good morning!

måning¡

👋

Good Morning!

Morning!

My fluffy white friend had a first walk outside in the rain and returned home in a black coat 😄

Good morning!

good morning

why is it that software developers need to be measured in fine detail and their work carefully planned, but other kinds of workers, don’t seem to warrant the same attention from management?

Is it because the terminology of software development is so foreign to others that they need this extra layer of management?

… so that this limited understanding leeds to insecurity and a lack of trust from management.

This is anecdotal, but I'm not micromanaged at all in my work, while my girlfriend who's a graphic designer has a boss trying to plan on what exactly she should be doing for every single minute of her working hours

perhaps it depends on representation in management - we don't micromanage our devs, because i know it's stupid and i can argue that case effectively to my co-founders

@simongraydifferent people have different preconditions. I had people in my team, that I would never had to speak to, they would have just self organized, and others who needed a detailed plan made for them. Some people are not good at communication and self organization, and it cannot be expected from them. On the other hand, these devs never had problems with doing boring, repetitive work from time to time, while the self-organizing people would really try and avoid these tasks. Strengths and weaknesses 😉 The problem you get is, when your boss expects you to “work” full time and do the management thing on the side”, that only works if your whole team is the first type.

Those who are bad at communication, but good at self organisation have it worst, perhaps

(Or those who might actually be good at communication, but management have failed to communicate their expectations of what they would like communicated to them)

depends on the context too, some things are doable in "isolation" some just aren't

There are some interesting points wrt in https://medium.com/swlh/why-story-pointing-needs-to-die-e60a775f9d37

then "management" can have many forms, so it's difficult to set rules/facts on that

Trying to get rid of SP everywhere I go. The issue is, that Scrum is used in projects a lot, but It’s more of a framework for product development. imho Scrum is not suitable for project work at all.

So to me this comes down to a couple of things. First is trust, the more you’re able to build trust, the less micromanagement happens (given sane management). The second thing is that you need to understand why you’re being asked for estimates. Sometimes it’s because of a lack of trust (simply because you haven’t worked together), sometimes it’s because that’s how we always done it, sometimes it’s because of some external factor (needs to be done before some event at time x because reasons).

In my wife case, wanting estimates usually come from the sales lady who doesn't understand that software development planning is hard and wants to make promises to customers

estimates are hard. I don't think I every saw a project without surprises breaking estimations

then again, depends on context

hard deadlines are a thing tho

Yes, estimates might also be input to an opportunity selection process. If initiative x takes y time and pays z, then maybe initiative a which takes b time and pays c is better.

rocket launch day is difficult to move sometimes

In my current project, the stakeholders need estimates, because they only release a new version every year, so “we don’t have to deploy so much”. (In the meantime, there are 60 hotfix and patch releases in prod every year)

We usually estimate things after the promises have been made

ok, I guess I make the difference between task estimates, and overall project delivery estimates

the former is useless, the latter is often necessary and you can play on what is actually delivered

Yes, the latter then becomes input to an opportunity selection process.

but I am terrible manager, don't listen to me (did it for a while, hated it)

We have time x, our backlog has items which together are estimated to take more time than x, what do you want delivered.

It’s one of those triangles…

You have three possibilities, you only get to choose two.

Morning

Morning!

good morning

In my case, I am asked to provide a plan of when every step is implemented for one of the projects I’m assigned to, but these are 70-year olds professors asking… they have no idea what something like “create a pattern matching solution for XML to populate a triplestore and scrape 10k documents” means and what kind of effort it really takes. And that is like one milestone out of a hundred. I could just write some gibberish and put a date next to it and they would be none the wiser.

In that case, I’d give estimates and combine them with a probability.

There is a lot of work that goes into communication when you have the full responsibility of every layer of some software - and I really don’t have much time to spend on that. So it’s not that I can’t communicate, but it feels like the effort needed to explain your work to someone who is not at all technically minded is so extreme that it actually pushes the deadline.

probability sounds interesting

We have a similar (potential) situation at work. How long will task x take? I can give two estimates at this point in time: I’m 0% certain it will take one day, and I’m 100% certain it will take less than two years.

hah

but honestly the main issue in my case is that I’m assigned to 3 projects at the same time.

so planning is extra hard, when the pressure coming from each project is constantly shifting

If you want better estimates than that, I’d have to work for a while (say a month) and I could give an estimate with more certainty.

