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After several hours of meetings, over a couple of weeks, we finally answered the question of, "What's the best way for team A, which has two developers, to support team B? Which team does what? Which team generates the requirements? What happens when changes need to be made?" with the solution, "Team A should loan a developer to team B already Jesus poo poo can we get back to work yet?"
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Nov 30, 2015 03:37
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Our sprints would normally end tomorrow (except for my team, because we're on Kanban  ), for a release Monday, but the office is closed tomorrow and everybody's scrambling to get stuff through QA today. I proposed we delay the release to Tuesday and it actually worked. I'm completely floored.
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Dec 17, 2015 21:37
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All the other teams are doing sprints, but the team I'm on whined enough during the sprint planning meetings they gave up and let us do Kanban. That lent me a lot of credibility last week when I advocated for delaying the release by a day; our team wasn't rushing to complete a sprint, but every other team was. We had to do a patch release yesterday, anyway. At least we're getting another unit test out of it. We did catch some flak a few weeks ago because we weren't moving through our tasks quickly enough, but we flatly rejected the criticism, because we're that mature. (Also because all our recent tasks were "investigate how to build this backend that we don't know any requirements for.")
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Dec 23, 2015 16:29
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spacebard posted:At the same time, she explained agile practices to devs via silly team building exercises, retrospective format, etc... After the initial project was a success, she got a piece of the training budget for devs PMs, and managers to attend some "Agile day" thing. For me, that was the absolute worst part about switching to Agile. So many coddling meetings about why multitasking is bad. So much not listening to our project team, in particular, about our doubts that Scrum was the best fit. Fortunately, they finally gave up and switched us to Kanban, after the fortieth sprint planning that went off the rails with us complaining. A few months later, they suggested that Kanban wasn't working because our projects were taking too long. We all went, "Nope."
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Jan 24, 2016 19:48
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Yeah, my PO was all three until they went, "You're good at this!" and gave her a second team.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:09
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We tracked our time for a while. Nobody could get a straight answer on whether everything was supposed to add up to eight hours or not, whether we were supposed to hit pause when taking our ten-minute breaks, what we were supposed to do if somebody interrupted with a question, etc. Some developers admitted they didn't track in real-time, but instead filled everything in at the end of the week. Then we mysteriously dropped it and it hasn't come up again.
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Mar 7, 2016 07:25
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"Anybody know which issue caused this error message?" he asked, having already looked up who did it. *time passes* "It looks like it was commit number a1b2c3. Anybody remember where that came from?" he asked, despite the Blame command already telling him. *time passes* "Hey Team X, fix your poo poo!" he wished he could say.
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Mar 7, 2016 18:24
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I mean, I probably could, but I'd start feeling like a bully pretty quickly. The Socratic approach definitely isn't working very well, so I'll have to shift gears soon.
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Mar 7, 2016 18:50
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I hadn't heard of it before now, but I know one of the main reasons my team switched from Scrum to Kanban was because we all (mostly me) complained so much during sprint planning that certain issues were impossible to estimate. We always had stuff like "figure out how we can use technology X" and "tear down this architecture we've been using for years and build a new one." My answer was always, "I won't know until I get in there." We finally started doing stuff like agreeing to spent X hours/days on initial investigation and filing follow-ups, as necessary. The better fix was to use Kanban, where the most important stuff is always at the top and we can abort out of it if everything starts to snowball.
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Mar 8, 2016 19:05
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No poo poo! Edit: Even when we started breaking those things down into "investigate what we want to do, investigate how to do it, do it" series of issues, it wouldn't fit into sprints, because we couldn't hope to estimate steps two and three before step one was done. Fortunately, the people running the meetings finally gave up arguing with us when we refused to give numbers. CPColin fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 19:56
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So a pile of people were laid off yesterday and one of them was celebrating her birthday. Good planning, management.
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Mar 31, 2016 15:22
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Ithaqua posted:What's the problem? Would it be better if it were the day before or after? The one time I got fired from a job, it was a week after I bought a new car. This is not the first time it's happened! Sadly, there wasn't a cake anywhere. We have enough people where there's only one cake per month. The person whose birthday it was was the person who usually orders it, so there probably won't be an April cake for a while.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:25
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I'm not going to try to convince you that it was lovely.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:59
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The uncertainty factor is a good point to bring up against single point values. In the past, whenever my team had been estimating points and all agreed it could be anywhere between a couple hours of work and several weeks of cans of worms, we ended up using the high estimate and running the risk of way undercommitting. That was one of the main reasons we got our team switched to Kanban.
