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The person in charge trying to coordinate the whole thing, who’s asking for status updates on a daily basis and jumps down your throat if you don’t respond in a timely fashion, takes weeks to respond when asked for critical input. Also…
Leader: The world is going to end in 5 days, we need that product now!!!
Programming team delivers a functional product.
4 days later…
Programming team: did our item save the world
Leader: I haven’t gotten to it yet, I’ll take a look by EoD.
EoD? End of December? End of Death? (reference to world going to end)
They don’t know there are 20 other life and death situations that came before them. GET. IN. LINE.
Why won’t you sprint the sprint so we can get more sprints in the sprint?
Not programming, but the plot of Shin Godzilla was about bureaucratic red tape holding back the actual solutions.
WHICH IS WHY WE SHOULD DEREGULATE EVERYTHING! INCLUDING FOOD AND DRINKING WATER, AND WE SHOULD ALLOW ALLOW COMAPNIES TO DUMP INTO RIVERS!
I love hollywood
…you know this was a Japanese movie, right?
Oh I thought it was one of newer ones. I was envisioning the creep of conservatism into films, like that scene from Independence Day where Will Smith declares that he never wants to pay taxes
It’s my favorite Godzilla movie because of this aspect. There’s a scene where I lost it in the theater when the >!Prime Minister is completely certain in telling the press that Godzilla will absolutely never, not in a million years, not make landfall… only to have an underling whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.!<
I worked for a Japanese company at the time, and could recognize that it wasn’t even heightened for parody. That’s just exactly how it is.
only to have an underling whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.
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"Why isn't this ready yet? The meteors are falling in an hour?" - Oh sorry I got distracted by Youtube for a minute "...You've been doing this for a week"“Quick! Hurry! Scrum! 5 minute stand up team! We need to sort this crisis out NOW!”
“Joe! The building is on fire! Move! RUN!”
“No! We need to have a meeting first! SCRUM! STAND UP! AGILE! SILICON VALLEY!!!1!!!1!! When is the next sprint!?”
Looking for a passionate, motivated team member to be part of a newly refreshed team created to replace an unsuccessful team (RIP) promoting our incredibly competitive product!
- You must have at least 40 years experience working with Windows 11.
- GENEROUS remuneration package!*
- You need to be able to work 26 hours a day 9 days per week.
- You will need to bring PASSION! ENTHUSIASM! EXCITEMENT! [synonym not found]!, and GRIT!
*as we are a small start up, we can’t afford to pay wages, but when we are successful, we promise to write your name somewhere on an archived version of our website.
An app that will save the world…and other fantasies that software developers tell themselves to feel important
We’re making the world a better place 🙏
If anybody here ever does make such an app: Please, please release it anonymously, because the people you’re saving it from will be angry.
HOW MANY STORY POINTS DOES IT TAKE TO SAVE THE WORLD?
WHY DID THIS 3 POINTER TAKE FIVE DAYS
YES YES, IT’S NOT TIME BUT WE ARE TRACKING IT THAT WAY BUT IT’S IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO NOT THINK OF IT THAT WAY WHEN YOU ESTIMATE BUT WHY DID YOU GO OVER THREE DAYS
Let’s all head to the conference room, so we can discuss the definition of a story point for an hour. I’d also like to talk about why we are behind schedule and our velocity is dipping. Let’s make it two hours.
Management where I work finally unbent and admitted that story points were time.
…but also want to continue raising velocity in each sprint.
Sounds like a good time to start padding estimates.
I don’t even see why them roughly representing time is a problem due to them raising in a fibonacci sequence.
If they were a day each, it’s not like the jump from 5 to 8 means it’s going to take 3 more days, but that it’s gotten more complex and maybe it’ll still be 5 or 6 days but I can’t be sure because this one has a lot more unknowns that might not reveal themselves until I’m into it. That’s why we’re forced to go from 5 to 8 and not a 6 or 7.
The uncertainty is built right into it, so it can’t be exact time, but at the same time trying to ignore that they’re still time related is stupid.
Dont worry, they are unserious about actual results; they just care about the appearance of results that they can report up. Just start padding extra… Fucking story points…jesus… To each ticket. Now everyones charts look like their velocity increased. Dont worry, noone is actually measuring results.
That’s exactly what we ended up doing. Every story has now become one Fibonacci step higher than it would have been before.
Don’t look at me. I voted five. And then when the scrum master was like, “jubilationtcornpone, are you ok with it being a three?” I said “No.” But someone who thought they knew better decided it was going to be a three anyways.
I can’t give this enough upvotes.
Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?
On second thoughr… Is this a world we wanna save?
Half way into saving the World it turns out you need some data that’s not even being collected, something that nobody had figured out because nobody analysed the problem properly beforehand, and now you have to take a totally different approach because that can’t be done in time.
Also the version of a library being include by some dependency of some library you included to do something stupidly simple is different from the version of the same library being included by some dependency of a totally different library somebody else includeed to do something else that’s just as stupidly simple and neither you nor that somebody else want to be the one to rewrite their part of the code.
The sequel is when the original programmers die and a new team has to come in and figure out WTF their code is doing or even supposed to be doing.
I am currently doing this right now, pharma code team gave me a whole program and now i need to find out how everything works…
How’s it going so far?
