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we have a lot of "programme managers" and they live 100% in powerpoint and spend most of their time fighting tooth and nail for everything to stay as green in defiance of reality. also creating meetings with 50 people on them for a programme update where nobody is listening at all, then sending out minutes of their own voice oh, and also *constantly* asking for estimates of time/cost for things that have not yet been defined.
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Jan 24, 2023 09:20
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:oh, and also *constantly* asking for estimates of time/cost for things that have not yet been defined. hi
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Jan 24, 2023 10:05
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look if you could just give me a list of everything thats possible to build and how long it would take then I could just pick the products I want to develop and we could avoid these conversations.
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Jan 24, 2023 10:16
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look if you could just give me your budget and resource requirements for the next 12-18 months well lock down the budget now and you can define the precise implementation when we start ok? please get back to me by close of play, I need to update the status powerpoint
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Jan 24, 2023 11:01
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fart simpson I see you have asked for 2 developers, one qa, 6 months of analysis, 12 months of development and 500k in Aws credits this creates a budget requirement of 2.5 million which is unacceptable to management please adjust your estimates to 1 person for 6 months which is what I have put into the plan e: and we are moving to Google cloud to realise a cost saving of 6 dollars a month
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Jan 24, 2023 11:03
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we have the additional unhelpful role of product owner, who is supposed to be an internal point of contact for a system but in reality is just Yet Another Intermediary.
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Jan 24, 2023 12:02
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:oh, and also *constantly* asking for estimates of time/cost for things that have not yet been defined. i think if i had to point at just one thing that got me to start looking for an exit at my last job it was this. i had to have this fight on a monthly basis and it was just wearing me down well that and being promised that my team wouldn’t be held to the completely arbitrary numbers i pulled out of my rear end and we all know how well that promise holds up
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Jan 24, 2023 12:15
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El Mero Mero posted:we have the additional unhelpful role of product owner, who is supposed to be an internal point of contact for a system but in reality is just Yet Another Intermediary. we also have "business owner" which is generally someone that's senior in the relevant area and so has no idea whatsoever about what the system does. they are supposed to sign off on all sorts of policy cruft and a non-trivial amount of time is spent having to explain over and over again what it is, only to have them say something like "well actually I don't see why you need access to any data for 'development purposes'"
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Jan 24, 2023 12:16
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El Mero Mero posted:we have the additional unhelpful role of product owner, who is supposed to be an internal point of contact for a system but in reality is just Yet Another Intermediary. we retitled our business analysts to product owners and made no other change to their daily duties, lol
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Jan 24, 2023 12:57
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in my company “business analysts” are a generic title for mini-mes a more senior person dumps all their grunt work onto
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Jan 24, 2023 12:58
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My org has like twice as many PMs as they do designers "calendar janitors" sounds about right, and half the time designers need to nag them about schedules
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Jan 24, 2023 13:01
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:fart simpson I see you have asked for 2 developers, one qa, 6 months of analysis, 12 months of development and 500k in Aws credits this creates a budget requirement of 2.5 million which is unacceptable to management that’s what i was going to say
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Jan 24, 2023 14:02
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fart simpson posted:that’s what i was going to say you work on hardware stuff though right? genuinely kinda curious to know if it's... pretty much the same bullshit project planning-wise or if there's anything different about it.
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Jan 24, 2023 14:04
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Shame Boy posted:you work on hardware stuff though right? genuinely kinda curious to know if it's... pretty much the same bullshit project planning-wise or if there's anything different about it. well ive not really worked on software stuff beyond hardware companion apps so idk. it not exactly the same i guess
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Jan 24, 2023 14:08
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but we (product managers at my company) are regularly jerking around the software and hardware and mechanical guys by shifting requirements and trying to get their bosses to agree to a death march. if that helps illuminate
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Jan 24, 2023 14:10
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fart simpson posted:but we (product managers at my company) are regularly jerking around the software and hardware and mechanical guys by shifting requirements and trying to get their bosses to agree to a death march. if that helps illuminate yeah that sounds about the same lol also i thought you said "death match" at first which was a much more interesting mental image
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Jan 24, 2023 14:11
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Shame Boy posted:yeah that sounds about the same lol do you guys in software not use the term death march?
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Jan 24, 2023 14:18
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the biggest difference i can gather is it seems like software people keep working on the same software forever???? we make a hardware and everything has to come together for the start of production date and the instant we start production we’re done and everyone moves on to the next project
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Jan 24, 2023 14:19
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https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-2nd-Edward-Yourdon/dp/013143635X
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Jan 24, 2023 14:21
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fart simpson posted:do you guys in software not use the term death march? no we do i'm just groggy and my brain made the sentence funnier fart simpson posted:the biggest difference i can gather is it seems like software people keep working on the same software forever???? we make a hardware and everything has to come together for the start of production date and the instant we start production we’re done and everyone moves on to the next project oh that is something i didn't really think about but yeah. we definitely switch what customers or features we're focusing on over time but it's still the same core Thing we're working on forever
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Jan 24, 2023 14:22
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fart simpson posted:the biggest difference i can gather is it seems like software people keep working on the same software forever???? we make a hardware and everything has to come together for the start of production date and the instant we start production we’re done and everyone moves on to the next project what happens when you realize after production started the product is a piece of poo poo that doesn’t work?