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May 8, 2016 20:19
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I think the idea is that the whole team is supposed to agree and if it can't, it means the task hasn't been broken down enough.
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May 8, 2016 21:05
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Docjowles posted:Yeah I know. We'll probably bite the bullet and set up our own server eventually because the amount of downtime they have is absurd. But in theory it's nice to not have yet another service we have to manage and just let ~*~the cloud~*~ do it. The on-prem version is also like double the cost of cloud and we have several hundred users so it's not peanuts. I haven't noticed any HipChat downtime, but I connect via Pidgin so maybe the webapp breaks more often?
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May 14, 2016 22:27
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I assign code reviews to whomever has responded to previous code reviews the least often. It has not been entirely successful.
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Jun 3, 2016 00:11
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I was asked a few days ago to provide peer reviews for the other developers using the prompt, "Does X deserve a promotion?" I responded that I didn't think that was an effective question to ask, because I don't believe you're failing if you're not specifically deserving of a promotion. Like how I finally snapped after the whatever-th consecutive annual review where the assessment was, "You're a great developer, but you're going to need to improve, if you want to be promoted to Architect." I finally said, "Stop dangling that poo poo in front of me. I'm either good enough to be here or I'm not. I'm tired of being told I'm not good enough for a hypothetical." It was fun. (Now in my annual self-review, I just said, "You should probably give me that higher title, because that's what I do around here anyway." We'll see what happens, ha!)
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Jun 19, 2016 18:48
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Ithaqua posted:There's nothing wrong with saying "you're great at your current role, but you need to improve Specific Skills X, Y, and Z in order to be promoted to Position W." If the only feedback was "You're good, but you need to just be, you know, all around better", that's crap. I get that. I was mostly irritated because the feedback had been exactly the same for several years in a row. Also, they had changed the review schedule so I had two in six months. And I was already pissed off about other stuff that was going on. All that added up to one big "NOPE."
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Jun 19, 2016 19:02
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KoRMaK posted:So in that uncle bob video, he posits that half of all programmers since the beginning of the field, have less than 5 years experience. This is what I always try to get at when we interview people: "What was the worst bug you've encountered and how did you go about fixing it?" and "What are some of the first places you look when you encounter code you don't recognize?" What I want to hear are answers like, "Well, I added some logging, opened the debugger, and..." or, "I banged my head against my desk for ten minutes, then rolled over to my coworker, who remembered seeing something a few months ago..." Basically anything besides "I don't know." or, "I haven't had do deal with a situation like that." which can happen, when interviewing super-green intern candidates who haven't done much programming outside of their major requirements.
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Jun 30, 2016 15:23
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Better than nothing, at least!
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Jun 30, 2016 16:45
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Messyass posted:I couldn't give you a straight answer to either of those questions tbh. I would ask what you mean by the 'worst bug'? Biggest effect? Hardest to find? Largest amount of stupidity that caused it? Asking me those questions back is a better response than some have given! Volmarias posted:Please don't do this. I can guarantee both that I've worked on some gnarly issues that took days to track down, and that I will not remember them if you ask for examples out of the blue, and will simply resort to a deer stare while desperately trying to remember something recent and then give you a super lame example. If you had said you couldn't remember a bad bug, I would switch to asking, "What is one of the biggest challenges you've faced as a programmer?" The idea I'm getting at is, "Have you been involved in a big enough project that you had a serious problem completing it and how did you go about doing that?" I'm looking for information on the candidate's problem solving skills; I'm not going to insist that you remember all the details about a specific bug. Edit: And I'd rather hear about something that actually happened than invent a hypothetical. CPColin fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 15:00
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No!
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Jul 3, 2016 01:00
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The COO sent out an email earlier congratulating several people for getting promotions, along with a list of who got what. Just now, I heard a coworker congratulate one of the people who got promoted and she didn't know she got one, because she hadn't read the email yet. Whee! Also, a few people were promoted to a job title I hadn't heard of, so I asked what it meant and the COO asked why I wanted to know. Whee again!