Found a couple infinite loops that were causing systems to crash. Slowly coming along. Going to take a bunch of time to allow it to become operational again
17 bugs detected including 4 security threats, and we still don’t even know what the programming is supposed to do
“I’m going to try to hack the system.”
# sudo apt install hollywood # hollywood“We’re in!”
While Hugh Jackman gets some sloppy dome (with a gun pointed to his head).
Its because he’s the best there is folks.
Swordfish 2 plz
Hasn’t touched a computer in several years, yet can immediately hack into one of the most secure systems in the world in 1/60th the time of the best current hackers…
Well hilariously, its even worse/better. It was RSAs 128bit rc5, which would take waaaayyyyyy longer than an hour to crack. Like, supercomputers dedicated to the task for years sort of thing.
sudo rm -rf ~/*“Fuck y’all, I quit. Good luck with the crisis.”
All programmers are goth supermodels.
Also 1 overweight guy with a beard that diea at some point and 1 nerdy guy in glasses and a Star wars T-shirt…played by Glen Powell, or Chris Pratt.
They really need to update that to twinks wearing programmer socks.
The project manager keeps asking for an update every 15 minutes.
Not only do I feel this in my soul, I’ve been working for almost 13 years, and to this day, I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.
The only thing I can tell is that their job is to be the designated impatient person.
Good project managers are invaluable. I’d much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don’t have to be a party to.
When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit… and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they’re too green (or you’re too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won’t be materially different.
It’s like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone’s lives harder… the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it’s more likely you’ll get a shitty roll.
The really good ones understand they are in administration and leave technical things to the technical people.
They are the ones that talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to.
Often those customers are others in the same company.
I have a friend who was a project manager. He took the time to learn every platform used by his team, but held no pretenses that he could actually develop anything without the team. His main goal was filter all the horseshit from the stakeholders and higher-ups so that they wouldn’t overwhelm the team with minutia. By learning the platforms and observing the team developing, he could make accurate predictions on timeliness based on whatever arbitrary feature was being requested and he’d always answer “let me ask my team” before discussing deliverables if he wasn’t sure.
The number of times that he explained in meetings that’s the team’s timeline didn’t change, but that the stakeholders’ expectations did and that introduced a new additional timeline was incredible. It’s unsurprising that he only lasted a year or two before his bosses started pushing for a promotion. Seeing him work made mean bit jealous that I couldn’t be on his team, but we work at different companies and I don’t want to join the private sector if I can be of benefit to public education.
I’ve had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery… he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to “do his best for the day” and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management… sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise “using AI” in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.
They’re technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.
Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don’t need them, but they sure as hell need me.
A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn’t need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.
Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.
Good project managers are worth their weight in gold
Both project managers at my company quit at the same time, so they’re spreading the workload to engineering instead of rehiring.
It has not been going well. Turns out the PMs were doing actual work.
They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.
They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.
In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.
Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.
Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).
I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.
I’ve well over a decade in software project management. The number one thing we contribute to a project is saying to the client (internal or external) “Sure, we can add that feature but it will have an impact on the delivery timeline unless we deprioritise other features. Are you happy for us to extend the deadline? If not, let’s talk about what we can cut from the existing scope in favour of your new feature.”
I don’t work in software, I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Some project managers are superfluous if they don’t have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I’ve worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.
Being able to say: “we’ve done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress” and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.
This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I’d imagine the same still applies.
Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.
But I’ve never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it’s once a week, or by email as required.
I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Well now I’ve got this song stuck in my head again, which probably accurately describes life with particularly bad peoject management.
This song is near and dear to my heart after having only heard it a handful of times before
Though, the problems described are not from the project managers, it’s the higher ups and owners squeezing every last cent, with disregard for the people who will be killed.
So, so many unnecessary deaths because someone wanted to save money and cut corners in my industry.
This is why people who advocate for small government and lax regulations, are idiots
I’m a project manager for a team of IT systems, engineering, and infrastructure folks with just over twenty folks and my key purpose on earth is that I take one hour or less of their time once a week and by doing so they never have an email or conversation with anyone else outside of our team. I know enough to talk to any stakeholders and complete monthly status reports by simply knowing what is going on and communicating strategy to them. I’ve been praised heavily which feels very dirty being an individual contributor for so long in my career. I can speak the same language as everyone on my team spanning logistics, networking, systems, and software development but I don’t DO anything. I have major imposter syndrome as I near retirement so the praise is also appreciated greatly from them. It’s a really weird period in my career.
At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.
In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.
Not a movie but I feel like Mr Robot had somewhat accurate scenes
And silicon valley
Someone watching Silicon Valley could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that most software developers spend 90% of their time screwing around waiting for solutions to unexpected bullshit interruptions…
So yeah, pretty accurate.
Tickets aren’t agile, tickets are scrum.
Then again, the guy giving you that remark usually doesn’t know the difference
If you hate the taste of scrum give SAFe a try! (but really, please don’t)
I believe that the problem with agile is that it’s not enough like waterfall. That’s why SAFe is for me.
So glad we dropped that shit.
It doesn’t really matter what they call it. Companies that want to be waterfall (or more accurately, whose executives want waterfall style commitments) are going to be waterfall even if they call it Scrum.
I just left a SAFe company! God the system was awful!
I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.
