailing list or not?

So my team got this new clueless "Delivery manager" who doesn't know ANYTHING ABOUT AGILE!
Her favourite timepass ? To eat development team's time asking stupid questions just to make her presence felt. And she does that by visiting each developer personally. MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY !
Why can't you leave the team and let them do some actual work??😑

She would join our scrum meetings to ask questions like "what are story points again?", "How do we calculate team velocity?"
Dear miss Clueless: It's not cool to be dumb! It's cool to take up an online agile crash course if you insist to contribute.

The other day, she suggested a QA guy to "test properly" with a smirk!
I mean seriously ? Was that actually necessary to tell them? This team was working just perfect without you. How about you look before you leap?
I try being nice to her but at times it's just too much to take.

*Email chain forwarded by support team to our dev team*
Hi,
Please assist our customer. He is unable to reset his password!

*Went through the emails turned out that customer is asking for password reset request for legacy website for which we don't work at all*

Scrum master sending another reply to look into the matter on High priority.

We again double checked for the customer but he is not registered on the new website.

Apparently, both scrum master and support team and entire company is aware that our team is not working for legacy website.
But No one reads the email properly and keep forwarding to dev team disturbing the entire team.

Some times things like this are done by product manager and her associate, but they keep replying to each other on unnecessary things till they come to conclusion and scrum master try hard to keep up with them with his own agile disciplines.

I'm at this magnificent company, working scrum, doing continuous integration which is really very cool. But although the features we develop are really nice it is sooooooo boring.

One of our team members emphasized that we should not pick up new stories if we haven't finished previous stories yet. I agree to some extent but think it is ok to pick up new stories if you have nothing to do. But we may not.

So, here I am now. Literally waiting for the day to pass. This sucks sooooo much!

I'm a hard worker and perform at my best under pressure with many things to do. Now, I just deployed one tiny little story today. I can do much much more. I feel so useless and cannot believe that my client pays so much just for me being at the office. And occasionally clicking a button and writing a line of code. This is so fucked up.

So my team (read: not the team at all) has decided that we are going to scrum. Someone ease tell me it's not as fucking tedious as it sounds. Sounds like it's just more meetings. Especially on this team which is actually already pretty agile. And the way our "certified scrum master" describes the retrospective sounds like it was designed by the type of shitlord PM that forces everyone to wear ugly t-shirts to the mandatory company barbecue for "team building". Please tell me he's just a terrible salesman.

Long story short I joined this company as a junior after 1.5 years of a break from development. Before that I worked for almost 3 years in the required stack. We agreed that if I do well after 3 months probation period I can ask for a raise.

It turned out that Im doing better than half of my team so 1 week before probation was about to end, I put in my raise request. Got nothing but strong feedback, even managed to burn myself out a couple times.

Now since the request 11 weeks passed. Our HQ which has the final say about the raise is overseas. Im getting excuses about summer: allegedly because of summer some people in the appproval chain have vacations so this process is taking a long time. This is the excuse they are giving to me.

Right now Im getting really pissed off and resentful because this drag is becoming unnacceptable. Also being in a new scrum team filled with total juniors complicates everything a lot. Im not having the best time here. But at the same time I dont have any savings actually am in debts and currenty barely am able to survive paycheck to paycheck to I cant just quit on the spot.

Had I known that they will drag this out that much, I would have applied to other places and presented them a counter offer. Or at least bluffed from the start in order to speed the raise proccess up.

Should I give ultimatum to my manager?

Im hesitant to do that because up until now we had a decent relationship and he seems like a nice guy so I dont want to rock the boat.

Or should I bluff about having a counter offer, so he would speed things up? But what happens if he asks me to forward him evidence of my received offer?

Every one of our sprint "planning" meetings.
We would sit and be told to estimate a bunch of defects we had never seen before. And then we wouldnt actually decide as a team what to commit to because it was assumed that we had to deliver everything in the backlog every sprint. This is what happens when you try to apply scrum to a maintenance team.

1) What is the size of your team?
2) What is the size of your company?
3a) Do you have one on ones with your manager, tech lead and/or scrum master (insert whatever position you have one on ones with if you have them)
3b) How often do you meet?

