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oliveoil posted:Am I wrong to be confused here? Just get out of there. Jesus, that's insane.
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Apr 15, 2022 01:39
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oliveoil posted:Am I wrong to be confused here? Have you actually produced anything? From your TL's perspective it probably looks like "new team member was given a task that should take a couple of days, after two weeks they've made no progress and are saying it'll probably take another two weeks". And when you look at it from that perspective yeah, it's a very concerning situation. Especially if you haven't even learned enough about the system to give a better estimate for finding the actual root cause and are just saying "idk, another two weeks maybe?". If your two weeks of investigation has instead produced documents showing what you've learned about the system, what possible causes you've ruled out, and why it's not as simple as everyone assumed, that's much less concerning - it shows you've at least been making steady forward progress on a complicated task and aren't just spinning your wheels doing nothing. Based on your TL wanting a daily checkin I'm guessing you don't have that.
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Apr 15, 2022 02:14
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Setting aside the absurdity of a team generating time estimates for fixes to a codebase they don't have familiarity with, if the estimate was 2-3 days, day 4 of fruitless debugging with nothing accomplished would probably have been a good time to reach out to the TL proactively, as obviously you either needed a revision to the estimate and/or direction on where to go for help. That probably would have been the same POC you contacted anyways, but it's better to make the TL aware of these problems as soon as it was obvious the estimate was not realistic, rather than waiting to loop him in until it had already been blown past 4 times over
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Apr 15, 2022 02:25
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Even earlier than that, if an estimate is 2-3 days and you don't know the root cause by end of day 1, or have a strong reason to believe you're close to identifying it, then you need to revise the estimate and communicate that. In general, you need to be constantly communicating slips in estimates when they become obvious, not when the task is due. The whole thing sounds like a disaster. Why is the PoC debugging? If that's they're responsibility then why aren't they also fixing it? Did you go back and tell them the root cause they identified appears to be incorrect?
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Apr 15, 2022 03:20
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asur posted:Even earlier than that, if an estimate is 2-3 days and you don't know the root cause by end of day 1, or have a strong reason to believe you're close to identifying it, then you need to revise the estimate and communicate that. Yeah, as a (former) tech lead and EM I'd have a problem with feeling like I'm being left in the dark/lack of communication there. Specifics matter, so I could have the wrong take on this but I don't want to find out after the fact when it sounds like you could have or should have known much earlier. Remember the audience: it doesn't so much matter that this is a problem to a tech lead or EM, what matters is that you just made their schedule a mess. If it was identified earlier that this wasn't going to happen a lot of other work may have been changed or delayed in order to get this done, or this could have been backlogged because there were more important things to be working on if it was going to take this long. The later they have any ide of that the more juggling needs to be done. You need to know your audience.
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Apr 15, 2022 03:25
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It's a little suspect that the lead waited so long. I appreciate not wanting to nag your people, but after two weeks' silence on a 3 day estimate, the lead has lost any credibility acting all aghast at the lack of progress. I'm not saying it's an equal share of blame or anything, but in addition to whatever other fuckups, that's bad leadership.
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Apr 15, 2022 04:16
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awesomeolion posted:Thanks for the ideas. I was thinking of setting up two computers and have each one working on a different task and switch back and forth. Feels kinda unrealistic though for some reason. you work in tech, remote into your other PC from your workstation so you don't have as much mental load doing the context switch  "slay the spire" and "forward: escape the fold" are nice little point and click roguelike time wasters that only take 5-20 minutes to do a run-through, and probably run through a remote connection a lot better than other stuff https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766390/FORWARD_Escape_the_Fold/ If you're going to pick one, slay the spire is well worth the price of admission, it's almost spawned an entire subgenre of roguelikes Hadlock fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 05:15
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Hadlock posted:you work in tech, remote into your other PC from your workstation so you don't have as much mental load doing the context switch I've genuinely done this for 10+ years now. It doesn't work as well from Windows to Mac as Windows to Windows, which is one of the major reasons I've been reluctant to switch my work computer. I tried, but VNC is just too slow compared to remote desktop. I have my bevy of incremental games that I can mindlessly poke at for 5 minutes if I need a break or during boring meetings.
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Apr 15, 2022 06:51
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anyone past 40 and have made the choice to (semi)-retire or downgrade from full-time work to freelance/part-time work? i'm turning 40 this year and while i'm doing well (switched from pure dev to applied ML a while back), i feel like retiring and maybe treat coding as a hobby or part-time job deal. the pandemic's firmed the desire since i'm currently 100% WFH - my partner's told me to try out a sabbatical first. i'm idly thinking of writing a technical book for the domain I cover. we're financially independent so finances aren't an issue
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Apr 15, 2022 08:56
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I went to 32h when my first child was born and I'm never going back you can't make me
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Apr 15, 2022 09:47
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shrike82 posted:anyone past 40 and have made the choice to (semi)-retire or downgrade from full-time work to freelance/part-time work? The degree to which you are 'financially independent' really matters here. Are you talking 'Fat FIRE' at 2.5-3% SWR or 'Ramen-FIRE' at an optimistic 4+%? If it's the former, you can pretty much do whatever you want, or nothing at all. In either case, I would agree with your partner's recommendation: take a minimum 6 month sab and see where your head is at after that. A lot of highly successful people just can't tolerate early retirement and part-time work might not be as stimulating or cushy as your current FTE.