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Jan 24, 2023 14:22
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I've been working on the same system for like 15 years god what's wrong with me also I'm the combined "product owner", architect, senior BA and technical lead lmao oh and I'm the head of the wider area this comes under lol
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Jan 24, 2023 14:22
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Asymmetric POSTer posted:what happens when you realize after production started the product is a piece of poo poo that doesn’t work? that becomes the problem of someone called the “operations project manager” lol
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Jan 24, 2023 14:23
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the opm’s stated job is to manage the projects that have already started production. not my problem lol (usually, sometimes it is my problem)
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Jan 24, 2023 14:25
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fart simpson posted:do you guys in software not use the term death march? we do. we have the added bonus that once a death march starts it can theoretically never end!
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Jan 24, 2023 14:25
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*crying pm meme* bro just one more feature. please. this one is real critical we gotta get this done asap. i promise this is the last one
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Jan 24, 2023 14:26
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PIZZA.BAT posted:we do. we have the added bonus that once a death march starts it can theoretically never end! i have worked on a hardware project that was delayed and worked on for 8 (eight) years
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Jan 24, 2023 14:27
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fart simpson posted:i have worked on a hardware project that was delayed and worked on for 8 (eight) years did it have to be redesigned a bunch? i'd imagine you can't just release some consumer electronics thing designed 8 years ago without it looking real weird right?
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Jan 24, 2023 14:39
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like that's gotta be what, 20 different bluetooth versions behind at that point? lol
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Jan 24, 2023 14:41
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Shame Boy posted:did it have to be redesigned a bunch? i'd imagine you can't just release some consumer electronics thing designed 8 years ago without it looking real weird right? it was not redesigned, it was a tech demo that we gave at a trade show which had unexpected positive reception. so we spent 8 years half assedly making it actually work for more than the demo. eventually it actually worked pretty good and we released it to way after all the excitement was dead and it totally flopped and we sold basically 0 of them lol
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Jan 24, 2023 14:41
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fart simpson posted:it was not redesigned, it was a tech demo that we gave at a trade show which had unexpected positive reception. so we spent 8 years half assedly making it actually work for more than the demo. eventually it actually worked pretty good and we released it to way after all the excitement was dead and it totally flopped and we sold basically 0 of them lol oh god i was tasked with making pretty much the software equivalent of that once and the same thing happened lmao
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Jan 24, 2023 14:43
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Shame Boy posted:oh god i was tasked with making pretty much the software equivalent of that once and the same thing happened lmao
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Jan 24, 2023 14:45
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it connected our software to this little portable credit card reader and charged a card, then "printed a receipt" (aka sent a hardcoded string to a receipt printer, which are basically just 80's-era line printers with network cards glued to them) everyone was very impressed for some reason and I was cursed by that ever since
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Jan 24, 2023 14:46
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fart simpson posted:it was not redesigned, it was a tech demo that we gave at a trade show which had unexpected positive reception. so we spent 8 years half assedly making it actually work for more than the demo. eventually it actually worked pretty good and we released it to way after all the excitement was dead and it totally flopped and we sold basically 0 of them lol this is why I've stopped doing prototypes for features: everyone gets excited then it gets stuck in the backlog for 12 months and by the time we do it nobody cares anymore also no joke there is a massive feature overhaul that we agreed and I implemented five and a half years ago that we have still not deployed because a downstream system is so poo poo that they've only just managed to get their side up to date to handle the extended data model
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Jan 24, 2023 14:47
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mystes posted:was this at the same place as the office plugin thing? nah this was the current place, i don't think the last place ever really... went to any conventions... i've talked about it plenty before but it was more or less a pretend hobby company for the rich failson CEO to feel like he was actually doing something instead of just Being Rich Since Birth and boy did it operate in some bizarre ways as a result
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Jan 24, 2023 14:49
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:this is why I've stopped doing prototypes for features: everyone gets excited then it gets stuck in the backlog for 12 months and by the time we do it nobody cares anymore we have a bug on a $2500 speaker system that customers have been calling to complain about since september 2019, and it’s been fixed since october 2019, but i literally haven’t been able to get my boss to approve the ~2 weeks of testing resources needed to release the fix to customers. lol
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Jan 24, 2023 14:50
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:this is why I've stopped doing prototypes for features: everyone gets excited then it gets stuck in the backlog for 12 months and by the time we do it nobody cares anymore lol here if you make a prototype, by the time you're done showing it to the team internally for the first time they've already somehow sold it as a fully-functional turnkey solution to 20 different companies
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Jan 24, 2023 14:50
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fart simpson posted:we have a bug on a $2500 speaker system that customers have been calling to complain about since september 2019, and it’s been fixed since october 2019, but i literally haven’t been able to get my boss to approve the ~2 weeks of testing resources needed to release the fix to customers. lol lmao have you ever had to actually have a thing recalled that you worked on? i guess that probably doesn't really happen all that much with speakers unless like, they start exploding
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Jan 24, 2023 14:51
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Shame Boy posted:lmao not me but one of my coworkers worked on a speaker that had a few battery fires yeah also ive worked on stuff that we had to stop sales on for various reasons (we kicked the can on upcoming compliance reasons or we got sued for violating gpl crap)
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Jan 24, 2023 14:54
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fart simpson posted:we have a bug on a $2500 speaker system that customers have been calling to complain about since september 2019, and it’s been fixed since october 2019, but i literally haven’t been able to get my boss to approve the ~2 weeks of testing resources needed to release the fix to customers. lol the biggest risk to software enabled branded audio 
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