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MrQueasy posted:Several agile manifesto signers have come out in the last few years saying that points (and perhaps estimation in general) are a mistake that they regret and would never recommend using them. I think Ron Jeffries refers to them as "Razor Blades for Babies". good theyre a loving stupid waste of everyones time. best (quickest and most accurate) way to estimate is using historical averages but nobody ever wants to do that because its not practical or granular at all. leads us back to just using a best/middle/worst case time based estimate that can then be turned into t-shirt sizes for shorthand.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:11
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Just overestimate the time to complete each task by two weeks then blame someone else when you're still not done on time.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:14
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The most intelligent way to use points is just to declare that one point is one hour, and that anything over eight hours isn't broken down well enough to estimate. See Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence for the reasoning behind that.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:31
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*gets into some shitass meeting where the RA makes all the devs estimate how long they think a task will take by using cards numbered Ace through King*
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Apr 7, 2021 00:36
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titty_baby_ posted:I'm not a specialized IT person by any means (my job isn't really related to computer touching at all, I just know how to Google things) and if they had actually asked our in house IT department for any help at all making this smaller they wouldve figured it out just as quickly as me. That changes absolutely nothing. Nothing. You never ever say how easy it is if you want to be a third party contract after you don't work there. You never offer to show someone how you do it. You charge at least 200 an hour and a minimum of a day at a time. if you want to come in and contract then under no circumstances do you ever give any unnecessary info to a client. If you know how to do it and no one there does that makes you a specialist. Act like it and get paid for it. most importantly, fake some self confidence about it too, even if you are googling everything while you do it. Be the authority even if you don't think you are. Make the offer to do this for them, what can it hurt?
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Apr 7, 2021 00:42
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Kullik posted:Brought up that the morning meetings we have every day are a waste of time most days cause its just the Tl reading out the handover email we can all just read ourselves, he put it to a vote to skip the meeting and everyone voted to keep it but me citing that they just like the catchup and chat. From a while back, but if everyone around you is always the rear end in a top hat, maybe they're not the rear end in a top hat here. Zero One posted:I still have to attend virtual meetings where the boss plays music and expect people to dance. I still feel I'm coming out at a loss. I can no longer tell if this is a metaphor or literal. BitBasher posted:That changes absolutely nothing. Nothing. You never ever say how easy it is if you want to be a third party contract after you don't work there. You never offer to show someone how you do it. You charge at least 200 an hour and a minimum of a day at a time. if you want to come in and contract then under no circumstances do you ever give any unnecessary info to a client. If you know how to do it and no one there does that makes you a specialist. Act like it and get paid for it. most importantly, fake some self confidence about it too, even if you are googling everything while you do it. Be the authority even if you don't think you are. Very much this. Like the aphorism about the engineer giving an itemized bill as "bolt tightened: 25¢, knowing which bolt to tighten: $4999.75" you aren't selling the time, you're also selling your expertise and ability. I made the mistake of undervaluing myself early in my career, never again.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:48
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Volmarias posted:
I assure you it is literal. And it is always Hamilton.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:58
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Volmarias posted:Very much this. Like the aphorism about the engineer giving an itemized bill as "bolt tightened: 25¢, knowing which bolt to tighten: $4999.75" you aren't selling the time, you're also selling your expertise and ability. I made the mistake of undervaluing myself early in my career, never again. As an example of this I do work in computers. For years I have had a friend that runs a small business (~20 total computers, like 12 are actually used daily for real business, only maybe 4 are critical) here and I have heard him complain how horrible the computer support business is that supported their company. Shot didn't work right the DJ computer literally hard crashed in the middle of a weekend night, they lost weeks of data when a desktops crashed because their Quickbooks files were on a desktop that apparently had no backups, and the tech blamed the user for the failure. The place was in a shambles. Half the computers were running windows 7 in mid 2020 The network had 2 VLANS which were misconfigured and could talk to each other, one for the credit card processor and one for literally everything else. Phones on Wi-Fi, the DJ computers, the office PCs running quick books, the other Verifone credit card processors and ATM's, thermostats, ethernet stripper poles and IoT devices as far as the eye could see. You could ping the POS units from the cellphone you just connected to Wi-Fi on. I learned all this because the manager asked me to build them a computer for the DJ because the DJ computer kept crashing, and their tech told them there wasn't really anything they could do, their diagnostic tools didn't show anything wrong. He was a friend so I put the PC together and it worked like a champ. He was a friend so I did it for no cost, 1200 total for the parts, way overbuilt. I started asking questions about how their support works and decided what the gently caress, if support was that bad, I would pitch him an offer to support the place. I asked him what he paid the current company and the number he told me was FIVE TIMES my guess. I was prepared to do it with no problem for pocket change in my pocket by comparison. I moved my pitch way, way up after that, and I got the job. This is why I am now a small business owner as a side job. It took several months of working to build their site into something that doesn't suck, but it was absolutely worth it. For bonus points, the contractor was paid a monthly fee that included zero actual on site hours to fix anything. They were charging 4 to 12 k for replacing a single desktop PC. 880$ to replace a bad hard drive. All on top of their monthly. the contractor was making a thousand or two a month on average on top of their monthly fee for delivering absolutely poo poo service. I was astounded how much the company was paying. It's insane. And they are happy to pay me!
