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Feel like one of the downsides of self organizing teams is that someone can not do any work for a month and it’s no ones explicit problem. We had someone remote ghost on us like this a couple of years ago and it took way longer to fire him than it should have. Honestly didn’t even feel like they fired him as much as went, “oops, we should stop paying you.”
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Dec 7, 2020 13:28
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Queen Victorian posted:I was reading this like “lol don’t doxx me” but then I got to the no PR in 30 days and.. yikes. My productivity has definitely suffered due to WFH and overall quarantine-induced malaise and lethargy, but not nearly that badly. We usually each do a couple PRs a week on average. Sometimes I don’t finish stuff in time for review but I make sure the WIP branch is pushed so coworkers can see what I’m working on. Having (very brief) daily stand ups and weekly review meetings is helpful for keeping us on track and aware of what everyone is working on. We definitely have standup and meet every two weeks to talk over interesting problems we're currently working through, but even so nobody has accountability. Like more than a handful of times people just lie in standup and say they did PR review yesterday and I'm sitting there with a confused look on my face because my PR has been sitting for 2 days, unreviewed. Our team size finally reached double digits, so I feel like a lot of the problem is bystander effect. Everyone thinks someone else will do review and they won't have to.
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Dec 7, 2020 14:54
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Do you not request specific reviewers when you submit a PR? Everywhere I've been has done it that way.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:01
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no but maybe that’s how we should be doing it. any place i’ve worked at the expectation is anyone should be able to review 
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Dec 7, 2020 15:04
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Grump posted:no but maybe that’s how we should be doing it. any place i’ve worked at the expectation is anyone should be able to review Where I work anyone 'can' review but I'd not invite a front end dev to check my sql code is up to snuff. And I doubt they'd invite me to check their front end javascript.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:12
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well lol yes obviously I'm not talking about the whole development department, but my immediate team
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Dec 7, 2020 15:29
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There are some places where that wouldn't be obvious.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:36
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My team just has [any team member] as mandatory reviewer on all PRs, but we're only four devs and I set up a Teams channel that autoposts whenever a new PR appears so we're all aware. Only possible issue is probably that we can approve our own PRs, but nobody does that except when a previous PR brought some obvious mistake into main and it needs quick fixing.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:49
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What kind of crazy world do people live in where reviewing a PR is a valid use of an entire day?
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Dec 7, 2020 19:04
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Grump posted:no but maybe that’s how we should be doing it. any place i’ve worked at the expectation is anyone should be able to review this kinda changes everything. I wouldn't review many PRs either if nobody was putting them into my to-do list.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:10
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prom candy posted:this kinda changes everything. I wouldn't review many PRs either if nobody was putting them into my to-do list. idk it was never a problem at my last job. People always made time in the morning and at the end of the day because it was a small team and nobody wanted to be a dickhead. I guess the rules change when you have a bigger team. WHATEVER just let me complain!!
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Dec 7, 2020 19:17
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Grump posted:idk it was never a problem at my last job. People always made time in the morning and at the end of the day because it was a small team and nobody wanted to be a dickhead. The bigger your team is, the bigger the bystander effect and the more likely it is that $(min_reviewers * 1.5) people will handle all the reviews. It is real and painful and yeah I've been there with the team member who's every day standup update was "Code Merge" and it's a bad time. Sucks, friend. Hope you can figure out a solution.