I started my career almost 20 years ago now.
I had the chance to work in really good environments, and with people trying to be performant. In my first company, the CTO pushed a lot the new/shiny XP method. Then I used the first iterations of Scrum as a Team Leader.
As I became a Service Manager, I found my love in kanban/lean (and my worst nightmare in sigma six).

I crashed startups created with friends and cashed out sometimes.

I also did a lot of "agile consulting", around productivity, product methods, organization (even got certified SaFe, the Agile framework that states" process over people").

When I came back to Europe, I just wanted to get back to the level I was in North America.

I have done a lot of mentoring, but now I lack the motivation (and time) to keep doing it, the way I did. So I stopped.

And now I have to answer the question "do I leave delivery?". Also, it seems that a lot of actual organizations are starting to put the product under " tech top management" ( companies I like at least).
So I wonder, what my next evolution should be...

Should I leave tech delivery to be fully Top-Management...
Do I want to structure/handle/organize the Product Teams...

Covid has given me time to start thinking a lot more about my situation... And it sucks...

I'll be starting a new job soon, and I'm sure there will be a chance to implement some form of process for the dev team to use...

To Scrum or to Kanban?

Alright, let's talk about Scrum Masters. Honestly, I just can't wrap my head around why they're even a thing. It's like someone decided to invent a job title for a role that's already covered by other folks on the team.

I mean, think about it. Who's usually sorting out the team's issues, making sure everyone's on the same page, and keeping the project on track? That's right, it's the project manager or the lead dev. They're already in the trenches, dealing with the nitty-gritty, so why do we need this extra layer?

And don't even get me started on this "servant-leader" nonsense. It's like they're trying to be the team's buddy, but they've got no real power to make things happen. It's like being a king without a crown. Who's going to respect that?

Plus, having a Scrum Master often just leads to more red tape. Instead of getting stuff done, we're stuck in endless meetings, talking about process this and methodology that. It's like we're more focused on how we work instead of actually working.

The best teams I've seen don't need a Scrum Master to babysit them. They need a real leader, someone who's not afraid to make the tough calls and who can give them the tools they need to kick ass and take names.

So, in a nutshell, I think Scrum Masters are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. It's high time we ditched this outdated role and got back to doing what we do best: building awesome stuff.

Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.

More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.

Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.

It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.

Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.

C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.

To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.

Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.

It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion.

I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.

Three aspects why this sucks:

1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.

2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.

3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.

I'm just tired.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

Screw Scrum, screw it very much. Is it a task or a story? Oh let's make it a story to track points. What are points, really? *20 minute grilling always follows* Well they're kind of a roundabout way of talking about time without talking about time, mkay? But last time 2 points took you a day, what gives now? What do you mean points are for internal use, but how will management plan ahead for next quarter? Ok, let's mix in all those new people, and propotionately bump the expectation for the sprint, mkay? Yeah, they did 34 points per sprint over there, we'll just add those in. Oh, and by the way, after the 4-day estimation session we had where everyone was seizuring, I scheduled us at 645 points for the coming quarter, mkay? Don't worry, I added 15% for the "unexpected dtuff" so you're safe. Fuck you scrum, scrum-fall, whatever you are. Lost a dev lead role once for being honest about it after a year with a team that loved me, and projects completed more or less on time. Been reconsidered for a dev lead role for being honest about it in another place. Somebody else peddle this kool-aid, this one prefers a walk-on role in the wall to a lead role in the cage.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

Guy blackmails the whole scrum team that he wants to work on a python user story, because he loves python and that's what he's good at.

Then in a week writes about a hundred lines of code, didn't hear about pep8 and complains about the speed of the code.

Used re.seach instead of re.match. In half an hour there is a 100x speed-up. He loves python.

Our team moved to scrum a while back. But everybody still does story point estimation by mentally assigning 1 story point for each day of work it would require. :/
On top of that, management compares the performance of two *different* scrum teams based on the story points they finish in a sprint. ://

Does anyone have experience on just "taking" the team organizer slot? My current team meetings are just nuts. A lot of ummms and awkward silences no structure and each runs at least 100% longer than the allotted time. No preparations are made before the meetings. The oldest team member has only been with the company like 1,5 year. I crave more organization

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

When the scrum team complains in the last three to four sprint retros that were sick of back to back meetings ... MAYBE STOP SCHEDULING BACK TO BACK MEETINGS. Would it kill you to just spread them out a bit?