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Apr 7, 2021 01:22
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Zero One posted:I still have to attend virtual meetings where the boss plays music and expect people to dance. I still feel I'm coming out at a loss. Can you explain this in excruciating detail? I really don’t understand what the whole thing is like and how it works and what he says and whatnot, and I’m extremely curious
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Apr 7, 2021 01:25
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Used to work in a startup where the Zoom all-hands meetings every month ended with the "social media / image expert" subjecting us to a sort of tradition: she'd pull out an LP and play a track that was supposedly of some significance for that month or whatever. It wasn't necessarily a bad choice of song, but having to fake smile and slow nod to your buttrock at the end of the meeting on a Friday for about 2 minutes before someone breaks the occasionally cutting zoom audio with "well, good weekend everyone" was tortuous.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:27
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ultrafilter posted:The most intelligent way to use points is just to declare that one point is one hour, and that anything over eight hours isn't broken down well enough to estimate. See Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence for the reasoning behind that. i agree but breaking down tasks is also work that takes effort from a someone who understands it (who would probably prefer to do the actual work than ticket it). we're going to need to stop and put some points on that work !!!
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Apr 7, 2021 01:30
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BitBasher posted:For bonus points, the contractor was paid a monthly fee that included zero actual on site hours to fix anything. They were charging 4 to 12 k for replacing a single desktop PC. 880$ to replace a bad hard drive. All on top of their monthly. the contractor was making a thousand or two a month on average on top of their monthly fee for delivering absolutely poo poo service. I was astounded how much the company was paying. It's insane. And they are happy to pay me! The business world is very funny when you discover the guts of it. At my old job we were subcontracted to do a thing, the nature of which is irrelevant, for a string of government facilities. The main contract was held by intermediary, whom basically just acted as a middleman organizer for all various contractors that might be working at this string of government facilities, so that the government folk could enjoy only having one point of contact. This intermediary did not do any actual, physical work at any of facilities. This intermediary also sucked rear end. It is potentially not really their fault, because the nature of the arrangement meant one source was expected to deal with construction trades, electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment guys, IT personnel, loving everything under the sun these facilities might need. And obviously it is impossible for any one person to be knowledgeable about all that poo poo. Anyway, one year they finally lost the re-bid on the contract. Government wasn't happy with them anymore and gave it to someone else. Without the contract, the old intermediary had to lay off all the folks we had been working with. The new company had no existing physical presence anywhere in the state. So they just basically sent one guy out to be manager and then hired all the same staff that just got laid off from the old company. For all the real effect on human society you might as well have just hung a new sign on the same building. Then the new company hired us back to do the same job we had been doing before. So from the outside perspective, the government had dropped a contractor it was unhappy with and hired a new contractor to replace them. In real terms, nothing had changed except but a sign on the door and one new manager at the intermediary. This is the economy lol. Meme Poker Party fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 01:36
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*leaves a copy of The Mythical Man-Month on everyone's desk*
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Apr 7, 2021 01:40
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BitBasher posted:As an example of this I do work in computers. For years I have had a friend that runs a small business (~20 total computers, like 12 are actually used daily for real business, only maybe 4 are critical) here and I have heard him complain how horrible the computer support business is that supported their company. Shot didn't work right the DJ computer literally hard crashed in the middle of a weekend night, they lost weeks of data when a desktops crashed because their Quickbooks files were on a desktop that apparently had no backups, and the tech blamed the user for the failure. Man what I'd give to have a list of that contractor's other customers
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Apr 7, 2021 01:41
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the other good use of points and the group agreeing to the points to assign is discovering, when people disagree, that a) you defined the requirements poorly and / or b) the team is unbalanced and if you lose the person/people who really know this subject, you're in trouble
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Apr 7, 2021 01:42
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PIZZA.BAT posted:Man what I'd give to have a list of that contractor's other customers Same! They apparently had four contracts locally, and the guy I talked to was bragging that one of them was federal! They wouldn't tell me who they were before we broke the news to them.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:53
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MrQueasy posted:Several agile manifesto signers have come out in the last few years saying that points (and perhaps estimation in general) are a mistake that they regret and would never recommend using them. I think Ron Jeffries refers to them as "Razor Blades for Babies". This describes all of Agile. Their hearts were in the right place, it should work really well, and yet it pretty much never works and just enables even worse management practices than old school waterfall systems. It is truly the communism of project management.
