I once read about Andy Warhol’s film Empire and thought it could form a decent stylistic background for a movie about your average programmer’s work day.
One continuous 8 hour shot of a programmer sitting by a computer, slowly scrolling through a code, pausing for a long time to stare at particular sections, and occasionally saying “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”
Yeah, except Joe doesn’t just say “yes”. He’s got some corpo speak about making sure outcomes align with the the most emergent needs and ensuring Joe has a he right information to manage expectations.
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)
Not software, one my the reasons I dropped The Flash tv series was the speed at which the “techie” created new tech that would win anyone several noble prizes.
Do I really need to open a ticket for this
Yes
UNIRONICALLY, ASSHOLE! IT’S THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE!!!
Fucking “hey guys, we are bringing in someone from another department and they need to catch up. What’s the project looking like?”
“I don’t know. Nobody wrote anything down and now it’s scattered across six didn’t PCs in various states of dysfunction.”
IT guys think they’re all Michael Jordan right until they get the ball.
There’s an alternative to creating too many tickets that only add overhead and then make it harder to get into the project. Creating a good amount of tickets.
I took the OP reference as demand for ticket creation when they don’t make sense and only hinder development through unnecessary overhead. E.g. creating a ticket before a quick analysis, or creating individual tickets when one story/feature ticket would be enough. Or more specifically in this case, having to create one before fixing a critical blocker.
I get the message here for sure, but imo tickets (while important) take a back seat to a rich commit history. Ifbthe commit messages and history are high quality enough, one can tell whats up with the code sinply by looking at the log.
Tickets on the otherhand are in a secondary system. Of course, they can bind the work of multiple projects together. But honestly, has anyone ever been able to just reach the ticket history and know everything about a project without asking someone?
tickets (while important) take a back seat to a rich commit history
I’ve found people who do one will manage the other with ease. But “oops! No ticket” is a canary telling me their commit log is going to be shit.
But honestly, has anyone ever been able to just reach the ticket history and know everything about a project without asking someone?
I’ve been able to find out the status of individual half-finished bugs off a ticket log and work/reassign it quickly. Without a ticket in queue, I’ll either discover the issue has been completely ignored or that multiple people pioneered their own boutique fix without talking to one another.
Problem in some teams are the respective audiences for the commit activity v. the ticket activity.
The people who will engage on commit activity tend to have a greater common ground and sensibilities. Likely have to document your work and do code reviews as the code gets into the codebase and other such activity.
However, on the ticket side you are likely to get people involved that are really obnoxious to contend with. Things like:
- Getting caught up in arguments over sizing where the argument takes more of your time than doing the request
- Having to explain to someone who shouldn’t care why the ticket was opened in the first place despite all the real stakeholders knowing immediately that it makes sense.
- Work getting prioritized or descoped due to some political infighting rather than actual business need
- Putting extra work to unwind completed work due to some miscommunication on planning and a project manager wanting to punish a marketing person for failing to properly get their request through the process
- Walking an issue through the process to completion involves having to iterate through 7 states, with about 16 mandatory fields that are editable/not editable depending on which state and sometimes the process is stuck due to not having permission because of some bureaucratic nonsense that runs counter to everyone’s real world understanding.
In a company with armies of project managers the ticket side is the side of dread even if the technical code side is relatively sane.
Haha, i’d write a thousand pages of documentation before entering ticket hell. I fact I do put a lot of information into the ticket - they still won’t read it though and i’ll have to repeat myself 15 times to 5 different people.
The solution to this problem. . . I have no idea, but I’m sure they’ll appoint another delivery manager who will get hired by the ones who already know fuck-all to know less than them.
I’ve found that the few managers who want documentation, get documentation, and the others who want tickets and “story points”, get tickets and fictional bullshit - in general.___
Don’t know about solving, but at least can see the signs:
- If there’s a lot of layers of middle management between you and the head of the company
- There are people with oddly narrow scope of responsibilities, a scope that doesn’t make any sense to be a dedicated full time job
- Excessive numbers of “cute” acronyms to apply to everything and everyone
The solution to this problem. . .
is that they have to create a support ticket with you, that you then put in progress, and you walk them through your documentation, and then log your time spent onto that ticket. (/s)
I’ve found people who do one will manage the other with ease. But “oops! No ticket” is a canary telling me their commit log is going to be shit.
Thats an astute observation. I really cant refute that haha.
Project Zero Dawn but it’s funded by VCs
Your father died protecting free markets
What? Is this a reference to the game?
Yeah one of the audio logs
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?
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.
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.
As if, I, the programmer, will open a ticket for anything. Thats your job tester. Thats jour job PM. Im not putting this fire and I dont care if the company goes under because of it.
Some grad included unecessary libraries held over from them dorking around on a testbed that cost the company $40,000 and blew the code out tenfold
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.
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?
Black Mirrors Hated in the Nation makes fun of this briefly iirc
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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’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 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).
They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.
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.
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.
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.
Tickets aren’t agile, tickets are scrum.
I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without 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!
