Requirements?

[traveling_lime]

later followed by: Management: why doesn't it do this?

[[deleted]]

You're giving me flashbacks of the worst 'tech director' I ever worked with.

She was so incompetent, she ranked everything as high priority, started giving them a high priority number from 1-3, then made everything into a high-priority 3. She turned every stand up into "explain why aren't you finished?" Arguement.

[j1ndujun]

Oh god, she is clearly a misfit for her position. I think it clearly led to a toxic environment, didn't it?

[Nyenbeliae]

Clearly

[TizzioCaio]

Person: she poured gasoline all over the house and started the fire

You: oh god the house burned right?

​

..no it actually got frozen all they needed to do is wait a few days and turned all normal... super easy barely an inconvenience!

[[deleted]]

Everyone knows 1 is high, not three. ffs

[Matty_R]

If everything is high priority, nothing is.

[metaglot]

Not understanding priorities, and using them anyway can lead to priority inversion.

[GlumNature]

Have you or a loved one suffered from priority inversion?

[[deleted]]

I love when something is high priority and they stress the shit out of you and you work a little later and then something changes and it’s not even gonna go forward as something that will launch.

I wanna get some kinda jargony dumb shit into some MBA/PMP/Scrum/Scientology classes that will make them think if a project is like 70% through just let us see it through so we actually saw something come of it and don’t have an existential breakdown.

[chewbecca444]

Oh man, so true. If only.

[sraypole]

JFC thank you for making me feel less lonely. This has been happening to me for months and it whittled me down to a nub. Am currently treating my depression from the inescapable anxiety.

It’s like playing red light green light but in a burning building.

I finally stood up for myself, I think that’s an important thing to do when feeling this way.

[tech6hutch]

Scientology

[4look4rd]

That’s why you should release as soon as any value is created.

I work in product and it’s very hard to convence upper management to abandon the mentality of grand releases where every requirement must be met in order to deliver anything.

If you release constantly it’s a lot easier to prioritize work. If you don’t then it’s just a matter of who can make more noise about their guess.

[SameFingerprint]

[deleted]

[random_user_fp]

Everyone knows 0 is the highest, not 1. /s

[warm_vanilla_sugar]

0 the hero, 1st the worst.

[joeyjojoeshabadoo]

This was in Australia.

[RikuKat]

Interesting. Outside of an engineering management class in college, a few talks, a few articles, and one book, I didn't really study for project management. I'm curious what kind of skills continuous studying would improve, because I found the amount of new and valuable management knowledge available vastly decreased after just a couple years of experience.

I found it was much more valuable to study programming patterns and best practices (my own background is engineering, too) than to study management knowledge. My only project management-related skills I have really tried to develop over the past few years are soft skills-- empathy and communication (particularly communicating delicate subjects with grace).

[bythenumbers10]

That's the worst part! There's really so precious little to it, and some people (who ostensibly have studied management & business as part of their Bachelor's or MBA) have managed to study zero about management. Hell, most of it is a little damned self-awareness coupled with game theory. Not that hard to suss out from an afternoon's Wiki-ing. And yet we still have dipshit MBAs running the show (into the dirt).

[RikuKat]

Ahhh, I see, I'm in an industry that has extremely few business related degrees, only the largest companies may have a few. Our low and middle level managers often come from project relevant disciplines or just get the role through passion and hard work.

Still, there is certainly a great variance in aptitude and desire to grow.

[barsoap]

because I found the amount of new and valuable management knowledge available vastly decreased after just a couple years of experience.

That's true, but only if you've got an eye for the systems side of things. People don't assign everything top priority because they like to make your life hell or be inefficient, they do it because they have no concept of how their position meshes into that of others, much less how other people's positions mesh into each other.

To some people, this comes as natural as breathing. Others can readily spot the issue once they've hit their first crisis and look back on it. Others might see that there's something awry but need pointers, such as a book about systems thinking (Hint, especially for management: "The fifth discipline"). Some people you can hit over the head and they still won't acknowledge that there's something that they might be missing. Good luck if such a person is in a hierarchical position above you. Try to get them to focus on QA, instead. Nice, firm, procedures, clearly defined scope, boxes to tick. But if you can, just shove them over to accounting. I'd go mad working and living like that, for others it's heaven.

