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The company asked non-devs to come up with ideas for innovation sprints. Almost all the ideas that were presented were fancy frontend improvements. Most devs are backend folks. Result: Many devs work on stuff like improving the continuous deployment pipeline or testing their own ideas on making core algorithms better, and the non-dev innovation ideas sit on the backlog forever.
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Oct 27, 2019 07:34
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Carbon dioxide posted:The company asked non-devs to come up with ideas for innovation sprints.
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Nov 2, 2019 03:45
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Vulture Culture posted:Truly, this is an inspired product organization and a company with a really clear vision of what it wants Making people's job easier with tooling and features that the company wouldn't otherwise allow dev time for is generally a  thing for me 🤷♂️
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Nov 4, 2019 15:07
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Munkeymon posted:Making people's job easier with tooling and features that the company wouldn't otherwise allow dev time for is generally a That’s what I tried to do last Friday and I was told it wasn’t “the kind of stuff we do on this day”. Supposedly the day is used to learn stuff that has nothing to do with work, and god help you if you do anything work related on that day, cause no one else will and they’ll send out an email reminder reminding people not to do work related stuff on those free days because the people doing non-work related stuff will feel bad.
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Nov 4, 2019 15:46
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I've been in charge of improving our code's security practices (from the engineering side). E.g. making sure we aren't doing any OWASP Top Ten stuff via documentation and code review, integrating a bunch of static analysis and other code scanning tools into our CI pipelines. What's the best way to communicate this on a resume? I don't know any of the vocabulary for this!
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Nov 4, 2019 20:50
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strange posted:I've been in charge of improving our code's security practices (from the engineering side). E.g. making sure we aren't doing any OWASP Top Ten stuff via documentation and code review, integrating a bunch of static analysis and other code scanning tools into our CI pipelines. You used the vocabulary already. "improved security practices by integrating static analysis and security analysis tools into application CI pipelines". It's worth going into some detail on the positive end result of that (i.e. "reduced number of known vulnerabilities by X%"), too.
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Nov 4, 2019 21:03
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Other simple quantification options are things like “over xxx lines of code” or “over yyy checkins per day.” (By the way, has it ever been shown that quantifying items on your resume matters? I’ve been recommending it to people for years, but I don’t know if it matters.)
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Nov 4, 2019 21:36
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lifg posted:Other simple quantification options are things like “over xxx lines of code” or “over yyy checkins per day.” It does, or at least should. I could write that I improved security because I fixed some minor typo, but this gives them something to dig into. It also quantifies the impact, especially if it can be done in customers, or even better monetary value. Saved $200000 in yearly revenue by touching a thing? Sign them up, we'll practically be getting paid to hire them!
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Nov 4, 2019 22:09
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Volmarias posted:It does, or at least should. I could write that I improved security because I fixed some minor typo, but this gives them something to dig into. It also quantifies the impact, especially if it can be done in customers, or even better monetary value. Saved $200000 in yearly revenue by touching a thing? Sign them up, we'll practically be getting paid to hire them! It might be because I’ve never hired for, or been employed at, a FAANG company, so I’ve never been overwhelmed with applicants, but normally when I see a resume that looks even halfway decent I’ll just pass them onto a phone screen. Once they’re at that point the resume becomes a talking point, and not a disqualifier. I’ve been thinking about this recently because I just choose to do three phone screens for programmers with horrendous resumes, but it was obvious that they were being screwed on that front by their recruiter, so I didn’t want to hold it against them. Maybe I’m too soft.
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Nov 4, 2019 22:37
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If you find good programmers with bad resumes, you are exploiting a market inefficiency! Well on your way to becoming a cold blooded captain of industry!
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Nov 4, 2019 23:27
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Pollyanna posted:That’s what I tried to do last Friday and I was told it wasn’t “the kind of stuff we do on this day”. Supposedly the day is used to learn stuff that has nothing to do with work, and god help you if you do anything work related on that day, cause no one else will and they’ll send out an email reminder reminding people not to do work related stuff on those free days because the people doing non-work related stuff will feel bad. Stop trying to scab
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Nov 5, 2019 02:37
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If you do work on a day for personal growth you will absolutely make management start expecting 5-days-of-work per week. You’ve complained about this before, but your teammates are right and it’s super lovely to basically throw everybody else’s personal development under the bus
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Nov 5, 2019 02:39
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 Alright, jesus, sorry.
