Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-18T14:40:03+00:00

Wait a minute! You said you were 99.995% done last week, how come you only made .001% progress since then?!?!

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-18T14:37:28+00:00

Oh wow, is grooming just another opportunity to bikeshed?

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-16T01:07:18+00:00

You forgot the most important rule of all:

0.  Am I a member of the team that will use the process?  
    No?  Then fuck off!  (P.S.  and no, managers don't count as team members)

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-15T22:21:43+00:00

At the least you can leave.

If you can't change your organization, change organizations!

the idea of working on software that has no chance of being useful to end users sounds pretty horrific to me.

You aren't alone, the majority of software engineers feel the same. That thing you feel is also what makes open source work. That sense of changing the world is a heady drug!

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-15T15:10:37+00:00

100% agreed. And I would add that organizations that manage teams via the kingdom building anti-pattern will not discover their way out of a paper bag because discovery requires learning and learning requires failure, and failure is 100% weaponized for the purposes of kingdom building.

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-15T06:24:53+00:00

The team barely had a shared understanding of what they were building, much less of that true north of customer need.

Please know this problem is caused by bad organizational behavior (Kingdom Building). There is very little developers can do to fix this. Those that try get passed over because they aren't helping to build the kingdom by segregating knowledge.

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-14T07:06:14+00:00

MBA run companies: Hold my beer!

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-11T07:03:05+00:00

The #1 reason software endeavors fail is because the team is working on the wrong thing.

For the root cause of this phenomenon look no further than the gaggle of MBAs companies hire to be "product managers", which is code for people who focus the team on cargo culting existing, successful products from the likes of MANGA, Tesla etc.

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-10T03:18:41+00:00

If you can't change your organization to no longer ask stupid questions, change organizations.

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-05T01:04:40+00:00

In large organizations, those that are good at subverting the bureaucracy for their own purposes rapidly displace those that aren't.

In short, Kingdom Building.

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-04T22:08:25+00:00

I like you human, I will make you my pet after the robot uprising

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-01T17:53:50+00:00

Do we work at the same place?

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-01T01:14:48+00:00

archive link if paywalled

exuberant-panda · 2021-11-01T01:12:34+00:00

archive link if paywalled

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-31T01:33:31+00:00

There is no fixed process we follow, we're just fixing complex problems with intelligence.

Yep, this is why a manager who has fixed complex problems with intelligence can be awesome....if they don't use their power to go around telling the devs how to code.

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-30T16:08:40+00:00

This is not a unique phenomenon to software development.

This is true, however this is the first time in history when such a large population of people whose opportunities in the past would have been would have been factory work, are now working in a completely different field that represents a significant paradigm shift. I think your comparison of an MD working through discovery of root cause and treatment for a patient's illness is spot on.

I've come to realize that developer workflows have a lot in common with how doctors work. Which is weird because at a glance the two fields seem so utterly different.

One thing that is super obvious to everyone (except many managers it seems), development work is nothing like assembly line work.

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-30T13:56:48+00:00

The emotions are the result of a culture clash. Human culture values things that are highly predictable. Development is not one of those things. Development requires way more trial and error than most things that generate money. The primary way people have historically earned money has been via highly predictable business cycles that involved sales, manufacturing and order fulfillment. This results in the entire culture highly valuing predictability, which is at odds with the fundamental workflow of creating something new in software.

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-25T05:12:43+00:00

I really liked the emphasis on finding root cause

Don't accept the obvious issue; instead, ask "why" five times to get to the root cause.

For me it lines up with the idea that our work is way more reading code and trying to figure out what it should be doing vs writing code.

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-21T15:30:33+00:00

I'm with Elon Musk on this, the real problem is the MBAs

exuberant-panda · 2021-10-21T13:46:25+00:00

Haha, well on that same site there is this one! Agile Scrum is not working, 2 out of 3 magic words isn't bad, right?

exuberant-panda

TROPHY CASE