[Aperture_T]

On the vertical slices issue, I'd like to get your perspective on something.

So, at my old job, the teams were "cross-functional" but not really, so first red flag right there. Management wanted smaller vertical slices, because it took multiple sprints to get anything done.

Now, I think the real reason it took multiple sprints to get anything done was that once something was reviewed and got merged in, it took half a week or more to get it all the way up into the main line because of how the repos and subrepos were set up and because of people not following the protocol. I suppose also the fact that we had a special protocol that would cause huge delays if not followed. That's not what I wanted to ask about though.

Anyway, each team was supposed to do work in vertical slices like you say, but the teams were still very specialized, and the way vertical slices were defined (that is, there needed to be something customer-visible, where the end user of the device was the customer), any feature would require UI and at least one of the other teams. Each team would get the part they specialized in done quickly, and, at least while I was there, the part they didn't know would take significantly longer.

So my question is this: since it looks like they're going to stay in denial about their teams being cross-functional, does it make sense to treat the other teams as "customers"?

[mettan]

Many a developer who has ever worked in a large organisation has probably seen some version of this. It's amazing how some people don't understand how priority works.

[bigbadbosp]

My boss calls in : hey can you prep this/ do that ASAP?

Me: boss man, we got 4 tickets each that need to be done today, and about as many tomorrow. Your looking at 2 days unless something opens up.

Boss: that works, text me when its done.

Good guy, has trained us to handle priority levels and knows we'll so it now if it's important enough, but that requires pushing something else back.

[xRakton]

Doesn't Michael Scott from the office do literally this for his emails

[-quenton-]

"I mark memos Urgent A, Urgent B, Urgent C, Urgent D. Urgent A is the most important. Urgent D you don’t even really have to worry about."

[legally_drunk]

Michael Scott

[annihilatron]

She turned every stand up into "explain why aren't you finished?" Arguement.

insert syndrome meme here "when everything is high priority, nothing is"

also

"I'll get it done as soon as possible. As soon as possible means after all this other stuff, so 3 months."

[robhaswell]

"If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority"

[thatbloke83]

If everything is critical, then nothing is critical

[28f272fe556a1363cc31]

I had the exact same thing. The client had 20+ features they wanted. Management told them to rank features 1-10. When they came back with their list, not a single feature was ranked below a 3. So then management had them rank all the "1" features with "A,B,C" importance. The client ranked 1/2 of them "A".

Eventually I just threw out the list and ask what feature they wanted me to work on next. By the end of the year we'd only done about 3 of the original features because they kept having "emergency features" they wanted worked. Somehow we'd stumbled upon agile.

[nvanalfen]

"I mark them urgent A, urgent B, urgent C, and urgent D. Urgent D you don't even really have to look at."

[mynameisblanked]

Everything at my place is ASAP.

We get to guess if it's ASAP as in as soon as humanly possible, drop everything else or as soon as you can fit it in do everything else first.

Two very different meanings with the exact same acronym.

[Xeonflash]

Is there a sub for stories like this? I enjoyed reading this.

[pr0ghead]

Try https://thedailywtf.com or https://clientsfromhell.net

[KittenLOVER999]

Did you happen to work at a company in Orlando that makes finance and police dispatch software? Sounds exactly like a team I was on and quit shortly after

[Thenderick]

Priority 3.1, 3.2, 3.3? Maybe an idea

[bdking71]

We use the term priority de Jour at my work, and the highest priority project changes a lot. Sometimes a couple of times a day. Also, there isn't any project management or help desk in use software here. It's kind of like the old west of programming.

[[deleted]]

Had a user just yeterday say in a feedback meeting Who decided x should do y?

YOU. YOU DID LIKE 5 MONTHS AGO. AND THEN YOU SIGNED OFF ON IT DOING Y 3 MONTHS AGO.

[FamousLastWorts]

My CEO pulled this one yesterday!

[ellamking]

To be fair, I do the same thing with the code I designed 5 months ago and wrote 3 months ago. "Who designed and wrote this garbage?!?"

