This month is going pretty well so far..

New job: ☑️
Get out of FinTech: ☑️
New place: ☑️
Get rid of car #1: ☑️
Get rid of car #2: ☑️
Pay a shit lot of taxes: ☑️
Still have some money to on the side: ☑️
Book flight&car: ⬜️
Register in new country: ⬜️

And still 2 weeks to go.
Holidays are coming though..

I actually did a sticky label agile board for this 😄

It's sprint meeting day! Time to grab some coffee because it's going to be 5 hours of PMs ranting about tickets and progress. Yay!

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!

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

Been on a fairly large project for the past two months. Been getting more and more productive and confident with each sprint! Always informed that I’m doing fine. Left a four hour task in progress for a day or so while tending to a PR which had been pending for a week and a half and was currently under review. Removed from the project due to issues with velocity.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

Does anyone else find it strange that the stupidest people in the company are making all the decisions.

In order to be able to engineer software you have to understand everything that the product owner knows, the business analyst knows, the product manager knows + how to actually make the system both work in a reasonable time frame and be maintainable long-term.

But we're not the one making the decisions. The irony of it is something that I can't get beyond.

And when I do go out on a limb to point out a logical inconsistency to UX or product... They don't thank me for it they hate me for it and then 3 days later figure out that they should be doing it and quietly follow my suggestions.

Seriously is the goal here to create good software or to avoid stepping on everyone else's toes in the company who is overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

I think companies based on a hierarchy of non-technical people controlling technical people, in the creation of software products are a dying breed.

When it comes to creating software products everyone in the hierarchy should be technically minded.

I've seriously been trying to come up with an alternative perspective here.

The executives of the company are completely out of touch and the only thing which looks like progress to them in a sprint review is something visual on the front end.

The technical architect, the product owner and the product manager all seem to be engaged in keeping the executives happy and managing their expectations. By means of obscuring the truth.

Imagine how much more cost-effective building a software product would be if the executives were engineers themselves.

I'm keen to do an experiment and build a company comprised of engineers only.

Obviously they need to have insight into the other roles. But none of these other roles are as complex as implementation itself.

So why exactly are we the slaves of these well-meaning under thinkers?

Had a four hour retro/review yesterday. Plus a mini demo I had to put together. Three hour sprint planning session today.
And they still wanted me to go to some "company values" meeting tomorrow, aside from the weekly call I have to report progress. Fuck that shit.

I feel like I got nothing done this week. Monday and Tuesday were fine for the most part, but since it's been just complete idling.

I mean, I love my company, great coworkers, good management, and just all around great experience. But man, it gets frustrating when you lose so much development time... I wanted to sprinkle in some extra goodies for the next sprint, but it doesn't look like that's gonna happen.

I am currently on module has already the passed the sprint and current burnout chart is way far that my CTO will likely burn the chart and I my ass is burning as that module is required by other fellow developers.

Fucking Terraform examples and documentation.
I have been working on it for almost 2 weeks now finally made 80% progress and still 20% burn needed. Kind of deadlock.

I am not sure what to do. Just sit and watch my CTO burns over me. (Definately going to be remark in future engagement with HR)

Recently we've checked /sprint in HipChat to test batching of sprint status messages. For testing we wrote what first poped into our minds.

One Dev wrote /sprint We're on schedule
Another wrote /sprint Everything is broken, help

How different tests and first thoughts about progress sometimes can be?

3 days to sprint ending. A logic which was supposed to exist has not actually been implemented which halts my progress.

When I brought it up, was told to get that done too... Under my same story.. He goes on to say it is very simple.. I don't find it simple at all.. If this was properly planned, this would have been a 3-5 point story by itself..

Now with him calling it simple, feeling embarrassed to say its not simple to me... Caught in a dilemma and in my mind already making plans to burn weekend to get this done... I hate this..

I’ve been at this issue at work for four days now and no progress and I feel really bad because we have important stories to pick up and I feel I’m wasting my capacity like this because I haven’t fixed it. Basically, only in our QA environment (one before production) our services is not acknowledging duplicate events posted by Kafka, thus keeps reprocessing them. I’ve spent so long trying to diagnose the code, which is the same in all envs currently, seeing how this suddenly occurred, restarted things, went through complications of using different tools, asked for help from others a lot but IVE gotten NOWHERE. Idr wanna say to my team that I should prioritise other things because we have deadlines but I feel this issue is important to fix but I just can’t figure out how. Now I’m worried this whole sprint will go without me doing anything and then fingers pointed at me later

Today before leaving, the QA said she found problems in 3 issues I've been working on, until now everything was ok. Tomorrow is the closing of the Sprint but I can't present this progress because it's not completed...
I know the QA is doing her job but why now?
Hopefully I'll fix it tomorrow before the meeting

Every day, the SM likes to come by the dev table and ask what our updates are (stalking jira + dev slack channel is apparently too boring).

He comes by every 2 hours.
Each time asking about how close I am to finishing not only the current feature but the other stories I have to work on too.

The other stores are not in progress, what makes you think I was working on them in the background of what I'm currently working on?

Doesn't help that we somehow keep adding stories mid sprint,

- we need to show progress to the business
- but rewriting this component to be generic AND implementing it on the whole website can't be completed in one sprint. This will require a lot of regression testing, modifications to existing functionality, etc. we need to split it in two
- that's disappointing

we were forced to write shitty patchworks for over 2 years and now everyone's surprised it takes time to replace with proper code -.-