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Apr 7, 2021 02:03
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Code Jockey posted:the other good use of points and the group agreeing to the points to assign is discovering, when people disagree, that a) you defined the requirements poorly and / or b) the team is unbalanced and if you lose the person/people who really know this subject, you're in trouble arent a and b almost always true in practice though
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Apr 7, 2021 02:16
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Good coworker and I want to take over critical task from good coworker on another team, as they are overworked and would be happy for us to manage the process. We would need training to master this skill. Was the other team’s response to: A: approve this as it fixes a problem and eases their workload B: plan to hand the process off to another random team that can’t do it then get mad when questioned about it C: tell the good person on their team to stop doing this process. Don’t tell us or have anyone take over. Let us find out when clients ask why important work isn’t being done D: B & C
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Apr 7, 2021 02:21
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Meme Poker Party posted:The business world is very funny when you discover the guts of it. This also applies to very large government contracts. My experience is in the nuclear waste cleanup business and the national lab complex. Here's the thing, the actual people doing any tangible work are experts at what they do and they've been doing it for a long time, on very poorly documented legacy systems that are dangerously radioactive and leaking. Every 5-10 years the contract to operate a site will come up for rebid. Usually the company changes about that frequently, too. There's no real change onsite, of course - maybe stationary and signs change. But the people doing work stay the same. Senior and upper middle management is rotated in/out from corp HQ so those people change. But no matter who holds the contract currently, those people are always rotated out in 1-2 years. This is nothing but an experience boost on a resume. In the past couple of decades, the new companies winning the contract are often conglomerates/newly formed offshoots of the old companies. It's nothing but a paper shuffle.
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Apr 7, 2021 02:35
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Batterypowered7 posted:Is it too much to ask to get some documents that clearly detail the requirements and the specifications for how everything is supposed to work, and then for the customer to just gently caress off for six to eight months while the developers put it all together? It's impossible to know the requirements and specifications for how things are supposed to work before you build it. I'm not joking, this is well-established. Almost every project that though they were an exception to this, failed.
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Apr 7, 2021 03:04
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thathonkey posted:arent a and b almost always true in practice though and people are just gonna change their vote to match whoever the perceived "strongest" or most senior dev is anyway so lol
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Apr 7, 2021 03:24
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~Coxy posted:It's impossible to know the requirements and specifications for how things are supposed to work before you build it. https://i.imgur.com/NOtSkd3.mp4
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Apr 7, 2021 03:37
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~Coxy posted:It's impossible to know the requirements and specifications for how things are supposed to work before you build it. The problem isn't it being impossible to specify upfront - that's certainly very possible. The problem is that requirements change, often in the middle of development.
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Apr 7, 2021 03:45
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even if you had perfect requirements somehow still have to get your developers (probably of varying strengths and level of interest in what they are building) or whatever to a) understand them completely and b) actually follow them as written, that takes a lot of oversight from technical leads. consider that reading and writing specs is really loving boring.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:05
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Every project has change orders.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:10
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Only management deals in absolutes.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:12
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gently caress the customer.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:12
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A contract company writes the spec, for an AE to do the project, which has aspects farmed out to smaller contract companies. What could go wrong? Oh right, the customer getting something that doesn't work.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:14
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Full Metal Jackass posted:A contract company writes the spec, for an AE to do the project, which has aspects farmed out to smaller contract companies. What could go wrong? Oh right, the customer getting something that doesn't work. But did they get what they ordered?