I'm at that point where I want to lash out at our team for not finishing a sprint. I've been doing the scrum master/dev role for months now and each sprint is incomplete since we have started the agile way.

Most of my team members are seasoned senior devs and my team's downfall are caused by not acting as a team. I'm the youngest in the team and have been acting as a babysitter for them.

Well started on a support job about 1,5 years ago. Two days ago I had an interview about a new position in the same company, as a c# programmer. :)

I really hope I get it and I think I will. On Monday they will ask the rest of the crew what they think on the scrum meeting.

I'm just self taught on php so this will be fun. I hoped for this when a took the job, but I didn't think it would happen.

I have worked a lot with the development team the last year, with tests and I have also done some TSQL work so they all know some of my knowledge. But still I'm a little nervous.

So i have some SQL skills. and I ended up some shitty business reports .

My boss will to implement something she read on internet (scrum).

I recommended her to manage her expectations. IMHO After implementing scrum, no shit is gonna change and obviously I was ignored and treated as a negative thinking being

Do you guys think this could work? Since we're a 4 people team and each one of us have different and non related activities

Any and every HR induction I've ever been to.

Oohh, look at us, here are our working practices, we're so amazing, look how cool this company is, this famous person said nice things about us once, remember how important fire exits are, this guy is the boss, he's amazing, you're so lucky to be working here.

I don't give a crap, you've just wasted half my first day that I could have spent listening into scrum ceremonies, familiarising myself with the code, meeting my actual team, etc. - you know, doing stuff that's actually useful.

But nooo, Sharon and Dave from HR have to justify their jobs by filling everyone's morning with useless crap 🙄

Is there a team that works truly productive and happy via an agile (scrum) workflow?

Or does it always distill down to an excuse for a chaotic workflow?

My experience and cynic nature has let me to assume the latter.

(That being said, I never had a dedicated scrum master to work with. So that may be the first of many problems.)

So my team started creating an in-house wiki for all information about our products, methods, scrum, documentation etc. From the beginning we had settled on doing everything in English instead of native language just in case we get a foreign student intern or simply a foreign employee... And now it looks to me that nobody but my team leader and I care about it: half of the documents are either fully native (especially from other part of the team who work on a different project, they have probably never gotten the memo of language choice to start with) or the documents are in some weird-ass combination of English-native which is even worse imo.
I really don't understand why my own team doesn't adhere to the decision though: we're all at least reasonably educated and our country focuses heavily on using English as second language so that should be no big barrier. And why would you want inconsistent documents/code?!
And this is not the first time people don't stick to what is decided for things like formats and language... Getting a bit tired of it tbh...

Slowly I am strongly considering changing the company. Somehow our management is losing its focus on reality. On the one hand, the management doesn't care one bit about what problems we have, especially when we have issues with other teams, which makes it impossible to finish our (necessary) features. But when the management wants something, everything has to be completed immediately and preferably yesterday.
We work in our team (and in almost the entire development) according to Scrum, so we are organized in sprints. However, our CTO thinks that none of this matters and that the whole planning has to be thrown out just because he wants a small (absolutely stupid) feature.
And then, our supervisor thinks he has to force us to do things that are entirely irrelevant for the team. We wouldn't have any advantage and would just be the henchmen of others.
And then there's a neighboring team that refuses to make any progress and keeps blocking everything. But somehow it's management's favorite team and can simply (unofficially) decide about other teams.
Honestly, I'm pretty pissed off now, and I'm not in the mood for that crap anymore.

To give you some context, in the past year we have change managers 3 times. Obviously our process (we were trying to follow agile) has suffer the most with all these changes since it seems the managers that have been assigned to us are not really IT people.

We are using TFS (I know...) for our builds and for our scrum and kanban boards, only use developers and QA are really using the board and all the benefits that it provides and the managers are oblivious to what TFS is. I have tried offering them training and workshops but they just don't want to learn.

And now they want us to keep the requirement information on word documents and Excel instead. I'm not sure I can continue my battle against Word/Excel...

