|
Elephant Ambush posted:Agility isn't about the tools you use it's about mindset and behaviors. If an Excel spreadsheet is the only tool you have access to for something like this then my suggestion would be to find a better tool. That sounds like a nightmare.
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 20:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 14:27 |
|
|
ultrafilter posted:If most companies get it wrong, is it really a good framework? Which framework are we talking about? Scrum? Kanban? XP? There are many agile frameworks. Also the reason tons of companies are adopting agile frameworks is because they have historically done waterfall wrong as well lol. Most companies get agility wrong because their system is custom-tailored over decades to maintain the status quo and they think that agility is as simple as making all their teams do scrum and then everything will be delivered on time and on budget with no bugs and haha no that's not how it works. The average agile coaching engagement lasts about 6 months because most companies are not willing to fundamentally alter their structure to allow agility to work. Most of the time the expectation of senior managers is to just rename their behaviors to agile terminology and start using a couple tools and call it a win.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 20:42
|
|
|
I've been moonlighting as a finish carpenter (kinda) for the last month or so after being laid off from my engineering position in August. This is less my company because it happens industry wide, but something incredibly frustrating that happens is scope creep. These attachment details were forgotten about on the drawings? We'll put them in. Another sub falling behind? Sure we'll take their work. Oh, these soffits all need extra support because a half ton chunk of stucco collapsed after the supposedly purely decorative column was demo'd? Sure we'll do that. And yeah, that all means extra money in change orders for company; but here's the catch. The core tenet of this industry is Opening Date Does. Not. Move. Doesn't matter of you have double the work you initially bid (and staffed for!), doesn't matter if you miss every milestone, that final deadline is set, and everything that still needs doing just has to happen faster. Ugh. At least I can take solace in that for once in my career I'm not management and it's not my problem; I just put these metal bits on the walls, man.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 20:57
|
|
|
Elephant Ambush posted:Which framework are we talking about? Scrum? Kanban? XP? There are many agile frameworks. If most users get it wrong your product is badly designed
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 21:03
|
|
|
Piell posted:If most users get it wrong your product is badly designed
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 21:08
|
|
|
Lmao if you think you get a choice in how things are designed and not just the HIPPO in the room making the calls
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 21:20
|
|
|
I was just the dumb poo poo my work does. Sysadmin asked me to open up port 25 to one of our exchange servers because he’s trying to migrate us to O365 yesterday which I did. Pretty much right away some bot added a relay to our email and started forwarding like all of the company email to a hotmail account, as soon as I noticed that I closed the port. But while I was doing that I noticed a new line in the firewall config that said it was opening smtp to the affected server which is not a command I wrote. I spend about 10 minutes panicking like drat is the firewall compromised? Told my boss about this mysterious config change. Then about 15 minutes later I remembered that a Cisco asa will change your commands if it’s a well recognized service port so for example the change I added yesterday was like “Allow any <server ip> eq 25” to open up port 25 to that server. Since 25 is an SMTP port the asa changed it to “allow any <server ip> eq smtp” lol. Gonna just log off for the day
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 21:36
|
|
|
Elephant Ambush posted:Most of the time the expectation of senior managers is to just rename their behaviors to agile terminology and start using a couple tools and call it a win. 2/3 companies I've worked at have done exactly this with their "agile" process. My current job has gotten like 80% of the way there in implementing it properly for the teams actually developing the products, but really do not know how to manage stakeholders (me and my dept) and it's driving me nuts.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 21:54
|
|
|
It's very hard to do agile in an enterprise environment with fiefdoms because true agile is about giving teams ownership over their workflow. It'd be like letting the peasants decide their taxes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:06
|
|
|
What do you call it when you're a company that's trying to instill Agile but also has to maintain an ISO9001 sibling cert?