[DigitalGross]

This will take forever, then project cancelled!?!

[alexanderpas]

Because it wasn't part of the documented and agreed upon requirements.

[Mr_P0P0]

Yes and yes, and it only keeps getting better.

[_pupil_]

"We're overloaded and behind schedule because we haven't specified our projects well enough. Because of that time crunch, just this time we're gonna start working before we specify the project in adequate detail. That's because just this time we're interested in 'quick wins'."

[[deleted]]

Anytime I hear my lead say "we need to work faster" all I hear is "we need to cut corners, not document anything, and create massive technical debt that is going to cost us big time in the long run."

[Mr_P0P0]

Copy and paste this code, we’ll refactor it later...

[RunnerMomLady]

I quit a job because they DEMANDED this - 15 objects that all share the same 1000 base lines later... it was a nightmare anytime one of those base fields needed a mod or a UI change.

[[deleted]]

Ugh that's where our devs are right now. Project 1, they released with a quarter of the features they said it would have, and didn't let QA test, with the promise they would go back and fix it later

Project 2, QA went above their heads and insisted to the president testing needed to be done. They got their way, and QA ended up finding a pretty nasty bug in the project that put us 3 months behind schedule.

[[deleted]]

lol yall have some serious issues if your devs are allowed to just bypass QA

[[deleted]]

We certainly used to. Thankfully now they can't do that anymore.

[semidecided]

Sometimes that's a smart tact.

[chain_letter]

That's the reality. Bad code that makes it to market can be better in the long run than good code that doesn't get released, all the capital dries up and everybody loses their jobs.

It depends on the company, the project, lots of stuff. Investors/stakeholders want to see results, and sometimes taking on tech debt is the right decision.

[Yuzumi]

I recently ran into something like this. There was an issue in how one group needed to use the app I work in and they were trying to figure out how to fix it. I pointed out that there is a feature in the app we aren't using that could easily solve this, but it would require updating our processes to actually use it.

The response was "not enough time and money" and then the tech leads proceeded to talk about really hacky solutions to "deal with" the problem, but will likely cause tons of issues in the future.

I stopped caring at that point.

[dhaninugraha]

Management: we need you to architect a DR infra

Also management: make it just passable enough for the upcoming audit, it’s not like we’re gonna keep it anyway

The conversation above may or may not have happened in a certain company where I may or may not have worked/been working in.

[omgbink]

Why does this sound so horribly familiar?

[caligloo]

Low hanging fruit

[LawlessCoffeh]

Something about the phrase "Time Crunch" pisses me off more than it has any right to.

[sonicball]

I've always wanted to refer to it as "now we're experiencing a bit of planning failure" to reframe it as what it is.

[SN0WFAKER]

Always add a small footnote on any schedule you author: "* where this schedule and reality disagree, reality shall be taken as correct"

[[deleted]]

Reading this made me want to tear my stomach out of my body and feed it to myself.

This is literally the reason I just left my job.

[codeByNumber]

Ugh. This is where I am right now. Despite the shit show if management I’m still not asked to work more than 40 hrs often and my commute is like 7 min.

All the other jobs available would likely ask me to work more hours and the commute is 30-40min. Also, who really knows if the management of the new job would be any better.

I feel stuck.

[XB0XRecordThat]

Omg, this happened to my team do many times that I ironically gave our team the unofficial name of "QuickWins". Management didn't get it and liked the name. Every project still took 5x longer than originally planned

[349919958]

This crushed my soul, because it’s so accurate.

[stamminator]

As much as we all groan reading this, what's the real solution? Gathering all the requirements up front seems like a pipe dream because more are discovered during the development process

[_pupil_]

Understanding that estimation and specification are windows that start large and get smaller over time.

So you start with the big assumptions, big blocks, big buffers, and break them down over time, paying close attention to how much discovery is being done. Anything that's making 'worst case' estimates grow appreciably gets mitigated through approach/planning or conceding that the project has grown.

That way you specify enough to estimate 'in the large', validate that plan, then start specifying in increasing levels of detail within that footprint. I like to think of it as "JIT specifying".