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Apr 7, 2021 05:12
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Outrail posted:But did they get what they ordered? Lol
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Apr 7, 2021 05:32
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did they get anything
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Apr 7, 2021 05:32
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thathonkey posted:did they get anything No, but the important thing is that they got it on time
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Apr 7, 2021 05:37
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Underpromise, overdeliver. How long will this task take? Almost too long. How long will this task actually take? Long enough for me to gently caress around for a while, and then do it, turning it well before my promised deadline. I are good employee of MegaCorp Inc.
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Apr 7, 2021 05:45
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Dumb poo poo apparently every clinic and hospital we work with does is apparently never open or look at half of the referrals and admission forms we send them, and then email me asking for them one by one over the course of a few days. I have now sent this patients admission form three times to this nurse, and passive aggressively forwarded one of the previous times email to her when she asked again today by email. She replies with "have that one, needed [incredibly common surname] and whatsissurname" Both of which had already been sent to her as soon as we did them. Neither of which she had asked for before this point. Then I got screamed at for a solid few minutes by a patient because the sleep clinic never opened the email with her referral we sent last week, and this is of course my fault.
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Apr 7, 2021 09:06
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vyst posted:Our company doesn’t review historical velocity like at all so every quarter i go back and reduce the velocity of all work items by like 50% so i can keep sprint backlogs small to avoid dev burnout when they have to take on ad hoca and still show a constant upward trend Thank you, you’re a good person. Knowing when to lie your rear end off to protect your team is an important part of leadership. thathonkey posted:i agree but breaking down tasks is also work that takes effort from a someone who understands it (who would probably prefer to do the actual work than ticket it). we're going to need to stop and put some points on that work !!! I know a team that actually does this. Everything becomes a spike and they estimate the spike and then estimate the actual ticket which is the outcome of the spike. Because god forbid someone spends 5 minutes looking into the ticket before the meeting. And god forbid the guy who knows what to do just does the work instead of breaking it down into tickets that a baby could implement - we have to maintain the illusion of devs and tickets being completely interchangeable, otherwise a manager somewhere will start freaking out about bus factor. 
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Apr 7, 2021 09:55
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titty_baby_ posted:I've decided I'm putting in my two weeks Monday. I don't have another job lined up and I don't give a poo poo. I have enough in the bank to ride out the rest of the year if needed, and I'll be able to find temp work quickly enough. I know its stupid to leave a job without another lined up, but im in such a bad place mentally right now that I need to make some sort of change. I dread going into work and have so much anxiety and grief from it that leaving is necessary for my well being. Sorry to reply to an oldish post, but this hit me hard. I was in your exact place a couple of years ago and I did the same thing. Just said gently caress it, quit, and took the next 6 months off travelling by myself around South East Asia. It was the best thing I ever did. Now I'm in a far better job, received a promotion, and am fully supported by my coworkers and managers, just as I support them. Godspeed friend, hope you're feeling much better soon.
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Apr 7, 2021 10:40
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For context, the place I used to work one of the two CEO's (yes, we had two CEO's) punched a client at a work gathering. That's the kind of place we're talking about here.
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Apr 7, 2021 10:44
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Meme Poker Party posted:So from the outside perspective, the government had dropped a contractor it was unhappy with and hired a new contractor to replace them. In real terms, nothing had changed except but a sign on the door and one new manager at the intermediary. Entire EU works this way, employee contracts are maintained across transfers. This is why I have an extremely sweet redundancy package, it's a poison pill for anyone taking us over and restructuring.
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Apr 7, 2021 10:52
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:I know a team that actually does this. Everything becomes a spike and they estimate the spike and then estimate the actual ticket which is the outcome of the spike. Because god forbid someone spends 5 minutes looking into the ticket before the meeting. And god forbid the guy who knows what to do just does the work instead of breaking it down into tickets that a baby could implement - we have to maintain the illusion of devs and tickets being completely interchangeable, otherwise a manager somewhere will start freaking out about bus factor. I die a little inside when I have to make a spike story in refinement and then they size it a 1 or a 2 when you could have just baked that into the implementation story.
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Apr 7, 2021 10:54
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