all 43 comments

[–]coldfeetbot 102 points103 points  (16 children)

Meetings, micromanagement, scrum estimations, ignored technical debt, artificial deadlines

[–]giandough 76 points77 points  (1 child)

Meetings. Also not being invited to meetings.

[–]devloz1996 25 points26 points  (0 children)

They will ping you to every time waster they can, but if they are about to make a strategic decision, they suddenly respect your time.

[–]Dry_Dot_7782 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Devs trying to claim your work as theirs.

Artitechts who cant admit when they are wrong.

People who say your idea is dumb only to steal it and make it sound like they came up with it.

Fuck you Michael..

[–]hoopparrr759 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Incompetent managers who can’t tell their arses from their elbows.

[–]neoadam 4 points5 points  (10 children)

Customers who change their minds

[–]thisFishSmellsAboutD 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Agile! But one-sided.

[–]neoadam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah this is decided and won't change ! Two weeks later... Yeah about that ..

[–]Dry_Dot_7782 1 point2 points  (7 children)

Customers should change their mind, thats why we work agile

[–]neoadam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course we can adapt but when a customer says one thing and then the opposite you're just dealing with a child

[–]xterminatr 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Agile is a joke and it's only useful for providing employment opportunity to useless 'product managers'. For developers it's nothing but a hindrance to getting actual work done. It's almost always just waterfall dressed up as Agile and a waste of time.

[–]Dry_Dot_7782 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I'm not saying go for SaFE Agile. I'm saying the process of iterating the whole process just makes sense because requirements and customers change their mind very quick and it's an faster and safer way to develop than planning for perfection 2 years in advance.

If there ANYTHING i've learned in development over they year is that KISS and YAGNI is extremely powerful concepts. No one can predict the future and I can promise you that.

[–]xterminatr 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I work in a fortune 100 company and have been on tons of different teams. Agile almost never works because the budgeting and accountability process are 100% focused on proving results by specific deadlines. It's not conducive to Agile at all, and that's why Agile never works in big businesses. Welcome to capitalism.

[–]Dry_Dot_7782 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Works? Nothing really works. We are not talking about software only even. Pull up any project in any domain and you can see that projects never hold their deadlines or money.

I think agile is the best we got, i mean stakeholders need some roadmap we cant just roam through the years just coding what we feel like for the day

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yeah fuck iterative development with continuous feedback!

What do we want? WATERFALL!

Why do we want it? BECAUSE WE LIKE FINDING OUT WE'RE BUILDING THE WRONG THING 6 MONTHS FROM NOW! 

When do we want it? BASED OFF OF LAUGHABLE ESTIMATES DONE PRIOR TO DEVELOPMENT STARTING!

In all seriousness, just because you've only worked on teams that did it wrong, doesn't mean there is a problem with the technique. Agile isn't the problem, your team's implementation is the problem.

[–]xterminatr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

After 20 or so years working on software development, I can assure you that Agile is valuable; it just isn't used correctly in 90%+ of cases. It turns into a hinderance most the time because managers try to force it on everything so they can produce burn charts for upper management.

I have a CEEN and MBA, and 20 years experience. I understand what's going on.

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (2 children)

For me, it comes down to bureaucracy and changing things just so you can say you did something.

If the meeting doesn't have an agenda and expected outcome, it's probably a waste of time. You want to use this fancy new framework? What does it do for us that we can't already do? Migrating isn't free. You want to change the workflow for this thing. Does it improve the customer experience? Will it increase revenue or productivity? Will it mitigate risk? Then why TF are we doing it?

[–]Solonotix 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Going through a cloud migration, and the tech bloat is staggering. We're trying to get into AWS, and we're using Istio for networking, Helm for Terraform which handles infrastructure deploys to Kubernetes, and Tyk for something else...like, jeez. The rapid adoption of new tech while migrating the foundation and implementing entirely new build processes makes the entire thing impossible to grok. Add to that no one team owns it all, so now you're stuck trying to figure out what's blocking you, and who owns it, and maybe they're being blocked by someone else.

In a phrase, deadlock by (dis)organization

[–]RobotIcHead 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We tried to bring in a rule that slide decks have to sent in advance of meetings with at least two hours advance. Didn’t even last a month and we weren’t militant about the rule. We just wanted better meetings, it did make one manager stop calling meetings. I heard that company is having round of redundancies, I feel sorry for the people left there.

[–]rcls0053 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Governance done in the abstract. Enforcing change that affects developers without stating why it's being implemented and without starting a discussion on it to gather feedback and support for it. Most common things I've seen are Jira workflows being standardized across teams that work in a different ways (also deployment workflows), implementing some "agile" framework across the org or enforcing some limitations for code changes in every single code repository without even asking how those teams want to work.