I understand they are valuable tools but... Is it really difficult to use a tool that was made specifically for that and it's as easy as filling some text fields and click a button? Why is it so hard to understand that if you want to know the status of a task is as simple as following a link where you can find all the related information?

I think I'm loosing it, even the other developer on my team is in support of using Word... of course the guy doesn't know agile and his cards on the board are shit making him work with QA all the time....

Feel like I'm alone here....

Just completed a 24 hour hackathon at my school in which the 'best software' winner purely had mock ups of yet another mobile app and had no proof of concept. Meanwhile my team developed a scaling platform online that adapts to groups of user's trends to create optimal results.

I guess I keep misreading the definition of 'software' in the dictionary each morning. (RULE #8.2 - Software Engineers shall read the definition of the following phrases each morning excluding Saturday: software, heap, ego, scrum, algorithm, the documentation of C)

Recently, our COO left the company and we got a new one. He is, for some reason, a freelancer which I find very odd as a C-level employee.

Anyway, fast forward 3 months and we the scrum master (or project manager), 60% of our dev team, one tech guy responsible for installations and our intern IT support department all got fired.

Now they gave me the decision for a raise, extra training (that they pay) but I have to find/figure out or an e-bike. Does anyone have some advice?

Every unholy, directly sent from hell, refinement-planning i ever had since dealing with scrum.

Refinement: Good
Plannings: Fine

But the juxtaposition of both kind of meetings...
... destroys nerves
... desintegrate teams
... destroys lifes

*shivers*

Am I the only one who feels like morning scrum meetings are a complete waste of time? At least in the way that my team does them. It's 30 minutes of "I did this thing yesterday, and I will continue to do that same thing today." All of this information can be sent in an email, but we insist on meeting every morning to say the same exact things.

For the past 3 weeks, the majority of the team has said the same exact things during scrum: "I continued to work on this big feature yesterday. Thank you." Like how does a detailed retelling of what this person did yesterday pertain to the rest of the team? It's just meeting for the sake of meeting, and talking for the sake of talking.

If you have this little technical issue that only pertains to work that this single person is doing, then meet with that person separately and discuss it. There's no reason to make everybody else sit and listen to information that will never be useful to them.

And most of the time, this scrum stems into spontaneous unplanned longer meetings afterwards. So suddenly this "quick" 30 minute scrum turns in 2-hours of meetings and a morning wasted on information that could've easily been discussed over email instead

Help. We're starting to feel the effects of unnecessary micromanagement.

We're a small startup. The kind with less than 10 devs spread across different domains. We've been fine with a Kanban approach as the velocity/flow of deliverables don't necessarily warrant a Scrum approach yet.

Our boss has been wanting to adopt Scrum-style sprints, even shoved and assumed that were doing these sprints and demanding Scrum-style reports (and meetings!!!) when they are, in reality,
1) unnecessary
2) a waste of time

Absolutely none of the team members want this. But our boss insists on having it. We like our boss, but lately things are getting out of control

What can we do to mitigate and prevent this?

Hi all,
I'm in this company for about 15 months. It's one of the big name company. I'm a senior dev here. In my team we follow agile development. In starting I was just working on my part mostly. Then my manager raised concern to me for not taking ownership and helping others.
I started doing things what I could do. Like code review, API discussion, design discussion etc..
Now, the thing is I usually get upset when people go with 'lazy' solutions because I feel bad design leads to maintenance overhead, and it happened to us in past. We had to spend weekends to make things work. So, I started making code review, design review strict.
Some people didn't like it. But my manager was supportive, or at least I think so.

Some days back manager took me in a one-o-one discussion and told me one of the colleague kinda complained against me.

Now, my manager is not involving me into design discussions and API discussions. There are some new features are coming and I am not informed. I get to know things only in scrum-updates.

Am I about to get fired? I'm not gonna lie, I'm so scared. I can't put down papers as I'm already into 4th company in 7 years.

This thought is just killing me. What should I do? I'm so alone.

Have you ever worked for an organization that is not specialized in software development because that is not their main line of business, however, their products are software applications?

If you are, then hi you and me are in the same boat. Currently I have a nice manager and I'm acting as dev lead the strange thing I have a peer that is supposed to be lead as well but I cannot define his position....