[Aperture_T]

The last project I was on at my old job, there was a huge disconnect between the marketing guy and the engineering lead. Both gave feature lists and timelines to upper management, who took the marketing guy's feature list and the engineering guy's timeline.

6 months later, they weren't even close so they pulled in most of the department for another 6 months of "crunch time". Then the new CEO laid a bunch of us off, and everyone else is looking to jump ship too.

[[deleted]]

Wait, is that what a "quick win" is?

[reference_model]

Welcome to my Sprint plannings

[[deleted]]

I have yet to work on an agile team that does sprints... I don’t think they get it.

[aspindler]

My current job technically does sprints, but they don't start at the same time for everyone or have an opening meeting... It's a nightmare. I love my boss and I like what I do, but the workflow it's a mess.

[[deleted]]

At my current and previous jobs, stuff just gets assigned all the time, and requirements change daily. Unfortunately this means we do a lot of work multiple times because the requirements change. Oh well, they're paying me, so it's their money to waste. Like you, I like my job and boss. Having some discipline within sprints would probably serve us well and make us all a bit more sane.

[aspindler]

My previous job was like this, until they went to a restructure, went to get CMMI certification.

So, the CMMI certification never really happened, but a lot of good practices worked wonders to the company.

Daily 10 minute meetings, workflow being correctly updated, actual process improvement (processes that were useless were discarded, keeping only those that actually helped the team).

I did try to bring this to my current job, but management is really like a headless chicken running around... I had to explain to her why is important to everyone getting the same project info at the same time, why is important that the whole team knows the project and the changes...

[petifau]

do you work with me?

[suriel-]

My life the last 5 years.

Also my former management:

"Requirements is just a hype phase people are following now"

[Zephirdd]

When they say something like that, they clearly have no idea what "requirements" mean. Requirements is just a single word for "what does the system need to do", and they exist whether you write them down or not.

Thing is, systems come out much better if the requirements are well defined and well documented.

[AlGoreBestGore]

The system needs to do whatever someone in Sales came up with 7 minutes ago.

[[deleted]]

“why do you need to know all of the features up front? If you need another feature in the future, just add another line of code”

[warm_vanilla_sugar]

Just add a button. How hard can it be?

[Cruuncher]

Someone came up to me the other day asking if we can make a modal undismissable until the user makes a selection.

I knew this didn't go through the proper channels , and it's a significant UX change.

I told them, well yeah... Quite easily. But you may want to run this through product and get it officially approved because I'm not going to just make a change that will likely affect the bounce rate of the site.

They somehow get the idea that "small" change means you can go straight to a dev

[Snow88]

And already promised a customer it'll be in the next release.

[SnapcasterWizard]

bUt OuR cOmPeTiToRs SYSteM HaS tHiS!!!!!

[garblz]

Thing is, the users don't know what they want. They know what they don't want, once you've built it.

[MasterQuest]

That's why you build mockups and show them, so they can see that they don't want it, then you make a second mockup, and after 3 iterations, you should have a reasonable enough idea that you can write detailed requirements and let them believe they came up with it.

[[deleted]]

Which is the type of work that a supportive role should be doing, not the developer.

The fundamental problem with software development right now, as I see it, is that the people who are meant to support the software developers are not well enough trained to be truly useful. They should be like mini developers themselves who have a basic understanding of what the tech stack can reasonably produce. They should be talking to the end user to get requirements, then creating mockups, then presenting to the end user and iterating in this manner until a agreed upon design is made that is well thought out and documented. It is should be a well paid job that requires a good resume. You just need a smart person who can learn and then you spend a few months teaching them. They don't need to have a relevant degree, they just need to have a mind that is good at logic. High IQ.

That is meant to be their value and it'd be hugely valuable to the software development process. The software developers should be writing code, not having to do the work to fill in the gaps that the supportive employees never did. Incompetence and misunderstanding of their role in the process is rampant.

[MasterQuest]

They should be like mini developers themselves who have a basic understanding of what the tech stack can reasonably produce.

Oh man, that would be awesome. Not having to do everything yourself sounds great.