It might then be that I’m done with the task at that time as well.

hah

Perhaps consider an OKR driven approach (which we've adopted at our company). Every 3 months, you set out broadly what the objectives are (in collaboration with the "business"). Then, you define 3 or so Key Results you expect to do in those 3 months that align with the Objectives, that have specific measurements used to track achievement of the objectives. The measurement can be anything - percentage, number, beans, whatever. Then, you're left to do it and you track yourself how well you are going. Aiming for 70% success.

@dharrigan that sounds interesting

We've thrown out "agile" and all the ceremony that goes with that at our company

But @simongray, I really think you need to take care to not burn out. Key things are to learn to say no, don’t give unrealistic promises, and remember that promising delivering in two months and delivering in three, is alway perceived worse than promising to deliver in five months and delivering in four.

And as someone mentioned earlier this week, figure out a way to make your backlog visible.

@dharrigan I like throwing out agile. We’ve done the same but I wouldn’t say it’s all roses as sometimes we can meander. But “key results” is also weird, like how can you convert a good user experience to a key result? Especially in a b2b world where sales is very much disconnected...

Here's ane xample: "Reduce Latency of the Website by 50%"

Easy to measure and easy for a user to validate.

Sure

All of the work I can do will lead to there maybe being a search API some time in the summer. But 70-year old professors have no idea what an API is or what to do with it. They expect something visual, which isn’t coming till later. But I’ve just sent them an email that I’m working on materalising a search API in the summer and that I can’t really plan any further ahead.

At my last job, there was a lot of structure (= a hierarchy of middle managers) and very little freedom. I didn’t exactly thrive there too, since the sprinting made you focus entirely on delivering PRs rather than really diving deep into the work.

So while I realise that I make it sound like I’m really burned out where I am now, it’s really more the case that I went from one extreme to another. Often, weeks go by at a time where I can do deep work with no interference. I was missing this aspect from my previous job. The main thing I am lacking now is the “shield” from the outside world that a product or scrum manager provides.

There used to be one taking that kind of role, but she quit the same month I started taking 30 years of experience with her. They haven’t rehired anyone for that position, preferring to spend the money on more PhD positions (I work at a university).

Just some background for those people here who are obviously worried about my health. ❤️

I mainly wanted to start the discussion since I feel like no matter the structure in place (or a lack thereof), having non-devs in charge of developers creates a certain pressure and a need for management to closely assess the developers. The only place I’ve worked where this wasn’t the case was when I worked a startup in my early twenties which was started by two developers who were also in their early twenties. There was no formal structure, just a weekly stand-up and a few adhoc meetings every month. But I think it worked because the CTO and CEO were both developers, so they didn’t need an extra layer of communication and project management to understand what was going on.

They could go to your desk, ask what you’re working on, and get an understanding of it and its scope in like 2 minutes. But when management is ignorant of the software development process and don’t know what’s actually hard to do and how many layers are needed to build software, this will spawn some mistrust no matter what. I fel like the only remedy is for the developer to spend a significant portion of time on communication.

And when this actually starts to eat into your productive time, you’re really left juggling the need to satisfy management’s mistrust and your obligations to that same management.

It’s quite a conumdrum.

moin moin

At ardoq, we’re approaching 100 employees. And I only have ex-developers above me in the hierarchy. I guess that’s somewhat fortunate.

We have a rather interesting experience with measuring the output right now: Management decided that we need to measure the output of the teams and we need insanely overloaded OKRs for both business as well as product team and once a week we do a video-conf to capture the status quo. Now it turns out, that the business team's output is really really behind the quarter goals and they try to massage their metrics to cover the poor achievements. Compared to the product/dev team who do a quite good job and produce hard metrics about their work.

Appart form the fact that this weekly check costs us almost 20 man-hours per week

I'm happy to work at a 10 person company 🙂

good part is thought, that it protects the dev team against further pressure until business team catches up with their metrics…

Yeah, at my old work, a very high percentage of your overall hours would be spent on stuff like that too. It was big project using the SAFE (hierarchical SCRUM) model and it was/is pretty much split between 1/4 middle managers, 1/4 business analysts, 1/4 testers and 1/4 developers (out of something like 400 employees). Always felt like such a waste of time and money. And I keep feeling that waste since my taxes go towards paying for it 😛

@orestis been there, now that company grew a bit the dynamics start to change

also, despite all of this time spent on planning it still hasn’t delivered and is like 4 years late by now…

But it is a great incubator for Clojure developers.