In theory he should be scrum master / resource manager which fails at both terribly.

I ended up implementing Agile in the team and deciding what goes and not into the sprint based on quality while this guy just try to squeeze stuff into the sprint, the more the better even with all kinds or problems...

Honestly I'm not sure why he is still in the team since it seems like he only drains the budget, doesn't understand a thing about the products he is working on and every single idea he has is horrible.

Every meeting I have with him I always ended up asking myself "How can somebody be that stupid?" The lack of technical knowledge and even common sense is over 9000 in this one...

It might sound bitter from my end but after two years of dealing with this stupidness of getting people in software development that have no idea what software development is and understand the intricacies of it just because they did an access database or are good at excel is nonsense.

I'm at the verge of quitting and the only thing that is keeping me here is my manager and the fact that the products I am working with are pretty interesting.

Sorry for the long rant but I had to get it out of my chest before it explodes and I directly call out this person.

Not looking for suggestions but if anybody want to chime in go ahead.

The previous company was working for, or scrum team was so in sync, complementary and top gun that we could finish each other phrases. Dream team.

Our Scrum gave us new buddies today. Everyone on the Team got one.

I know your code is great and that you learned about scrum a month ago. But I didn't know the scrum training had to say you don't assign yourself tasks, mark them as done and be surprised when other team members haven't done them, two minutes to five the day before a national holiday (yesterday).

of late my team has slipped in the rather irritating habit of not scheduling review meetings; instead they just announce during scrum that they'll have a review right after scrum. this just messes up the day. you go to scrum thinking 15-20 minutes, and boom you end up with 3 hours of back to back unscheduled meetings

Long one
So our newest team-mate has made a channel dedicated to make fun of or scrum master, then I send him a pm saying to cut out the childs play, and we need to act professional.
Then he tells me that our scrum master is okay with it, and really looks like he is!
SM said this making jokes about him brings the whole team together and makes us a better team!!
WTF...
Really WTF ... am I the bad guy for caring about my team??

My experience with SCRUM:

Everytime some say:
Lets try scrum.. couple weeks later dropping it.

Just use Jira instead, and meetings once a week.

I Never have seem (Official) Scrum working in a team for a long period.

What is the best way to work on a project with a team?, I mean, how to use git, runbots, scrum, kanbans, modeling, and the most important the deadline... D:

I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..

Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.

Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.

Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.

Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.

We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.

I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.

Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.

I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.

So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people.

Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.

My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome.

Estimates.. First, part of the team makes "high-level" estimates which are based on informal, incomplete, still-evolving specs and an unstable back-end. The project people report the estimates to the client and elevate the status of these inaccurate estimates to that of commitments.

Then, before the "sprint", we review our initial estimates *ahum commitments* in greater (technical) detail. Because there are still a lot of unknowns, we tend to estimate more buffer here (back-end is often not ready, always ping-pong between project people and dev-team about unclear specs, more work than originally expected, and often late modifications to the original spec).

When an estimate becomes more than 50% extra time at the "refinement", we are told: "sorry, we gotta do it in less" and when it doesn't work out, we're kindly asked to spend part of our weekend catching up at 100% pay rate (legally it's 150-200%).

FUCK THIS SHIT

*quotes used abundantly because these terms belong to "agile/scrum" terminology but we're only pretending

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

!rant

I just became scrum master for my dev team XD!

I started reading all the info I could find on the net about it but still want to ask you guys for any advise 😶

Kind of had my first SCRUM-meeting couple hours ago. I'm a student and have a internship at a company. It felt so dull since me and my two team-members stood there and listened to three others talking about their project that we have nothing to do with. Then we got to say what we made yesterday and so on. Hopefully this is all in educational purpose?

Team building exercises... Curious to hear your opinions....

They annoy the hell out of me personally and I can't see the value in them...

Have bonded way more with previous teams by simply working on a project together. No BS exercises, or even scrum for that matter, we just respected each other and that seemed to effortlessly let us make each other better at our work.

Getting ready for another day at work.

They seem to think that scrum is the perfect tool to micromanage their team.

Thanks guys for the creative ideas on how to get back on her, but I'm doing the responsible thing and I'll send them a nice email detailing why that's fucked up and what they need to change.