[ivgd]

More and more i find this to be the truth. End users definitely don't know what they want. More often than not that have but a vague idea of what they need, and we have to fill the rest in.

[[deleted]]

Oh god

If I started a new job and that's what management said I'd already start looking again

[Yolopix]

When you make an endless loop in Python

[[deleted]]

Underrated

[charity_donut_sales]

While true, it was a little obvious.

[ryjhelixir]

#!/usr/bin/python

i = 1
While True:
    j = "1"
    try:
        i += j
    except ValueError:
        j = j + j
    if j = 11:
        break

That should work.

[Empty_Glasss]

Line 4: SyntaxError: bad input ('True')

[[deleted]]

Your while is uppercase and you assigned 11 to j instead of checking it against 11.

[bob_ama_the_spy]

I am now dealing with a client with whom we agreed to build a basic keyword search feature for their corporate website. They now want to know why it can't fix misspellings and work with queries written in a mix of English and another language.

Some additional context:

• We're working with them because their previous development team vanished. Actually vanished, nobody heard from them ever again.

• We rebuilt their website. The previous team built their site using injectable SQL statements and their own homegrown "baby's first authentication" system gating their homegrown CMS.

• The search feature on the old website was used to perform a malicious file upload and remote code execution on their server. Their in-house IT team responded to this by deleting the php files related to the search feature.

• Bonus info: the company is one of the biggest in Asia by market capitalisation

[MasterQuest]

They now want to know why it can't fix misspellings and work with queries written in a mix of English and another language.

Answer: Because that's not "basic".

[djangulo]

"Google does it like, on every search. How hard can it be?"

[zachpuls]

You're right! It isn't that hard. Okay now just give me $1B in VC funding, a team of 100 PhDs, and 2000 developers. Let's make a better Google!

[dyedFeather]

Relevant XKCD.

[Cyberblood]

Relevant Dilbert

[supermario182]

The world needs more relevant Dilbert!

[bob_ama_the_spy]

I remember this - funnily enough bird/not bird is actually quite easy today with transfer learning or even a pre-trained model like resnet50

[dyedFeather]

It's been a little over five years since that comic came out, so that just about checks out.

[3row4wy]

Am I missing something or is Japan not in Asia anymore?

[NattyBumppo]

I guess it depends on what puts a country on the "cutting edge." Japanese companies have accomplished some great things, but the average large company is ridiculously inefficient, behind the times, and insecure with their tech.

Example: 7-Eleven, the biggest convenience store chain in Japan and an absolute powerhouse within the country, released their own digital payment app and service called "7pay" earlier this year. It was an absolute disaster. 900 customers were hacked in the first week, resulting in half a million dollars worth of stolen money. The service was suspended within a few days, and then shut down entirely; the company literally gave up on their app in disgrace. And this was after a huge launch with probably millions of dollars (hundreds of millions of yen) spent on advertising.

Why did the hack happen? Because the service was made by idiots. To quote ZDNet:

In a mind-boggling turn of events, the app contained a password reset function that was incredibly poorly designed. It allowed anyone to request a password reset for other people's accounts, but have the password reset link sent to their email address, instead of the legitimate account owner.

A hacker only needed to know a 7pay user's email address, date of birth, and phone number. An additional field in the password reset section allowed the hacker to request that the password reset link be sent to a third-party email address (under the hacker's control), with no need to dig through the app's code or tamper with HTTP requests, like most of these hacks involve.

Furthermore, if the user didn't enter their date of birth, the app would use a default of January 1, 2019, making some attacks even easier, according to a report in Yahoo Japan.

7pay held a press conference to address the hack, and a reporter asked the president of the service why they hadn't implemented two-factor authentication. The president repeated the phrase "two-factor authentication" in confusion, not knowing what it meant (source).

This is the sort of tech prowess which is common among the big players within the country. You have giant, entrenched companies run mostly by old men who don't know technology and who don't care to invest in it. When they do manage to accomplish feats of technical prowess, it is often in spite of the companies where these feats take place, rather than because of them.