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Nov 5, 2019 03:51
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Munkeymon posted:Making people's job easier with tooling and features that the company wouldn't otherwise allow dev time for is generally a lifg posted:(By the way, has it ever been shown that quantifying items on your resume matters? I’ve been recommending it to people for years, but I don’t know if it matters.) Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 05:05
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Vulture Culture posted:If absolutely zero of those things are in your backlog already, are any of them important whatsoever?  basically.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:21
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Vulture Culture posted:If absolutely zero of those things are in your backlog already, are any of them important whatsoever? Going from my own experience, there are usually quite few things that are pretty important to users that don't end up in the backlog for a variety of reasons. It could be an opportunity to grow some goodwill.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:25
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:Going from my own experience, there are usually quite few things that are pretty important to users that don't end up in the backlog for a variety of reasons. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Almost certainly, since half the stuff in a backlog doesn't matter anyway at any given point in time, and half the time people are working on important things that aren't in any backlog. It's just there to provide a story to some manager, perhaps your own, that the team is aware of a request or complaint. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 05:20
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Oh man I’m so slow at responding to things... New job honeymoon is still ongoing (or this is just what having a good job is actually like and I’m still overjoyed to not be scolded and undermined all the time). PhantomOfTheCopier posted:First, congratulations! It's so nice finding a good spot. Thanks! And good luck in your search and be sure to tell everyone you know that you’re looking for something new. My current job was never an officially listed opening. I met my now-boss via connections under non-job-search-related circumstances and she became very keen on hiring me once she learned about my skill set and that I was looking to jump ship from my old job. quote:I don't claim to have anything quite as egregious as you, but my team is consistently playing this game of "we approve of all the design details... (work done)... we don't approve of what our packages require to ship those design details". Given that I don't see this with other code reviews, I'm starting to feel singled out. Heh, tell me about it. I actually started building a document to record instances of me getting singled out and nitpicked to death in the review process with specific examples and comparisons to similar stuff in other developers’ merge requests that did not get the same level of scrutiny. And that time when my boss ordered me to approve one of the new kid’s MRs despite it still being full of lovely and wrong CSS. I bailed before having a chance to present it to anyone, though. quote:Yeah "if there's always a problem when you're around the problem is you", but in this case I think I'm just not the best person to support the team's passions at this time. I thought the problem was me for a long time (too long), but then I came to realize that all the being poo poo on and set up for failure was what was wearing me down and making me resentful and defensive. So by the time the patronization and the unfair review process reared their ugly heads, I was at the end of my rope in terms of being able to handle all the crap being thrown at me and the only way to make the situation better was to remove myself from it. As for the part where I change jobs and go from being a slow and bad codemonkey with zero decision-making power to calling the shots for the front end and being a productive and good code contributor, I think I was just living down to the abysmal expectations at my old job, and I didn’t go the “well I’ll just prove them all wrong  ” route because I was too worn down from the combo of being poo poo on, constant fear of being undermined/thrown under the bus, and imposter syndrome so I just embodied the lovely dev they made me out to be. And it wasn’t like there was any opportunity to shine when you’re set up for failure from the start and risked eroding your standing if you said anything and they disagreed with you.I guess the moral of the story is that a negative environment where there is no psychological safety can be extremely detrimental to productivity and morale. Even if it doesn’t seem THAT bad, I’ve found that environments can keep degrading if management doesn’t do anything about bad undercurrents. Case in point, here’s how our most recent retro went:  : *pulls up Pivotal* Okay guys sprint’s over and we got a lot done, especially towards implementing the new feature for [customer] - they will really like this next update! Looks like our velocity is down a bit, but we hit some snags in review and [junior dev] has been out of town. Still, great job on everything you did accomplish!While at my old job, they’d almost always go like this:  : *pulls up Jira analytics report* Once again we’ve failed to complete all the points we committed to. Coming up short this sprint has pushed out our estimated release date by another five days and it’s going to get further delayed if we don’t reverse the downward trend in our velocity. This is unacceptable.Guess which one inspired us to get more stuff done and which one didn’t. PS: sorry if all I seem to do here is rail on my old job. I think I’m still processing all the poo poo I went through and it’s cathartic to write down my thoughts on it.