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Dec 7, 2020 21:15
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Grump posted:anybody else's coworkers getting extremely loving lazy with WFH during covid? I have one dude on my team who hasn't submitted a PR in 30 days and hasn't done a PR review in 32 days. miraculously, he hasn't been fired yet don't let your managers failings become your headaches. if this coworker is holding you back in some way (like not reviewing prs you need their approval on or sandbagging some work your work relies on) bring it up with your manager and your skip level if your manager doesn't acknowledge or act on it. otherwise let other people worry about that poo poo; there's no good reason for you to be concerned with how hard your peers are working
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Dec 7, 2020 22:20
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Having a coworker who doesn't do anything is actually useful because you get to find out exactly what management does with that. If you have a coworker who is allowed to do zero appreciable work in a month without getting any kind of management attention, you can probably assume that your job is equally as safe. You can also start to see patterns of incompetence at various levels - the coworker isn't your problem, the manager is. I'm not saying you should do anything in particular with that information - a friend once told me that a large corporate job with zero oversight can be a good choice if you want to just chill out for a year or two. Or build your resume, learning whatever you want. There is some risk that a company with management that sucks this bad could be circling the drain. A different friend got burned by that, because he liked being able to do whatever he felt like, and didn't notice that the management incompetence went all the way up. The company laid everyone off after bungling their largest contract.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:23
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the talent deficit posted:there's no good reason for you to be concerned with how hard your peers are working Spoken like someone who has never had a dependency on one of these peers
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Dec 7, 2020 23:25
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Grump posted:We definitely have standup and meet every two weeks to talk over interesting problems we're currently working through, but even so nobody has accountability. Like more than a handful of times people just lie in standup and say they did PR review yesterday and I'm sitting there with a confused look on my face because my PR has been sitting for 2 days, unreviewed. Standup is supposed to be a place where you state both what you're working on (optional), and what's blocking you (important). If no one has reviewed your PR, you should be calling that out then and there.
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Dec 8, 2020 00:14
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ChickenWing posted:Spoken like someone who has never had a dependency on one of these peers i explicitly said to talk to your manager and skip level if this is the case. beyond that, being concerned with someone else's job performance is not your concern and letting it stress you out or upset you isn't going to accomplish anything. it sucks, but it's not your problem to solve
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Dec 8, 2020 00:36
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ChickenWing posted:Spoken like someone who has never had a dependency on one of these peers just fork them
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Dec 8, 2020 05:46
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Everyone likes to complain about useless standups - is it just me that hates retro more? The only good retros I’ve ever had have been timeboxed to five minutes so people can only say really important things the entire team needs to hear. But every lead likes to organise them for an hour and the scrum alliance site suggests it should take even longer. IMO there are only two types of problems: things that someone can solve, in which case you should tell that person directly; and things nobody can solve, in which case why bother bringing it up at all? If I could remove one meeting from my sprint it would be this. At least long standups aren’t just a stream of negativity 
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Dec 8, 2020 13:51
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Everyone likes to complain about useless standups - is it just me that hates retro more? The only good retros I’ve ever had have been timeboxed to five minutes so people can only say really important things the entire team needs to hear. But every lead likes to organise them for an hour and the scrum alliance site suggests it should take even longer. IMO there are only two types of problems: things that someone can solve, in which case you should tell that person directly; and things nobody can solve, in which case why bother bringing it up at all? If I could remove one meeting from my sprint it would be this. At least long standups aren’t just a stream of negativity I think it really depends on process buy-in, by teammates and management. Retros are my pet agile project, because a good retro process is so helpful for making sure everything is running smoothly for your team. I've always enjoyed the "What went well/What didn't go so well/Wouldn't it be nice if..." format, because it starts with shoutouts and good feels, and ends on a more upbeat note. You're going to have more "didn't go so well" more often than not, but so long as you've got a good manager who helps you turn these into action items, then actually acts on those action items, you'll see a lot of those change over time. The important thing is to make sure you've got enough time so that everyone on your team can be heard, and to make sure that everyone on your team feels empowered to speak up. If you do a live retro, that might mean specifically asking people who don't speak up often (not awkwardly, just mention "hey X we haven't heard from you, would you like to say anything?). If you use post-its/etc, tell everyone you'd like at least two things, if possible. I follow the "one hour of retro per week of sprint" guideline and for a team of 8 people that was usually the sweet spot to make sure we could have productive discussions. Sprints ended on a Friday, so we'd usually book the retro for 2pm and everyone would grab a beverage and go relax in the meeting room, and you'd basically bug out for the weekend once the meeting wrapped. It worked out really well for us, and we were able to build an agile process that worked for everyone.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:31
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Third type of problem is one you don’t know how to solve.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:32
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smackfu posted:Third type of problem is one you don’t know how to solve. That’s true, though I count that as type 0. You know (or strongly suspect) that it can be solved, and you must have some idea who can help you, at least to level of “the X team” or “I dunno, but my manager probably knows”. At that point you can reach out by yourself. ChickenWing posted:Sprints ended on a Friday, so we'd usually book the retro for 2pm and everyone would grab a beverage and go relax in the meeting room, and you'd basically bug out for the weekend once the meeting wrapped. Am I right in thinking this is a lot of the value people get out of retro: it’s mandatory structured team hangout time?