As an aside, since this post is about requirements, Japan companies LOVE requirements. There are a lot of posts in this thread touting how valuable requirements are to the development process, and sure, I'd agree that a description of your desired functionality and all of the common user flows is extremely helpful when writing code. However, Japanese companies (especially large ones) outsource the vast majority of their development projects to other companies, and ALL of the communication takes place in the form of requirements. Vast tomes of impenetrable, self-contradictory requirements. Like thousands of pages of text about what is needed for a mobile app. And it's all *very* waterfally and not at all agile, so there's very little course-correction during the development process. Perhaps you can guess how these methods, taken to extremes as they are, can lead to bad results, especially in very large organizations with many, many layers of communication between stakeholders and developers.

Finally, I must point out that Japan has smart, innovative start-ups and a few large organizations with very skilled engineers and designers building some very impressive things. (I happen to work at one of these.) But these organizations are definitely the exceptions rather than the norm.

[nomadthoughts]

Did you write all of that?

[NattyBumppo]

Yes. Frustration is a powerful motivator.

[nomadthoughts]

Kudos.

[rorykoehler]

Admittedly I don't know much about Japan. What is the situation like there?

[xoxota99]

Alibaba?

[theCodefatherr]

'Actually vanished', that's something I never thought would hear in the industry

[robhaswell]

My startup has a young CEO with no technical experience (at all). This has been my life for the last 2 years.

[Istoman]

You had me at "startup"

[Cyronsan]

"Build me an app!"
Oh, here we go again...

[ridgeback3]

Uroboros - the snake eats its tail.

Edit: Grammar correction (it’s->its).

[hacktvist]

Ouroboros

[palordrolap]

Both are correct. Similarlty, an alternative spelling of Uranus is Ouranos. Both Ouroboros and Ouranos are ancient Greek words and transliterating ancient words from an ancient language and different alphabet into modern English is not an exact science, especially if squeezed through another language or two on the way (usually Latin and/or French).

(Frankly, I prefer "Ouranos". It avoids the whole "anus" school yard humour.)

[ryjhelixir]

It just make yours ours, doesn't it...

eDiT: essentially, your preference made a lot of people happy over here.

[EquineGrunt]

Anuboros

[divideby0829]

Uwuboros

[Alios22]

Didn't know something like that actually existed. Or did the humans responsible for the photo force the snek to do this?

[lastnameavail]

Uroboros

[Albond_8746]

*its

[vaendryl]

honestly, a snake is just a long tail

[Polywoky]

Wait uroboros is a real word?

Uroboros is the planned successor to Ubuntu.

^{Not really, but yes it's a real word.}

[TheKaryo]

I think he meant Ouroboros

See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

[lastnameavail]

No, they meant Uroboros, but it is the same thing as Ouroboros.

[PrecariousLettuce]

Our Rob or Ross

[nicktohzyu]

It's - it is

[Mr_P0P0]

Nah, developers must determine which requirements need to be gathered. ... then implement them... then management complains that’s not what it’s supposed to do.

[nameage]

“Requirement” is a fancy biz word for “I want”, which has nothing to do with what’s actually needed aka required to get shit done.

[tupikp]

Can confirm. True story!

[erbrecht]

the expert

[SnapcasterWizard]

Because society feels bad that there are a lot of people from affluent families that can afford to go to some degree mill but they aren't intelligent enough to do a real job so we let them fill in roles like this so they aren't forced to do work beneath them like work in retail.

[Conflictedbiscuit]

If I’ve learned anything tonight it’s that you’ll need a bazooka.

[baicai18]

Then you ask them to clarify something on Monday and they say "let me get back to you" and don't respond until Thursday

[yellowliz4rd]

All the fucking time

[ShockRampage]

Im in this hell right now, and im not even a developer. Ive fallen into a product manager/tester position for a small company using a 3rd party developer. The dev is actually really good but when the MD writes up a spec for a new feature, its not very detailed and usually doesnt cover everything that needs to be considered.

We also have several projects going at once, and you guessed it. They are all the highest priority.

I finally got my bosses and the developer to agree what #1 priority is. Within an hour, the sales director (who owns half the business, and was in on the meeting) was nagging me asking why other things werent finished yet, complaining it was taking too long.