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:06
|
|
|
Inzombiac posted:Gotta vent for a sec. Bit late on this, but 2 jobs ago I had a performance review with my manager. I was feeling lovely so I mentioned that there were often days I didn't want to come into work, expecting to prompt a discussion like "What's stressing you out?" or "How can we help?" or something. Instead he just said "Yeah, I feel like that too sometimes. That's just how it is". He seemed genuinely surprised when I gave my notice the following day.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:07
|
|
|
PIZZA.BAT posted:inzombiac you have a bad boss. i've had a boss that pulled that poo poo on me before. the only fix is to get out. you won't regret it
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:33
|
|
|
Inzombiac posted:Gotta vent for a sec. Your boss is incompetent. You're not on crazy pills. Big secret reveal about a large chunk of the human population: most adults absolutely have no idea what they're doing and are just faking it as best they can. People do have their core competencies but these are extremely specialized. The rest of their day-to-day lives, such as raising kids, planning meals, choosing purchases and especially management? Absolutely just guessing and hoping for the best. When things don't immediately blow up in their faces they are hoping they're doing "OK". Management and leadership aren't taught in school or at all, which means most anyone in a position for managing people absolutely has no idea what they're doing. So now you have someone in management with no idea what they're doing in terms of actually managing people and something goes wrong. If they can't adequately fix the problem, they can either take responsibility (which could expose the fact they're just faking it) or they can blame someone else. Your boss, being the incompetent spineless piece of poo poo that he is, is just throwing you under a bus. For future reference, anyone else who behaves like your boss should not be trusted. They don't know how to manage, and they'll just look for scape goats. Unfortunately dealing with people like this means keeping a log book of issues and their resolutions and so forth so when they try to call you out on anything you will have paperwork and they will not. Ideally you want to have them sign off on it too, but that might be tricky. It's not an iron-clad means of protecting yourself but if a third party gets involved the person with the paperwork generally looks better. I have a story about basically creating my own paperwork to make bullshit deflectors but I'll only share if asked.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:33
|
|
|
Smik posted:
I've said it upthread, but I think it's dangerous to assume that having paperwork will help you if the person you're taking notes on has hire/fire power over you. If they're just incompetent, then sure... documentation will help you. But bad managers don't get where they are without some aid from above, and your skiplevel may not care if you have "evidence". Better to update your resume and attempt to find a less lovely environment.
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
Smik posted:I have a story about basically creating my own paperwork to make bullshit deflectors but I'll only share if asked. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
Elephant Ambush posted:What you described is not Agile. https://twitter.com/nocontexttrek/status/1388252226838306817?s=21
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 23:13
|
|
|
Slotducks posted:What do you call it when you're a company that's trying to instill Agile but also has to maintain an ISO9001 sibling cert? Or if in addition to applying it to tech teams, they try applying it to Accounting, help desk, and HR? With zero yes-man managers willing to laugh and say no?
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 23:14
|
|
|
Yeah to make it 100% clear to anyone who's never actually experienced this and think it's some sort of fabled unicorn: good bosses are real. they're out there. a good boss doesn't tell you how to do your job or ideally even what to do. if they're ever giving you orders it's a high-level objective or information that you genuinely wouldn't know about unless they told you. besides that the only time they'll be asking you about what's up is so they can know how to make your job easier the huge irony is being a good boss is actually easier. a ton of people make it difficult for themselves because they can't get over themselves and feel like they have to be in control of everything with predictable results. good bosses know and accept that they're not the ones in control
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 23:20
|
|
|
MrQueasy posted:I've said it upthread, but I think it's dangerous to assume that having paperwork will help you if the person you're taking notes on has hire/fire power over you. If they're just incompetent, then sure... documentation will help you. But bad managers don't get where they are without some aid from above, and your skiplevel may not care if you have "evidence".
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 23:39
|
|
|
zedprime posted:Do all of the above especially proactively trying to get out of abusive situations. But its pretty great consolation to have a boss think they are firing you with cause then you threaten to sue and get unemployment insurance and they're now in the poo poo with HR for being sloppy. By sue, you mean "enter into binding arbitration with a company provided mediator", right?
|
|
#
?