@slipset how many clojure devs at ardoq?

between 5 and 10, depending on how you count.

if it is 4 years late, clearly what you need is some more planning 🙂

More Planning Needed! 🙂

@otfrom how about a hiring spree?

The Mythical Man Month was often referenced (by myself and other devs) but management were all professional managers from other parts of the public sector.

well, you gotta plan that hiring spree. If you are lucky you will plan the impact it will have on making things take longer to deliver

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if developers and analysts would have spent some time in the hammock rather than setting up a system of 2 week sprints without the requirements clearly in place.

I really start to dislike SCRUM. If you don't follow it by book it turns into a difficult to control hybris where people pretend having everything under control

Ah, The Mythical Man Month….. loved that book. Bought four copies and read it much faster! 🙂

the # of engineers doesn't really matter, as long as they are part of small units imho, I wouldn't like to work in a place being part of a team of 10+ people team

I quite like ~5 per team

scrum was never really good agile (and an awful lot of it - points, commitments, others) aren't actually part of it any more

XP and mobbing is good agile

XP is fine. You can cover the team in post-it notes.

Someone needs to invent a range of postit notes with gorilla-glue-like backing. It's so annoying that after a few minutes/hours/days your carefully laid out sticky notes, plastered all over your (glass)walls, comes crashing to the ground.

Bit like projects really.

that's what blue tack is for

or rather blutack

3x5 index cards and blutack. Post its are scrum nonsense

oh, but the masters love their pretty colours

How else do you know it's a UI or a Backend or a High Priority or a Non-Functional....yadda yadda yaddaaaa

that's why there are many colours of sharpies

Too advanced 🙂

(I'm generally OK w/kanban as well as it does make things visible)

Where's my sardonic icon?

"Scrumban" 🙀

"Banscrum" <-- there, fixed that for you.

😄

the cards being good as they show what you are working on and can be re-organised.

At our place, we were using jira, then we moved to monday, now we're back to putting things into gitlab

and we still use jira 🙂

jira is the devil

It's hard for managers to exorcise jira from the organisation

We use trello, but jira has been slowly forced on us too

also jira is really really expensive

We started using jira so that we could pay less for Salesforce 😕

oh, good reminder - a few people also use trello too

we use clubhouse

That's now owned of course by Atlassian

Somewhere I read, that the team developing JIRA uses sticky notes on a wall to organize

I've slowly come to realize that all the planning methodology in the world simply hides the fact that pretty much nobody knows what's happening or needs to be done 9/10 times. And the more process you introduce, the harder it becomes to discover what needs to be done, since people will start to mistake process for progress

This is a cynical take mind you, take it with a grain of salt 😛

"mistake process for progress": how can this be a mistake if nobody knows what the real progress should have been ;)

that's a very good point 😉 in a lot of contexts there is some vague understanding of it though, in a lot of business cases it almost always comes down to the trivial "generate more revenue"

or one would hope that the stake holders have some idea of what the end result should look like 😉

(although honestly that seems like a rare occurrence)

Software development is just a game between people where some people optimize for endorphins by solving puzzles, others optimize for looking good towards their managers, other people optimize for producing metrics by estimating/tracking. And others optimize for making a profit or growth. And somewhere there is a game-theoretic equilibrium.

I think that’s basically any organisation that isn’t populated by identical robots 🙂

software development or not

people have different goals

and motivators

it's basically actor-network theory then I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory

Well, I think the point is: everyone has a different concept of "progress", but taking a step back, it's just a game being played by people (that goes on until one of the parties quit), no objective "progress"

interesting thought though, although I always end up in somewhat of a loop in my head between "this is probably a good descriptor of reality" and "but what's the purpose of it", which then degrades into "welp there must be no point to any of it" ... which isn't great motivator in life 😛

Just enjoy the game, especially the part you are optimizing for ;)

that's the great puzzle in life I guess 😄 (still not very good at that game 😅 )

nobody is good at the uberpuzzle, if it exists at all

just enjoy today's puzzle

Back when I was 19-20 I had a period of my life where I read a lot of Nietzsche and Camus to figure out what the damn point of it all was. I still credit The Myth of Sisyphus with giving me some sense of direction.