Adding important words like, "that behaviour is affecting team integrity" or "it demotivates people", "It is counter productive", "it diminishes team performance", "instills fear".

Maybe, or I'll stick to my work hours and wait for my contract termination notice. 🤣

Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.

We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.

I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.

Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).

So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus

So, while working on a story, I noticed something which the lead dev did that is now giving me problems.... and he's offline while in another building.
Ok, I'll just contact our PM to see how much is due today (visual happy path only or API call is needed too)...same state as lead dev.
Scrum master, the person who's in charge of contacting anyone... no flipping clue where she's at.

It's great being on such a small team!

I missed my scrum today. Missed the team meeting with VP, he asks everyone what are they working on, a good way to get in touch with peers.
Reason being, when I was sleeping the family started screaming in the morning for 2 hours they went on. I got little stressed and my eyes are still swollen.

Is it the valid reason not attending the meetings. I'm working for a promotion and 1 day in 2 weeks miss my scrum due to some reasons. What do you people think, should I stop struggling for promotion now and find another job?

Returning to tech after 3 years working with agile, training and coaching Scrum, Kaban and XP practices. Applying for team leadership positions. Advice?

Anyone else the scrum master for their team?

So I've been asked if I want to take the role of scrum master along with my job as developer.. I must say that I am quite interested in taking on that role and it's responsibilities, but I'm somewhat scared by the things I read on the internet (especially when combining it as dev on that same team).
Let's hope I don't become the bad guy in this story after some time by being an a-hole of a scrum master lol

My team lead wants all tickets reviewed but it takes them forever to review them. The 2 juniors (incl. me) have now 6 tickets in review each.

"Scrum master" (if we can call it that) assigns all tickets upon creation. There are currently no unassigned tickets left in the backlog that I can start with.

I am the only front end developer in my team, used to be 2, and there is 4 java backend dev. We are all Seniors, so you'd expect to be experienced. I like my code to be "nice" and I am using linting tools, rules, formatting etc... (I do JS mainly).

During a scrum review some of the java guys showed some code on the screen and that thing was a monstrosity for me! I could not look at some code like that, if I had to work with that I'd probably hang myself. Nothing was aligned, no consistency. So my question: you guys aren't using any guidelines to have cleaner code ? How do you make sure you all code the same ?

...

What are you taking about ? We use Eclipse, with default options, no tools no guidelines...

How does one get experience on working in teams if every project I've built has been solo because of a lack of developers from where I am from?

It's refreshing yet odd when you go from a team with loads of meetings (mostly stand-ups and of that Scrum stuff) to one with only 2 weekly meetings.

I don't want to answer my manager. Each SCRUM, each SPRINT retrospective is becoming so long. Everyone in my team works on different projects, it's no use listening to all that and wait for your turn and on top of that your manager bombards you with the questions that you really know the answers to but he always questions again like give me estimates, like if I haven't ever worked on something how am I supposed to give you the estimates.
My english is just lowering it's standard day by day, I try to think smarter words but no it is sucking bad.
I am not frustrated as I am learning how to see all this as a part of my learning. I am a good developer I know but I haven't worked on code for like 3 months, everything needs to be investigated, contacting the other teams etc. I am just thinking to close on the projects that I have right now and leave.
In 1:1s my manager said something else but in team meeting asked me to do something else.
I haven't coded in more than 2 months even before that it was at least 3 months gap. I want to take leave for a week and work on the code. But fuck it, open source is not allowed in my company. WTH WTH WTH!!!
I switched the company for growth and I definitely did not have any technical growth.

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

We are a remote team of two android developers for this startup. I have 3 years of experience and my protege has 1 year of experience.

One month a new guy with 10 years experience joined our team and hes working onsite. He's supposed to be scrum master and be good ad dividing and delegating tasks, but what he's doing past two weeks is appaling to me.

Basically we got a request for a new feature. He skipped discovery and planning steps, went straight to implementation and one week later showed us his implementation.

Note that at that moment my remote team was not informed about anything. He started reinventing a library to capture a picture and video, while there are tons of other well developed libraries out there.

What makes things more difficult is that his english sucks.