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Jul 5, 2016 19:50
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Guy asking a question on Experts Exchange: "Selecting a line, cutting, and pasting takes too long in Eclipse. Is there an easier way to move single lines around?" Me: "Alt-Up and Alt-Down." Guy: "Do you have to select the line first?" Ugh why wouldn't you just try what I said first it would take a tenth of the time! This is beyond just terrible programmer, right? Though an unwillingness to try things out is definitely a hallmark of terrible programmers. Edit: Meant to post that in the Terrible Programmer thread in YOSPOS. CPColin fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jul 8, 2016 |
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Jul 8, 2016 15:41
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Yeah, I've been trying more aggressively, lately, to get my teammates to get in the habit of filing clean-up tickets when they encounter rough spots in the code. Also, when code review finds something that could have been done better, but, well, it's Friday and we release Monday, so we need to keep moving. Acknowledging the need for a clean-up task and filing it is 1000x better than lamenting it and forgetting about it, in my eyes.
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Jul 29, 2016 17:19
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It just occurred to me: In the 9.5 years I've been at my current job, I've pressed the team to upgrade to Java 5, Java 6, Java 7, and Java 8. And they still won't let me call myself "Java Architect."
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Aug 4, 2016 19:10
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Band together, write recommendation letters for each other, and tell that rear end in a top hat to gently caress off and let you work.
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Aug 16, 2016 15:49
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IAmKale posted:That's the thing, we weren't working on a redesign of an existing product. This was an entirely new project that we were building from the ground up. Integration with the old system would have had to take place at some point, but in the near term we would have built and maintained it. Yeah, it's stupid for them to give your team a "skunkworks" type of project, then balk when you picked the best tools for the job and they didn't match the existing system. Best case scenario is for your team to insist that this is the best course to take, but it sounds like your founder is pretty stuck in his ways and unlikely to budge. ChickenWing posted:Bragpost: by the end of today, I will have completed 7 story points (which are estimated at about 1 story point per dev day) in the space of two afternoons. What do you do for tasks that take an hour? Or fifteen minutes? Do those get one story point (and the expectation of taking one dev-day), too?
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Aug 16, 2016 18:02
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Maybe next year I'll be able to leverage my ten years of experience into a $90k salary!
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Aug 17, 2016 15:29
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necrobobsledder posted:$90k with 10 years experience as a developer is fine if you're in flyover country or work primarily for academic or government institutions I work in the private sector in California.  I sometimes feel simultaneously underpaid, relative to other companies in my area, and overpaid, relative to the value of my contributions to society.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:34
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I like when tests fail with the message "assertion failed."
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Aug 23, 2016 02:38
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I saw somebody put into his test plan that he was going to test a certain class, probably because he saw it in the diff, but I jumped in and said, "You don't need to test this; the change is trivial and the compiler already verified it by not blowing up." He proceeded to approve the project, so I deployed it to Test, where he repeated the same steps and closed the issue. Then, a few minutes later, edited into his closing comment that he tested that class.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:23
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Error: "1" not defined
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Aug 26, 2016 22:26
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We had somebody come in, advocate test-driven design left and right, and write a caching class that has lots of interesting "quirks." And no tests.
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Aug 29, 2016 05:55
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Anybody know if there's a difference between "Architect" and "Systems Engineer?" There's talk about creating a new position that more closely reflects my job duties and I'm lobbying for "Architect," but the higher-ups are leaning toward "Systems Engineer."
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Sep 17, 2016 23:06
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Thanks, all. I was getting the impression, during our conversation, that "Systems Engineer" was closer to DevOps than I wanted my role to sound. My boss even said, "The role would be a developer who supports DevOps." and I suggested the term "DevOps" already encompasses that.
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Sep 18, 2016 06:53
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Escalate that poo poo!
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Sep 20, 2016 15:38
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I can imagine people coming around and asking, "How come none of your projects are closing out?" because they didn't notice they've been in QA's hands for weeks. As long as your PM knows that part of the slowdown is due to possible overtesting. I've had that problem, too, where QA goes off in the weeds with regression tests on changes that carry very little risk. (Then I get really annoyed if QA actually finds a bug in the stuff I thought they were overtesting.)
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Sep 20, 2016 15:57
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:52 |
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Cuntpunch posted:Quickly moving upwards, if you have references to back it up, can easily be a show of "I'm just good at this stuff". That's a lot of the reason I'm angling for the Architect title; I got my Senior title five years into my current job, which was also five years ago. I don't want the risk of somebody thinking, "Hmm. He's been Senior for X years. I wonder why he hasn't moved up since then."
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Sep 26, 2016 15:31
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