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Nov 6, 2019 06:21
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Don’t feel bad, we’ve all had that soulless corporate job. The specific flavor is a bit different but it’s always unmistakably the flavor of poo poo. I actually had a good convo with a coworker the other day in a similar vein. The manager at my current job is a real nice guy who is respectful of your time and capabilities. The general workplace is a much more positive workplace and I feel like my contributions are meaningful. There’s a great sense of camaraderie, et cetera. Meanwhile the old job felt like I was padding out some velocity stat that nobody actually cares about and I was sick of the poor project management leading to several missed requirement projects. Plus there was the awkward time I was quite openly job hunting as they were paying me pennies at the time, and their response instead of paying me more was to take me to lunch and say “We value you.” Let me tell you, that does not make you feel valued. So yeah, getting treated like a worker drone is horrible. It’s no wonder some companies struggle to get anything meaningful done.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:57
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Vulture Culture posted:Help me, here. You have things that are important enough to users that you actually work on them to the exclusion of something else. In what world are these not important enough to ever land in your backlog? The original context of my comment was about internal users. Generally, they're simply trained on The System as-is and that's that. Their managers don't care about or possibly actively don't want quality of life features added as long as things Just Work and they don't have to do more training on new features. Because time spent training is not time spent Getting Work Done, you see. These factors prevent any user desires from making it to the backlog and a sort of jubilee time where I can make up my own definition of what might add value to the company could empower me to help those internal users. But, if we're supposed to work on non-company stuff, then I've got some stuff in GitHub that could use a refresh 
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Nov 6, 2019 15:56
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Vulture Culture posted:Help me, here. You have things that are important enough to users that you actually work on them to the exclusion of something else. In what world are these not important enough to ever land in your backlog? Organisations aren't perfect, stuff that needs to bubble up gets stuck etc. etc. We had a process improvement round which included end-users, simple stuff that would make their lives much easier and wasn't that hard to implement for us were routinely coming up. Usually it got stuck inside their own departments where the manager decided not to tell us because because they didn't think it was that important. Which is why I usually go out of my way to just talk with people who actually use the system. Munkeymon posted:The original context of my comment was about internal users. Generally, they're simply trained on The System as-is and that's that. Their managers don't care about or possibly actively don't want quality of life features added as long as things Just Work and they don't have to do more training on new features. Because time spent training is not time spent Getting Work Done, you see. These factors prevent any user desires from making it to the backlog and a sort of jubilee time where I can make up my own definition of what might add value to the company could empower me to help those internal users. Exactly. Is it bad? sure. Could we do better? ofcourse. Is it an anomaly? probably not. Mr Shiny Pants fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 19:27
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Vulture Culture posted:If absolutely zero of those things are in your backlog already, are any of them important whatsoever? oh hey lol PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Almost certainly, since half the stuff in a backlog doesn't matter anyway at any given point in time, and half the time people are working on important things that aren't in any backlog. It's just there to provide a story to some manager, perhaps your own, that the team is aware of a request or complaint.
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Nov 6, 2019 19:28
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:Organisations aren't perfect, stuff that needs to bubble up gets stuck etc. etc. We had a process improvement round which included end-users, simple stuff that would make their lives much easier and wasn't that hard to implement for us were routinely coming up. If you can sit down with the users and screencap their workflow. You’d be amazed at the inefficiencies in it m
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Nov 7, 2019 01:47
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Found on a site for freelance work:quote:I'm looking for someone who can build an 'easy-to-use' test tool (SaaS). Broadly speaking, this is a tool in which you can draw a simple flowchart and from there generate the test cases based on a certain test coverage (for example, each combination of 2 test paths minimum 1x). This is a so-called Model Based Testing tool. In addition, some features must be added, such as indicating the category of the test cases, exporting the test cases to Excel and a simple procedure for purchasing the tool.
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Nov 9, 2019 22:24
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So ya'll don't get your 20% by overestimating every project by 20% and collecting the remaining time left over?
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Nov 10, 2019 06:27
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Anyone using GitLab for project management? We use TargetProcess but it's complicated and feature bloat-y, we use maybe 1% of the features and no one is putting in the effort to understand how we could use it better. We're reaching the end of the trial. There's one person who vocally wants Jira and no one else seems to care. After looking at GitLab's features in this area it seems like it may be a simple option that naturally interfaces with our code, CI, and code review practices. We're mostly research types doing some combination of R&D and development, so it's difficult to settle on the right process. We're trying to do more or less a simple Kanban so we don't need a lot. We are actively trying to improve our process which for sure is the larger issue and maybe I'll get into that here later, but at the moment I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts tool-wise on GitLab.
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Nov 10, 2019 14:31
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Get your process right first, then select a tool that fits enough to support the process and makes the process easier to manage. If you cannot find a tool, you might want to rethink your process. If you make the process fit your tooling, you might want to rethink your organisation.
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Nov 10, 2019 14:40
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Point taken, that's exactly why we're only using 1% of TargetProcess and looking to simplify our tool to match our process rather than complexify our process to match our tool.