I don't understand what he's doing but now it seems that either he's playing office politics and is trying to stay ahead by not informing us so we would be forced to follow his implementation. Or maybe he is totally oblivious and don't have any sprint management experience, so he's just trying his best by working hard and trying to prove his own worth.

Eitherway it sucks that he is not able to communicate specifications from HQ to us, because even I did a better work with planning our sprints by communicating remotely.

So now I started asking him questions and turns out the guy doesn't even understand specification. He already half implemented the feature and can't tell us why we need it and why we are not using what we already have in the app. So now he's back to square one: doing discovery. It's fcking ridiculous.

How to deal with micromanagment?
I just lose it when the team leader checks on issues on a hourly base, And dont get me started on the scrum master who checks the sprint status twice a day.

I can't quit this work but I'm losing mind here.
H-O-W T-H-E F-U-C-K do i deal with this idiotism??

Small start-up story:

The company hired independent foreign devs. The tech lead developer has decided to leave (due to some disputes with the boss(es)). The rest of his team are subcontractors/other independent devs that are good friends with the lead dev. We also recently adopted a 'scrum' which they really dislike.

So I guess there is a small change we will have a back-end team in the near future.

I work in an agile environment and I act as scrum master. There is one team member I have been trying to get on the rails for two years now. Today she went off at standup and one other team member commented it was like listening to a diary entry. It’s true. I’ve been to agile open hours with this problem so many times- glad we are only in the office two days so I can mute myself and react. Anyone else have team members taking standup meetings hostage? I just want to scream !!!

Having some lazy scrum team members and it is getting out of hand. For the past 1 week or so we have one dev who's daily standup written report is: regression. In our test case summary I can't even find her name, which means she is not doing anything.

Same goes for two of our new QA's who joined like 2 months ago. We have like 20 ready for QA tickets pending, but QA is saying that they are doing regression. Yet when I check how many cases they actually covered, it's something that even I as a dev during my first weeks in the company would have completed in a halfday. Right now we have one senior QA guy who is doing all the heavy lifting and I want to change that.

Wondering how to politely call out their bs during standup? It's kinda annoying seeing them covering their lazyness with "regression" for two sprints in a row now :)

For those of you in college or university...

I'm taking on my first project as a part of a second year. In a team of 3 people total, we have to build an application for a client of our choosing. Whilst we don't exactly know who or what we are doing, does anyone have any advice?

I have a book on scrum mastery but I would like to ask the community for advice.

I'm having a weird time with my current project.There are many companies involved and we are several teams coordinating with each other. My team was initially very large, for various reasons we were divided into smaller groups and I must say that the transition has been catastrophic.

We are doing SCRUM…sort of. The customer assigns the tasks to be completed at the end of the sprint, the story points are given without full understanding of the implementation and the deadlines are tights. I always find myself rushing to the release day with code that isn't production-ready but since the customer requests it and there's no objection among my superiors (please note, i tell them the deadline is tight) I gotta rush to deliver.

The customer doesn't know what he wants, but if he does know the deadline is unreasonable, or if he has just an idea of what he wants he still demands it... somehow without specifying what kind of implementations is expecting.

The current senior project developer takes everything (any task) as an emergency, it's never possible to defer to the next sprint, it's quite demeaning.

And I'm here wondering if maybe I've missed something, if the project simply lacks method and coordination, if I have more responsibility than I think, if my project leadership is too absent but I know one thing, at the moment I'm in anxiety about the current sprint due date because there is a task that will take longer than expected.

Any advice?

Question about scrum in terms of developer/QA workflow. We have a problem in our team: basically when a dev submits an MR it needs to get 2 approvals from devs and then task is marked ready for qa. Now problem here is that qa takes 2-3 weeks to get to the task and when they do usually MR has merge conflicts and since QA are quite new-ish they have to wait for dev for conflicts to be resolved, ergo rendering the MR unable to be tested until dev resolves the conflicts.

Our teamlead proposes to solve this by forcing devs to rebase everyday (even if QA will get to working on the task 3-4 weeks later). Problem with that approach is that each conflict resolve removes approvals. So I had a situation where in 3 weeks I rebased like 15 times and 5 times I had resolve coflicts and because approvals were lost I had to annoy all devs and ask for reapprovals. And this is only with 1 MR. Now imagine all devs doing rebasing daily and spamming each other for reapprovals. Its not efficient.

