- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Unpaid overtime = work is just not going to be done.
That’s what I do at work, even though I’m salary.
Management decided to hire a new guy and then have a round of layoffs within 6 months, effectively canning someone to replace him. Since then, we’ve had multiple times where we have hundreds of tickets sitting unassigned because there’s more work than people. So shit sits and falls through the cracks until someone has time or something is on fire.
It fucking sucks, but eventually the bean counters will see that we actually needed that extra body…
We did have well over 100 tickets in the queue, now they split the support team into multiple sub support teams and each sub team has fewer tickets in their own queue. The total number is still massive but compartmentalising the problem makes most of it go away! I can filter it down to such a degree my queue is almost single figures by just ignoring everything else because that is someone elses problem.
Also my sub team doesn’t have anyone to cover 1st line on some products so I am covering 1st line there as well as 2nd line. Upside is my stats look brilliant now that I am doing all the password reset tickets.
I would share this with my dev team
But the teams “scrum guide” and “product owner support” are on the chat and it would get my ass fired
I prefer the inclusive term of “Scrum Dumpster”. It really works.
Guess i got a blackout bingo on this one. Oof.
Nah, time tracking is often needed for tax purposes: companies can write off R&D expenses
It all depends on how time tracking is implemented.
Tell me I have to account for my time in 15-30 min increments? Fine, I can put it into a spreadsheet and track it.
Tell me I have to track real time spent? Get entirely fucked, and I hope you’re ok with spending time fixing my time punches because I absolutely am going to forget to open or close a time entry because I’m working on 3-4 tasks at any given time.
I’ve done both, and while I won’t intentionally sabotage the latter, my rampant ADHD and terrible memory have got my back on that one.
Yeah but that can be done after you’re finished, definitely shouldn’t be part of planning!
"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn’t select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you’ll have to start this whole process over.
Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"
Let’s not forget “We need this right away!” then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren’t actually ready for it yet (if they don’t change their mind and decide they don’t actually want it at all).
It’s actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says “Well, it’s a simple task. Are you having difficulty?”.
It’s an obscure and weirdly specific law.
(This is a joke, of course.)
I have spent the past 20 years cultivating a variety of tones in which to utter my standard reply to such nonsense:
“Cool. You do it then.”
That’s a great way to handle it.
I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.
When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.
If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)
I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.
We have the one hour daily meetings we call “standup” 🙄
Right? Minute 55-60 is the 15th minute. Fuck that. If it takes that long then the team is too big for agile or the scrum master had lost control.
”All features are xy problems”
”PM adds new issues to the sprint faster than they’re solved”
”Each release require two weeks of testing”
”Each release introduces new bugs for customers despite the two weeks of testing”
Does 5 time trackers count as 5 points ?
“Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter”
who are these time wasters that just put bugs in their code. I mean come on.
If story points are now hours, I hope you’re fine with me putting a 40 on that ticket.
Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
Sources:
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
4 hour planning
I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.
Story points = hours
