The tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else is so true. I had a boss that insinuated I was inexperienced because I didn’t know his specific internal process (which was complete nonsense because he is literally illiterate and cannot read or write).
When I politely corrected him that this was my second job in this specific industry he paused before continuing to ramble as if I’m some intern when I was with the company for 3 years in a midlevel role.
Same guy who once gave me a 30 mins lecture about how much he wants women like me and his daughter to succeed and “have a voice”, literally without letting me insert more than 1 word the entire time.
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
It’s funny that people claim ownership of companies by individuals (capitalism) is so efficient when there are extreme and obvious problems when the distant private equity board needs an entire department to tell them what the company does and how well every few months, compared to y’know, ownership by people who work there and would know how well the company (and their part of it) is doing just by actually being remotely involved.
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be “scalable agile”. By “scalable”, they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about “Extreme Programming” or “Agile” being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
We have SAFe at my office too. It seems to me that it’s just a way to say you’re agile while still being waterfall.
We also do SAFe, I think they buy it for the name. We’re reasonably agile except we don’t choose our work, our input on feature sizing is ignored, we get told off for failing to deliver on time, we’re not encouraged to demo work to business
At least we do have scrum masters and sometimes product owners and work vaguely to sprints
Test is the least agile as they have an 80 page document on how to document testing and it’s impossible for them to have admin done in time to actually start testing until sprint 2. Since we went to using Git, build is unlikely to finish anything quickly as the automated unit tests are time consuming
I have been a scrum master and it’s almost fun in that role to try to make a team more agile
I wish I could upvote you more than once
fix json
fuck why is everything broken
spend whole day trying to figure out
oh yeah i see the trailing comma from when i cut and pasted
JSON parsers need to get their shit together. I’ve had errors for trailing commas and comments in JSON way too often.
All this is great if you’re working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.
I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.
That sucks man.
I’m loving work from home. The ability to do whatever during dull meetings, work through lunch on something interesting because you had lunch during the all staff meeting
Have the radio on even
I can’t count the number of coffees I’ve made during stand-up
Not every person is the same.
Rules and processes and documentation and change management often times equals stability and repeatable successes. Some people thrive in this environment.
Moving fast and breaking shit with no rules or processes or documentation or change management often times leads to outages and an environment where you have to be the hero or a real IT “rockstar” to be successful. Some people thrive in this environment.
If you don’t like all the rules and processes and documentation and change management, then you should know thyself and find a different job.
Found the bootlicking manager! Be sure to always remind the people doing the work that they are easily replaceable. They should be grateful right?
Found the IT “Rockstar”.
there comes a time where you have so little supervision that you can actually do something interesting and productive
Those are the days. I can even sometimes sneak in some tech debt reduction.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: “Write good code and hope no one notices”
I’d love a job like this and I’m not even joking
It’s okay even fun at first, but eats your soul slowly over the years. Edit: that ofcourse depends on perspective e.g. what you are doing at the moment. I myself moved from an abusive job to a cozy corporate one, it seemed like heaven at first.
Think of it that way: those nice people are sending you money every month and all you have to do is go there and look busy. Certainly not the most rewarding way to spend your day but having money is nice.
My thing is, as long as I’m not bored at work I’m good. If I’m being paid to look busy but can’t keep myself busy I’m going to feel like my brains are boiling away. But if I can actually keep myself entertained and busy and get paid for it? Hell yeah!
Just when you can’t take any more; donuts in the break room!
I thought I’d love a job like this, and it was fine, for a while.
But you can feel yourself stagnating and you know that when they eventually make you redundant you’d struggle to get another job because you spent too long coasting.
I left it for a job at a startup, much more engaging but also much more work
My job isn’t this bad but has the occasional pointless company meeting and the like. I’m fine with it - it’s their money they’re wasting. I do not look to my employer for meaning - I like the team I work with but I’ve no love for the work. I’m good at it and try to find joy in it where I can, but it is not my primary source of personal validation.
It’s a pretty comfortable life. I’ve worked for myself before and it was much harder in every way with nowhere near the pay.
This is the way.
Going on 22 days waiting for a firewall rule change so I can pull containers from the enterprise GitHub enlistment.
I’ve had discussions with 4 different OUs. Not one of them has been able to tell me why the firewall is different for this VM. There is no way for me to see the state of each and compare.
That’s literally my dream job. I’d spend my day walking around carrying folders and looking extremely busy. Once a day I’d send a “per my last email” email just to make it look like I’m actively trying to get shit done.
Yeah, it is pretty great!
I’m building software to bridge an in house legacy system and a CLI program. It has 1 partial restful API endpoint (no delete, no patch/put). But it does have 3 cyber security suites including one that wraps the runtime. It is not a public API.
I have 4 meetings a week.
Did I mention I work from home?
Oh god, add in “random scripts throw errors that you’ve never seen before” and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
Also every time a techbro tweets something a random number generator may fir- lay you off due to financial decisions.
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we’re in a release freeze.
Agile/Scrum, ISO 9001, ITIL, Six Sigma, CMMI, etc; it’s all cargo cults.
I’ve seen cargo thrown around a few times. What is that?
Build a skunk works, it’s like an IT department’s shadow IT, shave a yak, shed a bike.
attend mandatory training
