Agile/Scrum, ISO 9001, ITIL, Six Sigma, CMMI, etc; it’s all cargo cults.
Oh god, add in “random scripts throw errors that you’ve never seen before” and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: “Write good code and hope no one notices”
there comes a time where you have so little supervision that you can actually do something interesting and productive
Those are the days. I can even sometimes sneak in some tech debt reduction.
Not every person is the same.
Rules and processes and documentation and change management often times equals stability and repeatable successes. Some people thrive in this environment.
Moving fast and breaking shit with no rules or processes or documentation or change management often times leads to outages and an environment where you have to be the hero or a real IT “rockstar” to be successful. Some people thrive in this environment.
If you don’t like all the rules and processes and documentation and change management, then you should know thyself and find a different job.
Found the bootlicking manager! Be sure to always remind the people doing the work that they are easily replaceable. They should be grateful right?
Found the IT “Rockstar”.
attend mandatory training
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be “scalable agile”. By “scalable”, they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about “Extreme Programming” or “Agile” being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
We have SAFe at my office too. It seems to me that it’s just a way to say you’re agile while still being waterfall.
I wish I could upvote you more than once
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we’re in a release freeze.
Build a skunk works, it’s like an IT department’s shadow IT, shave a yak, shed a bike.
fix json
fuck why is everything broken
spend whole day trying to figure out
oh yeah i see the trailing comma from when i cut and pasted
JSON parsers need to get their shit together. I’ve had errors for trailing commas and comments in JSON way too often.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can’t set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I’m just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don’t have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.
When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.
Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.
You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.
Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.
Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
Also every time a techbro tweets something a random number generator may fir- lay you off due to financial decisions.
All this is great if you’re working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.
I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.
That sucks man.
Having a team touch base, followed by a daily standup, followed by a quality initiative meeting, followed by a biweekly support touch base, followed by a demo for a tool your team will never use, followed by lunch and learn session over some AI tool you’ll be forced to use, followed by your biweekly 1:1 with the manager, followed by the department touch base, followed by the company all hands… Aaaaand done with meetings. Finally, some time to get some work done… then your downstream customer wants you to investigate why their counts don’t match yours… “could you run the totals again? Could you run them broken down by hour? By minute? By second? Can you get me a list of each record at these 6 timestamps? Can I get them in a different format? Oops, the problem was on our end.” Great. And it’s 5 o’clock. Scrum master gonna be up my ass about story points tomorrow.
oh no my PTSD is coming back.
You must be a fellow data engineer
Eh, more software now. But I work on a streaming platform so or downstream customers are data engineers.
As a project/portfolio manager, the first thing I try to do is eliminate everything except the customer part. That is really hard to fix, but at least there is more time?