Apr 30, 2021 23:44
|
|
|
MrQueasy posted:I've said it upthread, but I think it's dangerous to assume that having paperwork will help you if the person you're taking notes on has hire/fire power over you. If they're just incompetent, then sure... documentation will help you. But bad managers don't get where they are without some aid from above, and your skiplevel may not care if you have "evidence". Oh, I know paperwork isn't surefire protection but it's better to have it than to not and even if it doesn't protect you it does plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of those over the managers. "Gee, that person had evidence. We have a high turnover rate, do you think it's really Fucko who's the problem?" If the paperwork doesn't save you then it's a toxic place to work but in situations where Fucko is just the one bad seed sometimes it does. Anyhow, on to my story. I used to have difficulties with marketing/management people who would ask me to write an analytics report. They would always make a vague request on the kind of data they were looking for and they'd get reports back full of data they didn't understand because they never had a clear idea of what they were looking for in the first place. In situations where the numbers didn't look great they'd question the report. So what I did was to get them to define their goals before I even looked at the data. Of course when I asked them to define what success would look like they'd respond with "I don't know" or stupid answers like "all of the things!", so I countered by asking them to define what the minimum result would have to be for the project to not be a waste of time and resources. For those who were absolutely clueless I also had taken the time to do a quick bit of research for industry averages -- for example in email marketing a 10% response rate is considered very good to excellent. So even if I was working with a numbskull making decisions on problems that they didn't even know how to validate a solution for, I had some kind of answer that they could sign off on. That way before I started the report I had a clearly defined Pass/Fail that the person requesting the report actually agreed to either on paper or in an electronic log Quite often I'd try to make sure that I'd clarify on what the working parts were to do as well -- response rates for ads, landing page bounces, etc. Then I'd go and do the work to see if all the parts were doing their jobs based on the pass/fail expectations. If things went according to plan, it was a happy report and smiles all around. When it didn't, it killed a good 80% of any counter-arguments because they were getting their own words thrown back at them. Their past selves were telling their present selves that they were in fact wrong. Pride, stubbornness or stupidity would account for the 20% of the time when they actually proved themselves wrong but wanted to stick to whatever they were doing anyway. The thing about this technique is that when I had to deliver bad news, the look on their faces when they saw their own words damning them made it worthwhile even in the 20% of the time when they decided to be a stubborn rear end anyway. More importantly it let me know the kind of person I was dealing with. I developed this technique when I was at this one company and they had a client trying to market some kind of app to college kids. I forget what it even did, but basically the guy running the ad (he was above me) wrote these typical cookie-cutter ads with stock photos and they were getting no response. I offered to try a different approach to get some traction and he told me to go ahead because he was out of ideas. So I whipped up some rage-face ads (this was back in the day when the meme was fresh) in MS Paint with short copy that was to the point. I don't remember the exact numbers now but I think it was anywhere from 1:10 to 1:16 of the old ads to my new meme based ads in terms of response rate in the span of a couple of weeks. I showed the report to my manager, expecting him to be pleased that the ads were finally starting to get a little traction. Instead, when I explained the origin of the rage face memes, he demanded I pull my ads in case they offended the client. "The client won't see the ads because they're not in the college student demographic. These ads are only shown to college kids," "What if his daughter sees them and tells him?" "Then the ads will have worked because she'd have noticed them," "I don't care, we can't afford to offend the client, pull them" I was tempted to keep them anyway since I doubt he would have known even how to shut them down in the first place, but I figured if he wanted to burn his campaign that was on him. I eventually left when I could see which way the wind was blowing but the place I landed ultimately ended up worse and I burned out, then my wife passed and I kinda dropped out of the industry for a bit which leads us to a post upthread about seeing other inane corporate bullshit coming down from head office at the retail place I'm working at while I sort myself out. Because of my work experience I recognized the stench of marketing horseshit coming down the pipe so I'm looking to jump ship again, except right now we're in lockdown.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:12
|
|
|
