the more i learn about software development, the more i feel I’ve dodged a bullet by changing my major to electrical engineering.
Well, if you learn about software development from reddit and Lemmy, that’s one thing. Not always representative of the real world.
its the things I hear from real software developers that concern me:
- You will spend your entire career chasing trends.
- The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.
- Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.
- Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.
- Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.
- You will spend your entire career chasing trends.
Depends on the language, that’s mostly a JavaScript/typescript issue.
- The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.
Depends on the country, where I’m from there has been very few layoffs.
- Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.
Not sure what to say, I haven’t felt my value decrease. All I see are bubbles saying they will replace me… and then they burst.
Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.
Agree but that’s more of an engineering wide problem, specially when you get managers with very few engineering experience. Take the Apollo landings as an opposite example: great managers that were great engineers.
- Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.
This is a bit too generic to argue against. You can get that in electrical engineering no? If you take more time designing that PCB because you want to better place the components to improve heat dissipation, will your manager care in the end?
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Never join a robotics startup, lol. You will have to go to standup and it will be useless and annoying basically every time.
Just send the robot instead!
It can’t! It’s too busy doing 500 km of burn-in after making it through testing. :(
If I was a in charge of a business I would put a hard email filter (including externally) on corporate jargon because it is too vague and people just use it to seem smarter than they really are. The no-reply would give a lengthy explanation on why it’s bad practice.
Hmm, I wonder how often it would generate a false positive and force someone to reword something innocuous. My guess is that it would be relatively rare.
Dope. Put garbage language where it belongs.
Counterpoint: If you’re working from home it might be the only people contact you get for days.
Supposedly talking to people and touching grass is healthy.
My fear of working full-remote. I mean I got enough friends, but still that’s significant less social time, when not being in something like a coworking space… Although other benefits are really tempting (like 2 to 3 times the salary)
Wait, you earn more to not commute?
I mean I can just take a job in the states, they pay quite a bit more there compared to Europe, and it can be even more targeted in the area of my interest (low-level stuff in Rust which pays even better than what I can find here)… Locally the jobs are pretty limited (at least those that interest me)… Everyone wants Java/C# or JS devs here (all languages I’ll try to avoid, and I suspect it has to do with maintaining old (tech-debt) code-bases which I try to avoid even more)… But I’m quite happy with my team currently and just have rant about JS everyday, but at least don’t have to maintain tech-debt (at least not something that I haven’t produced myself^^)… And I get great food for free… Hmm trade-offs.
Hmm, are they finally hiring internationally? Americans are historically funny about that.
I mean at least the jobs that interest me often are also (full) remote, but I’m mostly interested in start-ups, they seem to be more open with it (and the job descriptions sound more interesting). I think Covid did its job there, unlike it seems for big tech?
My first and third job had daily standup, my second and fourth job don’t have daily standup. I’m on my fourth job. I love not having standup.
I love how bright bulbs have utterly perverted the spirit of agile development into something so horrible that people are memifying ignoring it rather than trying to fix it.
Repeat after me: If standup takes any more than a minute or two per person you’re really really doing it wrong and it isn’t standup anymore and needs to be staked, buried and the earth salted that it may never rise again.
For an act of socially immature but oh so satisfying passive aggressive resistance, leave a copy of the Agile Manifesto on your scrum master’s desk :)
(Or, if you think they’d be receptive, talk to them about moving long form reporting to any other medium so stand-up can be a simple meeting where folks give blocked/not blocked status and, where blocked, resources are directed to help.
that’s it.
Stand-ups where Mortimer from the Front End team gives a 30 minute treatise on why react is a horrible fit for your application ARE IN FACT NOT STAND-UPS.
They’re just poorly run meetings in an agile trench coat.
My dumb ass: " Wtf how often do you have to go to comedy stand ups for it to be self care NOT to go. SMH."
Once, if it’s Ricky Gervais
If I ever was in a room with him, I’d ask if he thinks there’s ever a situation where a comedian should have priorities beyond getting a laugh. He seems to operate on the assumption it’s a no, and I want to hear him openly say that, or else have the opportunity to call him out.