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Apr 15, 2022 13:57
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Yeah my wife took a 6 month sabbatical and while she enjoyed it, I think she gets a lot more life satisfaction from her successes at work I would not retire early without some kind of plan. http://eyemead.com/oakwood.htm you don't want to end up like this guy planting 350 oak trees over 11 years because you've fixed everything in the house and on your car and looking for projects
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Apr 15, 2022 15:11
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shrike82 posted:anyone past 40 and have made the choice to (semi)-retire or downgrade from full-time work to freelance/part-time work? I'm in my late 30's; after leaving my last job I decided to work on a videogame instead of getting another traditional job. It sure hasn't cut down on my workload, but I enjoy it a lot more. There's plenty of opportunities for artistic expression, and the fact that it's all self-directed makes it more fulfilling than having other people directing. Statistically speaking, though, it is a money pit; IIRC something like 10% of indie games make a profit, and I sure swung for the fences with the size of game I'm making. So realistically speaking, after this launches I'll probably have to go back to a regular job. Fortunately, those are not in short supply. However, if it did work out, or if I had a little more money socked away (I'm "Ramen FIRE", as B-Nasty put it), then I'd absolutely be willing to do this for another couple of decades.
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Apr 15, 2022 15:18
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How do you deal with multi time zone stand-ups My boss is west coast and I've been east coast about two months now End result is I have a very disruptive daily half hour+ meeting right in the middle of my most productive hours, at noon so that his meeting can start at 9am
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Apr 15, 2022 17:19
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dont do em async or weekly
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Apr 15, 2022 17:20
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You're most productive at noon? At my previous job we had dailies at 11 am which suited me fine as a pre-lunch wind down, but then I my workdays began at 7 so ymmv
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Apr 15, 2022 17:28
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3h coast-to-coast is enough that they really ought to respect that you're time shifted compared to everyone else and adjust common meetings
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Apr 15, 2022 17:32
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You either adjust or skip. We have an east-coast/west-coast team now with most devs in CT. We've moved our standups to 2:30 ET, which is an interesting time for sure. I feel like it works out in the end as long as your meetings are both bunched and split.
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Apr 15, 2022 17:34
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Yeah 10:30-2pm and like 7-11pm are my peak times Having a toddler has destroyed my productivity, she's only recently started sleeping around 8 but like last night didn't go to bed until 10:30 for whatever reason Edit: also I eat a super light lunch, like a granola bar, which is why I'm not sleepy in the early afternoon, if that was what you were getting at Hadlock fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 17:36
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Standups running past half an hour is a sign that you have too many people in your standup. (Which is very easy to do when it's a remote meeting and nobody's actually standing up for the whole thing).
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Apr 15, 2022 17:56
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Hadlock posted:How do you deal with multi time zone stand-ups Async in a slack thread. If someone doesn't fill it out by noon local time unleash the hounds.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:01
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Jabor posted:Standups running past half an hour is a sign that you have too many people in your standup. (Which is very easy to do when it's a remote meeting and nobody's actually standing up for the whole thing). Yeah I was going to point out that was sus. Also mentioning specifically the boss being on the opposite coast. Is the boss attending these meetings? The dogma is that they shouldn't or else it just turns into a regular team status meeting, except every drat day. Another thing worth knowing is if what everybody is saying is of interest to the majority of participants at any given time. If it's actually more like a few groups of 1-3 people that are intermingling then those smaller groups should be the ones talking to each other every day instead of this monster thing.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:07
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Hadlock posted:Edit: also I eat a super light lunch, like a granola bar, which is why I'm not sleepy in the early afternoon, if that was what you were getting at Not particularly, I just thought it was interesting because I think it's the first time I've seen someone claim noon as a peak productivity time, heh. But it looks like you have like 6.5 hours of peak time so maybe we're talking about something else. Six and a half hours is a full day's work basically
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Apr 15, 2022 18:57
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leper khan posted:Async in a slack thread. If someone doesn't fill it out by noon local time unleash the hounds. Async dailies seem very team-dependent to me. That behavior of people zoning out waiting for their turn to say "worked on X, no blockers" just get magnified in chat and the end result is no one reading anyone else's daily report (not even the lead/manager).