"we must imagine sisyphus happy"

yes, that final story is pretty good, but I also liked how the rest of the book details how different personas can make their own meaning out of an absurd existence. It’s a very practical philosophy book, unlike the dense, theoretical works of Camus’ contemporaries.

Also, Camus was clearly a lot cooler than Sartre.

I love it that we are now talking about philosophy instead of scrum

I've generally found that I'm happier writing software when I can see the impact of that software on the real world. The further away I am from this the less happy I am. I don't think I've ever written software to manage some bit of admin that has made me happy. I am happy when I see the data analysis and modelling I do affecting decisions

I can totally relate. I worked at a government organization for 1.5 years, that was the worst period of my "career" (I hate that word), I was so unhappy because of how little (for any meaning of) "useful" things we did there. Not to say that government organizations are useless, but I felt useless in that particular one

strangely writing software for local gov't (special education and looked after children models) has been the most rewarding part of my career

but that's b/c I see the budget and planning decisions that are driven off the back of it

Different contexts. You are probably doing this on your terms, not as their direct employee

And not all governments / divisions / etc are the same, I just had bad luck, but at least I learned what I didn't like

that does help, but my attitude towards being an employee is a bit different as well (as long as they don't sack me, they must like what I'm doing)

but yeah, there are lots of bits of gov't I wouldn't work with

I know someone who knows someone who works for the British Government in London

They tell me that this person is really really really suffering as a developer there, and he wouldn't wish it upon his worst enemy

(the friend is constrained by having to bring home the bacon!)

red tape+++++ and unrealistic deadlines (due to politics) +++++

I don't think I would last a morning, let alone day, in such a circumstance.

is this GDS or a department? I thought GDS would be OK

TBH the govt is nowhere near as bad as banks and a lot of FinTech companies!

I have participated in three bank projects over four years. None of them went live 🙈 A former colleague of mine was always sent to bank projects. He didn’t see a successful go live in the first 7 years of his carreer

I worked for 2.5 years on some code for a bank. It was deployed to production, but never turned on. We declared victory and walked away.

it isn't as if banks need to worry about going out of business (unless they are the one the other banks want to sacrifice)

Did quite a bit of consulting for private banks in the past, I saw both horrors and wonderfully executed/run projects. It depends really

but yes, paperwork/admin-overhead is a thing in that domain

yeah, some bits of some banks are OK. They are big enough usually that almost anything can happen

one issue at banks, is that being close to the money (actual traders) can mean you see the impact of what you are doing. The really bad thing is that they may install a squawk box in your office so that they can push a button and yell at you

the need for accountability, high security make some processes more involved, lots of validation of procedures, testing at various levels etc. I think most of it is also driven by need to be compliant with regulators and whatnot

hmm... I wonder if anyone got their boss's password on the 1st day of the job working at a bank...

:thinking_face:

This is a true story. I used to work, many moons ago, for a building society here in the UK, that no longer exists. It was so locked down, that I had to fill in a form (in triplet yes!!!) listing all the websites I wanted to "google" and the results they may return, for it to be approved. And this was just me, looking to google API documentation...

Until then, "you shall not pass!"

I think I lasted about two weeks before I walked. Completely untainable working environment.

This was exactly the same at the government job I had. Internet was locked down and no work (and no 4g yet). This was rehab....

yeah, some gov't jobs are super locked down (tho I remember my retail supply chain job being locked down as they didn't trust the internet the 90s)

🐹

90s! Wild Wild Web!

morning

my experience of banks and govt is that banks generally give better parties

banks do have better parties. Tho I feel most comfortable drinking at user groups.

ok, now we're discussing where we like to drink

we're in a pandemic. what else are we going to do?

atm, I like drinking in my garden more than in my house. 🙂

I gave up booze last Ocsober and haven't resumed, so I'm just drinking tea in the lounge ... too cold in the garden still so you are very hardy

I guess your profile picture testifies 🥶

It got up to a balmy 15C today. I was too warm sitting out in the sun.

I've got some Black Seal rum, ginger beer, and limes. I see a dark and stormy horizon, which will be the first drink beyond a sip I'll have had in about 6 months.

15C is nice ... we're still in single digits. Enjoy! 🥃

The joys of 😎 😎 😎 Dundee, Scotland

We are shifting back to 0° again. But on the upside, I am getting one last chance to cross-ski on saturday 💪

Oh god, the white fluffy friend decided to get familiar w/220v and gnaw through the electric cable, somehow I left it unplugged 🙈