Most standups are bad because they’re not used as a quick collaboration tool, they’re used as a demonstration to prove you’re working, and then the least productive people talk the most because they’re the most desperate to prove they’re working.
Right along with story points.
Not meant to be a measurement of time, but of effort. But everyone ends up using them as a measure of time because that is what the MBA at the end of the tables wants.
My current company treats effort the same as time. I can appreciate that they’re at least honest about that lol
Wake up, stand up, talk about your work vaguely enough there are no questions.
I called in sick today so I could skip all the meetings lol
The worst thing about standups is that about once a month I catch a problem early because of what someone says. The tradeoff doesn’t feel worth it time-wise. But it keeps me from skipping them.
You could also see it as you preventing someone else from learning from their own mistakes. Maybe reframing it like that could help with skipping :)
In a standup comedy act whenever I get on my feet (optional).
Dont really have a choice in not attending that event.My boss doesn’t do meetings. Every once in a while he approves my vacation request and I get notified it’s approved. Sounds better than it is, but it is better than pointless daily meetings. Adult daycare crap.
My new boss just cancelled all of our daily standup meetings that were introduced by the previous management. Reason given: “I have seen nothing valuable here during the last two weeks.”
I like him.
My boss is usually doing WFM and HR duties instead of her own, so no meetings for me either! So far I have a perfect performance record!
Didn’t see what community I was in when I read the post and thought there were just a lot of people here who hate stand up comedians doing crowd work
I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.
Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.
It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.
I hate crowd work. Getting called on while on a night out is my worst nightmare
Just don’t answer the comedian, or don’t sit close lol
The purpose of stand up is to not listen to anything and say a sentence that no one listens to. It’s like a Buddhist meditation.
Lemmy keeps it real.
Yeah - it’s an art to find the perfect mix between “sounds complicated enough that they zone out”, “sounds like stuff gets done” and “not making people ask if you need help with that”.
lol I hope your standups are not actually like this! The purpose is to, as a team, plan what the team will do today to achieve the Sprint goal
I’m not actually a programmer (/engineer) I’m just a hobbyist. I work in supply chain, have worked at 4 companies in 8 years - all had stand ups, all of them are like this.
Err… Is your team doing planning during standup? I’ve never heard of that, from either people who are on teams that use standups, or from any of the Agile/Scrum literature that I’ve seen. In my experience, standups are typically about either a) coordinating the execution of work that has already been committed to, or b) whoops just a status meeting and everybody’s tuned out.
Ah, I see how my wording was confusing. I mean planning in the sense of “How will we complete the work that we already committed to?” and “What will we do today to achieve our Sprint goal?”
I arrived at the word planning because Scrum is sometimes described as a planning-planning-feedback-feedback cycle. You plan the Sprint, you plan daily (Daily Scrums), you get feedback on your work (Sprint Review), and you get feedback on your process (Sprint Retrospective).
Thanks for explaining. I still think “planning” is a weird way to think about what’s supposed to happen during standup-- It seems to me that the whole purpose of working in sprints (and the rituals that that typically entails) is to plan ahead so that during the week you can execute on well-groomed, properly-scoped work. Of course when you notice something is wrong, or needs to be reconsidered, you might need to pull the brakes and realign mid-sprint, but my sense is that if you’re doing planning every day, that might mean that your work isn’t groomed well enough beforehand, or you’re not locking in important decisions during sprint planning.
But it might depend on the work, and it might depend on what you mean by “planning.” If your planning just looks like “Hey are you free to pair on issue 123 this afternoon? Okay sweet, I’ll throw a meeting in your calendar,” then yeah sure-- I wouldn’t use the word “planning” for that, but it’s not crazy to. Or maybe the work is different than my work, and actually does warrant some amount of day-level of planning that wouldn’t make sense for teams I’ve been on. I’m open to that, too.
(Btw I tried to look up this “planning planning feedback feedback cycle” thing and the only search results I got were THIS LEMMY THREAD, lol… Cool to see Lemmy show up in search results)
But stand-up comedy has something for everyone!
Oh, this is about the depressing nexus between programming and corporate culture. Carry on.