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Dec 8, 2020 15:19
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Am I right in thinking this is a lot of the value people get out of retro: it’s mandatory structured team hangout time? Could be. There's definitely value in communal griping time. I wouldn't necessarily call it team hangout time, but I tried to cultivate a relaxed atmosphere so folks felt comfortable talking about even trivial stuff.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:46
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i like long retros but that’s because i actually enjoy complaining, unironically
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Dec 8, 2020 18:01
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I like retros that lead to positive change and improvement. I don't like the retros with my current team because they take a million hours, we write some action points, and then we don't even look at those until the next retro where we do the same waste of time once more. But then I'm on a huge "agile" team where business people are for some reason included and we basically do all the ceremonies wrong. So that's nice.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:16
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I’m in the actually enjoy retros camp (probably because I also like griping). At my current job, they are productive (we can discuss issues frankly and come up with solutions for next time) and I actually like everyone on the dev team and genuinely enjoy spending time with them. Also full-blown retros happen pretty infrequently with how we schedule project cycles. Weekly reviews serve as mini retros as needed. Totally different story at my previous job. Retros happened every other week and were excruciating - pretty much just us sitting there for two hours getting scolded for failing to deliver after being set up to fail. The lead dev was a dour, antisocial guy who managed to create a profoundly miserable and unsupportive environment. Didn’t help that one of the other devs was an insufferable sexist prick and the rest of them, while decent people, I just didn’t click with. In conclusion, retros are hell when your team sucks and you have zero psychological safety - no one you can trust to back you up and no one you can trust to not throw you under the bus.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:58
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Queen Victorian posted:I actually like everyone on the dev team and genuinely enjoy spending time with them. This is nice to read after all the poo poo you were posting last year about your terrible job
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Dec 8, 2020 18:59
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Our retros were always us passive-aggressively saying "people" needed to pay more attention to JIRA and less time investigating issues other teams were having and the one QA person we were all talking about not realizing we were specifically talking about how they were constantly looking into other teams' automated testing failures while our "In Review" column was over its limit by 100%. None of us wanted to be the one to turn straight to the person and go, "Look, you are dropping the ball here." (And obviously, the rest of us were also dropping our share of the ball by not being more direct, although I think the few times one of us got frustrated enough to go, "Hey, QA Person, look at JIRA, ffs!" the improvement lasted for like five minutes before going back to normal.)
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Dec 8, 2020 19:37
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prom candy posted:This is nice to read after all the poo poo you were posting last year about your terrible job Agreed Woebin posted:I like retros that lead to positive change and improvement. I don't like the retros with my current team because they take a million hours, we write some action points, and then we don't even look at those until the next retro where we do the same waste of time once more. Agilefall
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Dec 8, 2020 20:06
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CPColin posted:Our retros were always us passive-aggressively saying "people" needed to pay more attention to JIRA and less time investigating issues other teams were having and the one QA person we were all talking about not realizing we were specifically talking about how they were constantly looking into other teams' automated testing failures while our "In Review" column was over its limit by 100%. None of us wanted to be the one to turn straight to the person and go, "Look, you are dropping the ball here." (And obviously, the rest of us were also dropping our share of the ball by not being more direct, although I think the few times one of us got frustrated enough to go, "Hey, QA Person, look at JIRA, ffs!" the improvement lasted for like five minutes before going back to normal.) Why wasn't that part of stand up as well? The story is being blocked from being accepted because it's in review should be brought up every single day...