PIZZA.BAT posted:Yeah to make it 100% clear to anyone who's never actually experienced this and think it's some sort of fabled unicorn: good bosses are real. they're out there. a good boss doesn't tell you how to do your job or ideally even what to do. if they're ever giving you orders it's a high-level objective or information that you genuinely wouldn't know about unless they told you. besides that the only time they'll be asking you about what's up is so they can know how to make your job easier Conservatively I have had about 20 bosses and exactly one of them was good. He was phenomenal, stayed out of our way, acted as support and a bulwark against terrible policies. So, of course the high-brass hated him and squeezed him out the moment he made a mistake. Everyone else was either an unremarkable paper-pusher or was an active detriment to the workforce. Well, there was Sasha who worked for the Russian mob, drove me home if I asked, paid me in silver dollars and let me take as much food and drink as I wanted. He was cool until he disappeared.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:15
|
|
|
This is tangentially related but I'm cracking up at people leaving their Basecamp jobs because the management doesn't want people to talk about politics in the workplace (sounds like loving heaven to me) and won't give them a free bin of vegetables The entitlement some people have is unbelievable sometimes
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:18
|
|
|
PIZZA.BAT posted:Yeah to make it 100% clear to anyone who's never actually experienced this and think it's some sort of fabled unicorn: good bosses are real. they're out there. a good boss doesn't tell you how to do your job or ideally even what to do. if they're ever giving you orders it's a high-level objective or information that you genuinely wouldn't know about unless they told you. besides that the only time they'll be asking you about what's up is so they can know how to make your job easier It's true but they are unicorns. My current boss is genuinely great, gives me support, trusts me to do my job, and allows me to be self-directed unless there is some crisis or big project I need to be involved with. Much better than bosses who just tell you what to do, do not listen, or think they are hot poo poo when really they are clueless morons. Honestly, a good boss is sort of like golden handcuffs. Do you really want to roll the dice for a 10-15% pay raise? Hmmmm. AHH F/UGH posted:This is tangentially related but I'm cracking up at people leaving their Basecamp jobs because the management doesn't want people to talk about politics in the workplace (sounds like loving heaven to me) and won't give them a free bin of vegetables The funny thing is that my employer talks politics all the time. More than any organization I've ever worked for, and in an extremely in your face "you must engage" sort of way. It's all stuff I agree with, but I'm a cynical person so it just feels like empty posturing to make up for things that happened in the past. Corporations might be people in the legal sense, but I don't trust 'em. gwarm01 fucked around with this message at 00:35 on May 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:32
|
|
|
https://imgur.com/gallery/eAhCQI9 "My employer uses surveillance software that tracks keyboard and mouse input and takes periodic screenshots. Not only this is shady and “hours worked” is a terrible metric for software development, data from this tool is used to enforce mandatory overtime and was used as an excuse to terminate at least two developers. I disagree with such shenanigans, so I made a device that can imitate me “working” when I need to step away from the computer. I’ve heard of mousejiggler, but I needed something that can bring up different windows and press keys. Video is a prototype that simply scrolls a page down and randomizes delays between key presses."
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:57
|
|
|
^^: Lol, life finds a way. After reading this thread and others for a while now I still have no idea what the gently caress Agile is. To the best of my understanding, it's a frustrating and pointless piece of project management software that would probably work if used correctly but because c-level nutsacks and dumbshit middle managers have jumped onto it it's just more time wasted instead of accomplishing poo poo. Is that close? I have no plans to actually look it up so feel free to lie to me.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:58
|
|
|
Outrail posted:^^: Lol, life finds a way. It's not software, it's an excuse for the costumer to ask for a new ~*thing*~ to be added every week and for project managers to oversell how much can get done in less time.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:04
|
|
|
It’s not supposed to be though. My understanding is if it’s well managed it actually clearly determines requirements, helps track progress on those requirements, and should actually prevent idiots from suddenly promising a new thing to a client and sticking it as the top priority. But you can’t fix stupid with a project management philosophy.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:08
|
|
|
Tetramin posted:It’s not supposed to be though. My understanding is if it’s well managed it actually clearly determines requirements, helps track progress on those requirements, and should actually prevent idiots from suddenly promising a new thing to a client and sticking it as the top priority. But you can’t fix stupid with a project management philosophy. Oh, I know. That's why I said it's used as an excuse. You're agile, you're supposed to be able to roll with the punches [new requirements] and work quickly [AGILE!]