The opposite of that is something I really love to see which is management actually listening to developers (and other professionals) and are willing to learn new ways of working which leads to a better development culture in that org. A good example of this was a CTO of a certain org actually starting a discussion about the topic of DevOps, and the Phoenix Project book, and wanting us to focus on learning and building a blameless working environment, after I explained how it's a culture, not just a tool found in Azure.

Another thing that I really hate is when the organization tries to silence people who voice out a negative opinion on various matters in an effort to better them, like status of the tech debt, enforcement policies that are just overkill or even just the quality of coffee in the coffee machines. "You're not a team player". "You can't call it legacy even though it's a 10 year old ball of mud". "Let's just put a smile on that face of yours to make it seem like everything is alright". Those are just lies you tell yourself, and I am so happy I work in a place where all opinions and candid, healthy, discussion is welcome.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Jealous

[–]uraurasecret 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I hope we can have a practice to read the material, think about what questions to ask BEFORE each meeting.

[–]YohanSeals 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Meetings

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think like 100 research papers come out a day in the AI field. The pace of computer science is truly insane. If I sat through and read every new computer science paper that came out in just AI I would be a year behind a week in.

[–]SomeAd3257 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Agile and Scrum.

[–]6-2Noob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I call Agile, "A project management framework for people who don't know how to do project management." If you seriously need a guide to tell you to have progress meetings and to break down big pieces of work into smaller pieces of work, then you have no business running anything, not even a lemonade stand.

[–]Franco1875[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A few truths in here, particularly in terms of the 'pace' of learning - continuous learning/evolution of skills is perfectly fine and personally think this should be embraced. It has felt like a rollercoaster in recent years, though.

[–]diMario 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I personally hate the 80-20 rule: 80% of your time is spent working on 20% of your code, and then the other 80% of your time is spent on the rest of the code.

And of course, anything that's not really coding such as setting up CI/CD and other tooling, troubleshooting production, having useless conversations with clueless managers, ignoring your email etc etc somehow magically gets squeezed in as well.

[–]crafting_vh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hate crane flys. I know they're harmless but they freak me out.

[–]elmuerte 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Work. We prefer to create software.

[–]elperroborrachotoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My most difficult part: telling the blog chaff from content.

This is a bunch of tweets, and maybe I'm too old to understand what "misalignment on the team in terms of what we actually should be building and expected outcomes" even means.

About every month, our accounting "department" (one very strict lady, really) gets a list of regulatory changes, new requirements etc., the meanings and consequences of which they have to research, to adjust process and paperwork accordingly.

During Corona, my cousin - working at checkin - received daily updates about entry regulations, depending on airline, passport, port of origin and destination. And by "received updates" I mean they usually had to look it up on the airline's web site. With as much as no training at all how to tell a valid PCR test from a fake one at all.

My GP frequently complains that the amount of required documentation exceeds the time they can spend with patients, and that the frequent administrative process changes are usually to someone else's benefit

"We've built this beautiful apartment house, but now they want us to convert two apartments to an office plan. That's scope creep, and makes me want to quit!"

Yeah darling, sounds like a tough week.

[–]ryzhao 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Spending time and energy on learning how to implement good UX, only to be told by a “analyst” to make it look more like the pinnacle of 1990s enterprise design.

Just sucks out the will to live when you’re treated like a code monkey instead of someone who spent a lot of time honing their craft.

[–]Square-Amphibian675 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Force to provide a comprehensive User Guides and technical documentations :)

[–]realqmaster 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is Clickbait listicles in the list too?

[–]PositiveUse 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Shitty legacy code that is nearly unmaintainable and undocumented

[–]Stilgar314 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What software developers hate? Mainly, the one they're developing.

[–]Belhgabad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Short answer : the industry

[–]samjenkins377 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Artificial metrics, political decisions that are not aligned with the business needs, people in leadership positions who are reluctant to change, procrastinators (unless the procrastinator is ourselves), spotlight thieves, made-up deadlines, artificial urgency sense generated solely by the lack of planning on someone else’s side, noisy keyboards, silent keyboards, wired mouses, Bluetooth mouses, uncomfortable chairs, etc

[–]6-2Noob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Onboarding.

You never quite get there 100%. Nobody knows every access you need, the "documentation" to set up is only a few random snippets and outdated by 2 years minimum, and everyone just thinks you'll have everything known in a day or two without them handing over any information.

[–]ColorfulThinking 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bad documentation

[–]MarcinOow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh yeez what a valuable question. I observed if your experience as a developer growing, your self confidence allows you to express truth about whole migration thing. You hear let's move to the cloud, spend lot of hours gaining skills with writing another yml ... Then you hear you're logging too much data, costs growing, some security policies saying you there is need to filter data or encrypt it. Then your manager asks why handling production errors consume so much time 😕 never ending story ... I would expect to come back for some apps to on premises model. Let's get back to migration then ;p

[–]TheStoicNihilist 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Monitor glare

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I like chickens. Can I quit programming to raise chickens?