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Dec 8, 2020 21:57
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It was, pretty much constantly.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:04
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Volmarias posted:Agilefall
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Dec 9, 2020 01:04
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I find the retro to be the most useful regular meeting, and I think it's specifically because of the "what went well / what went poorly / what we're doing about it" structure.
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Dec 9, 2020 04:11
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CPColin posted:Our retros were always us passive-aggressively saying "people" needed to pay more attention to JIRA and less time investigating issues other teams were having and the one QA person we were all talking about not realizing we were specifically talking about how they were constantly looking into other teams' automated testing failures while our "In Review" column was over its limit by 100%. None of us wanted to be the one to turn straight to the person and go, "Look, you are dropping the ball here." (And obviously, the rest of us were also dropping our share of the ball by not being more direct, although I think the few times one of us got frustrated enough to go, "Hey, QA Person, look at JIRA, ffs!" the improvement lasted for like five minutes before going back to normal.) Yeah, I’m absolutely guilty of using retro for vagueposting. I think that’s all I use it for actually (all problems are people problems at heart). If I felt comfortable telling my manager “hey, could you have a word with x about y” I’d 100% rather do that instead. I don’t think it’s productive or polite to call people out in public. Because of the vagueposting, there are no concrete outcomes, since no individual is being told to do anything. Those who find retros useful - how do you tackle this? Whenever it was my turn to run retros in $previousjob I just had “good” and “bad” columns and after a point was raised I immediately asked “what action should we take about that and who needs to do it?”. Everyone hated it and the action points still didn’t get done
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Dec 9, 2020 11:41
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Yeah, I’m absolutely guilty of using retro for vagueposting. I think that’s all I use it for actually (all problems are people problems at heart). If I felt comfortable telling my manager “hey, could you have a word with x about y” I’d 100% rather do that instead. I don’t think it’s productive or polite to call people out in public. Because of the vagueposting, there are no concrete outcomes, since no individual is being told to do anything. Those who find retros useful - how do you tackle this? I talk to people privately and offline if I have an issue - the retro meeting is not when people should be realizing they hosed up. In the retro meeting itself, either what will happen is that the person who I talked to will bring up the problem itself in the retro, or at the very least, I'll bring up the issue without naming names (in the meeting), but the person and perhaps team leads will know specifically what I'm talking about because I mentioned it previously.
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Dec 9, 2020 12:39
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A team retro is immediately ruined as soon as you add anyone A) from outside the team or B) with some sort of power relationship towards members of your team. It can only work if everyone in the meeting is at the same level in the company hierarchy. If your 'team lead' (a vague term that can have multiple meanings) is your manager, they should not be at the retro at all. The most important thing about organizing any retrospective is to create a non-blaming, safe environment, where everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts without backlash. By the way: if you run into consistent cross-team issues, organizing a cross-team retro can be very helpful, but this should never replace the regular team retro, because the regular team retro always needs to be a safe place to talk about issues within your team. In order to not get your schedule filled with retros, cross-team retros should not repeat (just do them once to resolve whatever actual problems you're running into) and don't need all the team members to be present, as long as those who can do something about the issues are there.
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Dec 9, 2020 12:57
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Cugel the Clever posted:How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. When someone agrees with me, sometimes I don't believe they actually agree, so I repeat myself. This stems from insecurity. Other times I don't think they understand the impact of a change, so I repeat to drive the point home and to cover my rear end. Ither fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 17:10
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Carbon dioxide posted:A team retro is immediately ruined as soon as you add anyone A) from outside the team or B) with some sort of power relationship towards members of your team. This is so incredibly important I considered emptyquoting it. If your manager must be in the meeting, they should be contributing almost exclusively shoutouts and "I will address this". Anything negative from them undermines the whole process
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Dec 9, 2020 18:14
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We used to do retros at the end of projects. They helped fix lots of little nagging issues and once lets us give an outside contracting company the boot. I guess other people do them every sprint?
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Dec 9, 2020 20:13
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We do ours once a quarter but our scrum is scrum in name only 
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Dec 9, 2020 20:18
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