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:10
|
|
|
Batterypowered7 posted:https://imgur.com/gallery/eAhCQI9 I'm pretty sure this is exactly a thing in Snowcrash. Kinda sucks we're getting the worst parts of cyberpunk with none of the good ones.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:22
|
|
|
Tetramin posted:It’s not supposed to be though. My understanding is if it’s well managed it actually clearly determines requirements, helps track progress on those requirements, and should actually prevent idiots from suddenly promising a new thing to a client and sticking it as the top priority. But you can’t fix stupid with a project management philosophy. yes but it is weird nobody ever seems to have found a place where it's working in practice
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:38
|
|
|
One of the best bosses I ever had was Grimes's dad aka Elon Musk's father-in-law aka X Æ A-XII's grandpa.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 01:51
|
|
|
thathonkey posted:yes but it is weird nobody ever seems to have found a place where it's working in practice Like the good boss ratio I'd say it's at least 1/100. I've been lucky to taste "Good" agile a couple times, and it's amazing. Definitely makes SAFe and scrummerfall feel way worse. You gotta have high psychological safety, though. Hard to "build" that from a position of low-trust.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 02:08
|
|
|
This thread makes me appreciate my job a lot. I work for a small government department for, uh .. cultural heritage management? It doesn't translate that well into English. It's basically about inspecting and indexing historical buildings and, for the people higher up the chain, determining whether they should be protected. (Which means their appearance and construction has to be maintained close to the original looks, with owners eligible for tax reductions and such, but the financial side of it isn't our department). I do a lot of data entry and data base maintenance with the occasional interesting (I like history) research project thrown in. The pay is enough for me to make a living on a 30 hour work week, it's low stress, my coworkers are great. I also get my own office. Some of the work requires access to the on-site archives or, for the archeologists/restoration guys, to the physical items, but otherwise WFH is mandatory to minimize how many people are in the building at any one time. Also, we only started experimenting with using webcams and headsets for video conference meetings a year into the pandemic because .... government work? 30 days paid vacation a year, paid sick leave regulations in the country are also good (I think up to 6 weeks), and my hours are basically "The building unlocks at 6am, get your hours whenever." Since I only work 30 hours a week, I can either go home by 2pm or work longer and get myself a long weekend. Time at the office is tracked electronically. Since I'm salaried, I don't get paid OT, but overtime hours are tracked and immediately usable to leave earlier or take days off. Unused vacation days carry over into the next year, but are voided by September. Once a year, saved overtime is slashed, though, so if I had anything more than, say, a week, it gets removed. Word around the office is that once, a guy in the adjacent archeology department took 6 months off with saved overtime, so the cap was put in place. I'm gonna ride this out as long as possible, and it'll look good on my resume if I can't transition into a permanent contract once mine is up. Best job I've had so far. But the internal software we are stuck using is a finicky house of cards, and I heard the maintenance contract is up because the company in charge of the software had ONE GUY who knew its code, and he passed away. So now we can't get changes to the software and only the most superficial troubleshooting. Supposedly we're getting a new internal database software that will simply access our existing file system with ZERO PROBLEMS. Looking forward to it. Every so often someone will float the idea of hiring a dedicated software whisperer but anyone with real programming skills can do WAY better than a government salary right now. Our internal network admins/program installers are either old enough to appreciate the benefits of the position, or their job is something else but they're young enough to have some tech affinity and just kind of slotted into a computer wizard role. Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 08:39 on May 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 08:17
|
|
|
The Basecamp drama really should have its own thread and not a derail, but the way I've read it is that senior management's response to "why did you knowingly do nothing about a racist internal joke for years?" was "What? No. That's political talk. No political talk (other than politics the founder approves of). If you don't like it you can get out". https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp nexus6 fucked around with this message at 10:43 on May 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 10:31
|
|
|
...the true comedy being how many people did indeed choose to get out.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 12:32
|
|
|
Psykmoe posted:This thread makes me appreciate my job a lot. 30 hours a week at a full time job? Are you in Finland or something?
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 13:14
|
|
|
Full time is an arbitrary definition that doesn't mean much (in a sane country with reasonable work laws, so probably not the US). I think the UK census sets it at 31+ hours per week, but that's only because they want to put things in bins.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 13:40
|
|
|
Psykmoe posted:This thread makes me appreciate my job a lot. Your workplace sounds almost like mine, down to the "work hours are counted in a monthly base" thing (we do have software people around though, thanks god). In our case we are required to be around from 9 to 2 each day, as it's a public access University research lab and people need to be able to find us during working hours, but we are otherwise free to come early, stay later or whatever, as long as the number of hours worked in a month is correct. Some people do longer days M-Th and then get to go home earlier on Fridays, for example. We also do have 30 days a year of paid holidays, carrying on to the next year but under a limit. Only thing that differs is that we do 37.5 hours/week for a full week. I think senior employees are on a 35 hour basis though. 30 sounds like heaven.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 15:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 14:27 |
|
|
My fantasy If-I-Was-In-Charge legislation would redefine "full time" as 32 hours a week and abolish overtime exemptions. Don't see either of those happening in my lifetime, though 
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 15:44
|
|