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Apr 15, 2022 18:58
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Itaipava posted:Async dailies seem very team-dependent to me. That behavior of people zoning out waiting for their turn to say "worked on X, no blockers" just get magnified in chat and the end result is no one reading anyone else's daily report (not even the lead/manager). That doesn't sound asynchronous to me, if people are waiting for their turn. I've never actually done async dailies, but I imagine it going something like: - Checkin person: @all please check in in the next 30 minutes - Person 1: I'm working on X - Person 2: I'm working on Y ... - Checkin person: OK, thanks everyone for checking in, please review each others' checkins and react to this message when you're done
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Apr 15, 2022 19:43
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when we do async we do async, the thai peeps dont even check in until 7pm pst now, the advisability of a 50-peep dealio having w2 peeps in thailand, brazil, ukraine (until recently) and russia (also until recently)...
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Apr 15, 2022 19:50
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Sorry, I meant the behavior of "zoning out during other people's reports" gets magnified in async text dailies because it's very easy to not read other people's reports. I experienced that myself, it's very easy to not give a poo poo about what your coworkers are working on. Edit: though one could argue that this is a weakness of "text", and not "async"
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Apr 15, 2022 19:50
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I also don’t give a poo poo about what my coworkers are working on synchronously unless it’s close to what I’m working on, which usually means that I already know what their standup will be and it’s unnecessary
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Apr 15, 2022 19:58
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Itaipava posted:Async dailies seem very team-dependent to me. That behavior of people zoning out waiting for their turn to say "worked on X, no blockers" just get magnified in chat and the end result is no one reading anyone else's daily report (not even the lead/manager). I once stopped entering anything in an async daily chat standup for a team of ~20 on suspicion that it was write-only, and it took six months for anyone to notice. The manager and I scrolled back through the chat history together to find my most recent one, then said "huh". I wouldn't necessarily encourage this approach to changing processes in general.
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Apr 15, 2022 20:16
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Hadlock posted:How do you deal with multi time zone stand-ups Our stand-ups are text only, only sprint planning, refinement, and retro are via video chat. Re: zoning out You can zone out during a call just as easily, at least with text you can go back and read it later. I read my team's posts and address blockers (and also connect to see if they need anything if they've spent 5 days on a 2 day ticket or whatever as mentioned above). Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 20:44
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What if I replace the word standup with "daily status meeting with manager and team of 8"
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Apr 15, 2022 20:50
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Itaipava posted:it's very easy to not give a poo poo about what your coworkers are working on. thread title
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Apr 15, 2022 20:54
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Hadlock posted:What if I replace the word standup with "daily status meeting with manager and team of 8" I had teams where stand-ups where 45 minutes long without a manager present since some people just wouldn't shut up and there was no one in attendance who was willing to get them to move on.
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Apr 15, 2022 20:56
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bi crimes posted:I also don’t give a poo poo about what my coworkers are working on synchronously unless it’s close to what I’m working on, which usually means that I already know what their standup will be and it’s unnecessary Why are you on a sprint team with people that aren't working on the same thing as you or close to what you're working on?
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Apr 15, 2022 21:39
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Blinkz0rz posted:Why are you on a sprint team with people that aren't working on the same thing as you or close to what you're working on? Because management doesn’t want to hire another product owner to split the team, and we are a team that is responsible for keeping the lights on in a few distinct and separate domains
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Apr 15, 2022 21:42
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Blinkz0rz posted:Why are you on a sprint team with people that aren't working on the same thing as you or close to what you're working on? GOOD QUESTION
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Apr 15, 2022 21:54
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pokeyman posted:I once stopped entering anything in an async daily chat standup for a team of ~20 on suspicion that it was write-only, and it took six months for anyone to notice. The manager and I scrolled back through the chat history together to find my most recent one, then said "huh". I got away with skipping my monthly report for ~18 months, the only downside was being at the behest of 6 dotted lines instead of one person who cared.
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Apr 15, 2022 21:56
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bi crimes posted:Because management doesn’t want to hire another product owner to split the team, and we are a team that is responsible for keeping the lights on in a few distinct and separate domains Oof
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Apr 15, 2022 22:43
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Blinkz0rz posted:Why are you on a sprint team with people that aren't working on the same thing as you or close to what you're working on? I guess it depends on the definition of "close" here? If this sprint I'm working on new feature A and Bob is working on new feature B then at daily time it's a real effort to stop thinking about A and tune in to whatever Bob has got going on with B. I found it easier to put in that effort in audio/video than chat. Something about having the words just enter my brain versus having to actively seek out and read words. Incidentally I do think the effort is valuable because often times that's when people pipe up "oh you should check out X I think it might make your life easier with this feature" or whatever.
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Apr 15, 2022 23:51
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Hadlock posted:What if I replace the word standup with "daily status meeting with manager and team of 8" For reference, the team I'm on is around the same size, and we also have a regular status update meeting that's called a "standup", but we only do it three times a week and it's only 15 minutes. It sounds like some of the people in your meeting are not being respectful of the time of everyone else in that meeting. Unless you guys are insanely more productive than we are, it shouldn't take four minutes per person to give a status update, especially one that only covers a single day's work.
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Apr 16, 2022 01:27
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