Anyone could advice how to solve this issue?

Release team was recently disbanded, they handed off release management to the Dev scrum masters. The other day we had a weekly release for a product that uses a network service that is shared with other products. The devs didn’t know how to set up the build correctly. They had a purge setting on that removed the network service for products that weren’t being touched in the release. The end result was that the other products were inaccessible for an hour and a half! They eventually found their mistake, but we were lucky that it was outside of core business hours.

These devs need to learn how to work the build tools! Or maybe we should rethink getting rid of the release team.

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

Tl;dr any tips for new scrum team ? How to start with story points with people that dont know eachother?

More:
Its for our team project at uni ( 8 people 1 year). Yesterday we had our first meeting and the hardest part was asigning story points. Or asigning some benchmark value for story point.
Looking for some practicall tips since uni gives us all the theory we need. ( Does not mean I know all the theory :D )

I have to participate in this retarded conference for 2 days and then I will have to join this fucking summer gathering on my weekend and that will take whole day. Fuck this fucking corporate bullshit. Better give me a fucking raise or better yet start fucking managing this scrum team because half of devs are not pulling their fucking weight.

Fucking BA too lazy to update issues with new details after grooming so each time I pick a new task I either have to somehow remember what we discussed weeks ago or I have to spam you with questions so you would run around like chicken without head while gathering answers to questions that were already discussed because you are too lazy of a fuck to compile notes. And even that is not enough, my merged MR's apparently dont cover all the use cases because your'e too incompetent to even figure out how our app works and define properly the task.

And then theres supposedly a techlead dev whos not taking a ticket when theres 3 days left till end of the sprint and he goes: "But a task spillover will happen!!!". Yeah so I guess just sit on your ass and wait for new sprint so you could pick yet again another low hanging fruit task and marinate it for weeks.

Motherfucker I checked your MR's in the last 6 weeks you did 1 week worth of work. You are a techlead but your only dev colleague is asking us for help daily because you dont even help him Fucking lazy and incompetent bastard.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

I'd like to learn SCRUM/AGILE/JIRA or whatever management thingie is available out there that helps to manage projects in a team. anybody can share any link/blog/video? thanks

I started my first IT job nearly 2 years ago, and since then I have already had 4 different "project/scrum" managers for my team.

I don't know how I should feel about it

So we are 8 devs in our scrum team but 2 major refactors felll on my shoulders (initially they were supposed to be fairly simple tasks, but like that malcolm in the middle video 2 tasks became 10 tasks in the past month) and I have been working from 11 am till 4 am for the past 1 or 2 weeks. Just yesterday I worked until 7am. Slept only 4 hours... Trying to play it cool, since I asked for a raise 5 weeks ago and still waiting for answer.

I havent told anyone because partially its my own stubborness of wanting to learn things and not wanting to bother others with questions, but Im starting to loose it.

And all because my pushed initial features resulted in unexpected blockers so scrum team leaders had an all hands meeting and my newly appointed teamlead started shitting bricks.

Meanwhile all other devs pick a low hanging fruit tasks and sit around for 2-3 weeks while I have to do heavy lifting alone with some guidance from other devs.

We dont even have QA resources. We have 2 new hires who will be useful maybe after 3-4 months and we have 1 QA guy who judging by his output is working part time. Also same guy managed to take 2 weeks of vacation in the past 4 weeks.

So due to lack of QA and due to code reviews taking long time it takes over a week for code to be reviewed and tested and each time if a blocker happens I have like 2 or 3 days to rush until end of the sprint in order to fix the feature for upcoming release or I have to move tasks to another sprint and feel bad about spillover.

Imagine implementing something in 2 weeks, just to wait for another 1-2 weeks for changes to be reviewed/tested and now having to fix blockers. And then teamlead comes up to you with being surprises how come shipping of this is taking longer than 4-5 weeks? Dude, I did my fucking part in 1-2 weeks, its not my fault that other devs perform code reviews late and they dont even launch the app to test. Its not my fault that we have very limited QA resources and our only QA guy is not even testing out everything properly.

Seriously Im starting to fucking loose it. We are basically 8 devs in a team where 2 people are doing all the heavylifting.