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Nov 10, 2019 17:28
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My company uses GitLab. It's pretty similar to GitHub, but it's got some nice features that I'm not sure GitHub does. One being milestones: issues can be lumped together into arbitrary collections, and displays them in columns of unassigned, assigned, and assigned+closed (so, backlog -> in progress -> completed) which is really useful. We also have a really nice CI setup in GitLab where any feature branch can be set up as its own staging environment with a single click and automated teardown. It doesn't seem too bloated either, and a lot of stuff can be automated / manipulated by script. For example, upload a .md file with a certain filename to your repo, and every issue tagged with the filename will use it as a template. It does have more outages than GitHub does, but they usually resolve them pretty quickly. Kind of annoying.
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Nov 11, 2019 01:42
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Single biggest issues we had with Gitlab at my last place were: * Issue relationships are very basic. You can have a related issue but you can't have a dependent issue. * Features are implemented without considering how they interact. For example, at the time at least, if you pre-create your MR when you start developing for an issue and that project has required approvers, those approvers will get notifications every time someone pushes to the branch for that MR.
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Nov 11, 2019 06:21
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Thanks! We already use GitLab for Git and CI, and really like it, just considering using it for tracking user stories/milestones/etc as well. Sounds like there are some warts but nothing necessarily deal-breaking.
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Nov 11, 2019 09:37
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Why would you pre create a merge request at the beginning of feature development before you are ready to request the code be merged?
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Nov 11, 2019 09:37
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Not the op and Azure not Gitlab, but I sometimes create a draft or early PR when the branch is still under active development. It's a convenient place to @ people and link them to whatever you're working on. They can add comments directly inline in code if they want. In general I just think it's a pretty decent place to discuss whatever you're doing right now with context.
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Nov 11, 2019 09:56
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captkirk posted:For example, at the time at least, if you pre-create your MR when you start developing for an issue and that project has required approvers, those approvers will get notifications every time someone pushes to the branch for that MR. Dontnyou iust havento prefix the name of the MR with WIP: and it doesnt pester the approvers/fire the webhooks
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Nov 11, 2019 10:06
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We just switched to gitlab for project tracking and I'm not a fan. We came from a system that properly used epics, user stories, tasks, and sprints. That system wasn't directly connected to the code though so some teams didn't find it useful. If you want more than one kanban per project (high level boards in a group or something) you need gitlab premium, which is extra $. If you want epics and roadmaps, it's insane $$$$. Otherwise you need to figure out how to smash your epics into milestones but also use issues for sprints, which gets crazy convoluted very fast. The leaders of my org are very guilty of picking the tool and building the process around it.
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Nov 11, 2019 13:57
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Well, the worst possible thing that could happen has happened: I've lost access to my GitHub account. Went on vacation for two weeks, came back to find out that my 2FA authentication codes no longer worked and neither do my recovery codes. I've already made a new account so I can continue working but I really hope that somehow GH support gives me my account back. I have no idea how this could possibly happen.
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Nov 11, 2019 14:18
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Judge Schnoopy posted:We just switched to gitlab for project tracking and I'm not a fan. We came from a system that properly used epics, user stories, tasks, and sprints. That system wasn't directly connected to the code though so some teams didn't find it useful. Ugh I didn't realize roadmaps are in the highest level... fuuck that's insane pricing. Edit: they are thinking of throwing us plebs a bone at least: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/31840 SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Nov 11, 2019 |
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Nov 11, 2019 17:37
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SurgicalOntologist posted:There's one person who vocally wants Jira Brave of them to be so open about their mental illness
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Nov 11, 2019 17:58
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fluppet posted:Dontnyou iust havento prefix the name of the MR with WIP: and it doesnt pester the approvers/fire the webhooks Not sure, wasn't my team having the problem but the default behavior is to prepend WIP and they still had the problem. It's possible they were intentionally shooting themselves in the foot though.
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Nov 11, 2019 19:06
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This is all interesting to me. Next year I'll partly take over a project of 3500 man days (core team 12 people). Currently, they're using bitbucket and jenkins for git/CI and excel for Sprint planning, organisation and backlog stuff. Obviously, I don't want to use excel, but am unsure what the best alternative is. The company promotes Jira a lot, but I've never used it. In previous projects, I simply used a task list in confluence, which worked quite well so far, but I've never done a project anywhere as big as this new one. We could use trello (or some other website) if we use the free version and make sure we don't put anything confidential on it. Any advice?
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Nov 11, 2019 19:08
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