Job Ad: You will report to leadership stakeholders on key progress initiatives and collaborate on business value add action objectives.

Translation: Have boss. Do task.

Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.

It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/

Me: “here’s a demo of the backend functionality you requested. We’ve got more work to do to make this production ready. Let me know your thoughts or if we need to make any changes, otherwise I’ll hand this off to the UX team, we’ll be ready to go live next month after other they deliver the front end”

PM: *telling stakeholders* “The new thing is done and ready for go live”

Me: *privately to PM* “who told you that the thing was ready for go live?”

PM: “You did”

Me: “I suggest you go read what I wrote a little more closely”

Stakeholder: Users are connecting invalid memberships to their web accounts. They shouldn’t be able to do that.

Me: Their memberships were valid when they set up the account. Your team’s record de-duping project is the issue here. You decided to mark those memberships as invalid.

I’m real tired of this stakeholder acting like this is a website issue or user error. Plus, this chaos could have been avoided if they and other involved stakeholders had just cc’d me on this de-duping project. I would have said their approach was not a good idea. But they didn’t because they want to do what’s convenient for them. If they want to be a reliable source of truth for our data, then they need to be responsible with how they’re handling that data.

As expected, I take a single day of PTO and I get a whole bunch of emails about stakeholders needing help and requests for website improvements. I have 14 days of PTO that I have to use in the next two months, so stakeholders gonna get a rude surprise when they see my out of office response almost every other day.

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

Refinement? Let's do some planning. Review? Planning! Planning? Planning!!1

Why the fuck is every team meeting A FUCKING PLANNING SESSION WITH STAKEHOLDERS!!1 KEEP THOSE ASSHOLES OUT! AAGh fucking useless product owners!

Confession: I don't feel like working. At all. I'm so in need of a vacation. I spend 3/5 days gaming at home and do my sprint assignments in the last two, because I'm so fucking good at what I do. Been working like this for weeks now.

Last summer vacation I really had was fucked up by a PO calling me about the project expectations wanting me to really explain the technical decisions to stakeholders, because the schedule kept getting shorter and that caused me huge amounts of anxiety. I left the company next year. They even contacted me later asking if I had any interest coming back. No fucking chance.

Didnt have any vacation days for last summer. Now I'm in a really nice position where I don't have to really give a shit about the project I'm working on so I can just ignore work completely during my vacation. Gonna delete my email from my phone and disconnect Slack. Fuck work.

Yesterday, the Project Manager forwarded an email from a staff member who worked on a donations campaign. Staff member was confused about a Cloudflare challenge that appeared before the user was sent to the donation page. It’s a less than 5 second JavaScript check. He thought it looked fishy.

I had to explain that it’s a security measure that’s been up for almost a month. PM knows this but left it to me to explain because ownership of the site is on me. The donations page and api gets hit by a lot of bots because it’s a public api and there are no security measures like captchas to deter the bots. I’m inheriting this website and I didn’t build it.

Staff member says other staff want to know if the Cloudflare page can be customized so it looks more legit. Um, Cloudflare is a widely known legit service. Google it.

A few thoughts pop into my head:

1. Engineering communicated to stakeholders about the Cloudflare messaging a month ago.

2. Wow, stakeholders don’t share relevant info with their staff who aren’t on these emails.

3. Woooow, stakeholders and staff don’t look at the website that often.

Has anyone ever had to explain to stakeholders that you're gonna have a major delay, because a team member DIED?

Didn't happen to me. I'm just curious because I want to kill myself after listening to this SAFe planning where stakeholders just bash on what they need and team members don't even have an opportunity to say anything. Confidence vote? 0.

My workflow would greatly improve if my stakeholders would just communicate when they make changes to the systems that the website interacts with. It would also help if they didn’t lie when they make a f*** up. Lack of info and lies don’t help me solve the issues they created. But I realize asking for this is like believing that Santa is going to send me a puppy for Christmas.

Agile ways of working has us do more customer collaboration, but I just despise talking to business owners who are so stuck in their ways of thinking and working. Their opinion is that they're reached such a high level of efficiency, that learning new things and changing their way of thinking now is useless. Especially if they come from an industrial background. Often it takes a lot in me to not just explode in their face when I hear them claim how they know what's best for the product, while we developers try to advocate that we need user feedback to know what the outcome of something is.

I really hate when stakeholders treat me like an idiot. No, I didn’t change the existing logic of the website. It wasn’t discussed in the scope, so why would I touch it? Stakeholder, you “double checking” like this is demeaning and will only cause me to refuse future requests from you. Plus, you were at the meeting when we discussed scope, so there should be no questioning my intelligence like this.