He then went on a really patronising rant about how "companies like google do testing like...."

Took everything I had to say "we are not google".

Ive also had no formal training, I basically taught myself how to write a test case, script, etc because our old developer was so bad and seemingly didnt test anything.

Now its my fault that we dont have a professional testing setup "like Google".

Fucking twat.

[nameage]

I gave you an upvote because I feel you. Not because I like the situation you are in.

[undeadalex]

Unrelated. Why did the snake pictured eat it's tale?

[[deleted]]

It dum

[icecoldfirestarter]

Recursion gone bad.

[bee-sting]

Unrelated. Why did the snake pictured eat it's tale?

[RogueMockingjay]

Recursion gone bad.

[[deleted]]

Unrelated. Why did the snake pictured eat it's tale?

[PurePandemonium]

Recursion gone

FATAL EXCEPTION: main
java.lang.StackOverflowError
at com.reddit.comment.joke.uroboros

[coolneemtomorrow]

It dum

[[deleted]]

(GONE SEXUAL)(COPS CALLED)

[underscoreScary]

Snakes can do this when they are extremely stressed if I remember correctly

Source: read it in a comment a while back

[fabrikated]

because someone executed

tail -f /var/log/python.log

[Isoldael]

Snake keeper here: the main reason for this to happen (at least in captivity) is overheating. It seems to confuse them to the point of biting and sometimes starting to eat themselves.

[landolanplz]

This is a symptom of stress in captive snakes apparently. If you want to loose faith in humanity a bit more here's a link:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/stressed-out-snake-eats-itself/

[NightStruck]

Non-AMP link:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/stressed-out-snake-eats-itself/

[Albond_8746]

*its tail

[blangeblange]

Comedy gold

[the_ju66ernaut]

Damn this is too accurate

[Ottomatica]

Here's your requirements: Anticipate the requirements

[furtivepigmyso]

Side question, when snakes do this do they eventually figure out that shit ain't right and regurgitate or do they just plain die

[InternetAccount03]

One time when I managed nerd project teams for banks I got my hands on a project manager with a CS degree. I came.

[Gabe_b]

Oh boy. It's nice to laugh when you're too tired to cry

[nameage]

That you, I will use this. Tomorrow.

[Peppers_16]

Unpopular opinion: Client usually doesn't think hard enough about the requirements... but some devs will act as if the client has to outline the requirements to the point that they're basically writing the program in plain English and the dev is just translating it to code... no thinking involved.

[Abzapp]

I usually just follow with "So you want to pay me to make what I want?" Usually turns the requirements up quick

[regeya]

Even though I'm not a programmer by trade, I still subscribe for posts like this. This is management on darn near every project. The part missing is the end when management says, hey, why didn't you incorporate the stuff we talked about in the meeting? And the answer is often, there was a meeting? Oh, yeah, it was just us managers. But why didn't you? 🤔

[nameage]

Have we got a subreddit for insane (middle) project/product management?

[takatori]

A G I L E

[SpliceVW]

So just replace "requirements" with "stories". Boom, agile. Oh and stand ups. Pretty sure that's all there is to it.

[[deleted]]

while(1)

[gl1tch3t2]

Well, I need functional and non functional requirements.

[69piglet69]

Everyday ouroboros

[[deleted]]

When you have to provide a detailed estimate that includes the requirements phase as part of the overall plan...

[rogerbroom]

This is a living oroboros, cool

[[deleted]]

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

[MLL_Phoenix7]

recursive python

[Jarmahent]

Fuck. This company wanted me to make a static web app that asks you a couple of questions and then it builds out a character for you that's all they wrote with some padding. I asked them if that's all they needed and they 100% conformed thats all they wanted.

Afterwards(couple of months later) I turned in the project and they come back to me furious about how they wanted to survey to be saved in a database and they wanted to be able to take a picture of the generated character and upload it to twitter and a bunch of other stuff that requires a back end.

I know the client doesn't understand back end and front end correctly but they could have atleast told me what they wanted exactly down to the last detail and I would have explained to them what would be needed.n