I went from very little red tape to a ton of red tape now. Honestly the latter is better because that means everything production is basically off my plate. But there are times I wish I could just hop on prod, change a few scripts and run them without having to go through the entire production control process.
IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
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Noodleface
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We're a giant company going through an "agile transition" as well. Essentially just higher ups shouting "be agile" without too much of a framework in place around it.
I just embraced it early. We're a dinosaur of an IT department. While most of this will just be fake, promotional, buzzword filled change, any actual move to something more progressive will be good for us. I'm the "agile ambassador" for the team I'm on and so far it's made me look good. Hasn't actually lead to any real productivity increase yet but maybe that will come. Fingers crossed at least!
I just embraced it early. We're a dinosaur of an IT department. While most of this will just be fake, promotional, buzzword filled change, any actual move to something more progressive will be good for us. I'm the "agile ambassador" for the team I'm on and so far it's made me look good. Hasn't actually lead to any real productivity increase yet but maybe that will come. Fingers crossed at least!
Khane
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At the previous company I worked for they attempted to move to Agile. They brought in an "Agile Coach" who did "Agile Workshops" with the developers, and only the developers, for a week. They then asked the developers to explain Agile to the business owners, project managers, and testers. Needless to say it didn't work.
It was funny trying to get the business owners and PM's to storyboard features with the developers. After about a month that all stopped but our manager demanded we keep the daily standup. So we had a daily standup, with every single one of our developers working across multiple different, completely unrelated projects all talking about what they were doing. Which entailed the manager and other people interjecting to try to offer advice and help. Every day this standup would take at least an hour.
Luckily for me it happened right outside my office so I would sit in my chair at my desk actually getting shit done and pretend I was participating.
It was funny trying to get the business owners and PM's to storyboard features with the developers. After about a month that all stopped but our manager demanded we keep the daily standup. So we had a daily standup, with every single one of our developers working across multiple different, completely unrelated projects all talking about what they were doing. Which entailed the manager and other people interjecting to try to offer advice and help. Every day this standup would take at least an hour.
Luckily for me it happened right outside my office so I would sit in my chair at my desk actually getting shit done and pretend I was participating.
That isn't the worst idea. It is long theorized that Agile really only works with empowered developers and where managers exist only to remove roadblocks and take meetings. Making the developers learn the concept and try to implement it at the management level doesn't feel backwards to me it feels proper. My company has been using Agile practices since I've worked there so its mostly second nature. But its kind of funny when the new management came in they installed a ton of arcane waterfall practices and now they've decided we need to go back to being more agile. But since it is management forcing it they've completely missed the point on what it is to be Agile, the risks and the benefits. They basically just want features faster and have decided that the initiative to make that happen will be labeled Agile.
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We tried agile maybe 3 years ago and this same thing happened. Intimate coaching sessions, but the scrum teams ended up with too much manager involvement. It's just how things were back then. Lots of micromanaging. Asking all of middle management to abandon that at the time was too much. Agile drifted away, but we definitely kept the "daily scrums" which ended up just being hour long team meetings. My manager at the time loved it. It gave him a legit excuse to do what he wanted to anyway. He had been dinged for taking up too much of his developers time in random meetings in the past.
The push this time around comes from much higher up and management seems much more into the idea now. The frustration so far as been on the grunts who are just stuck in their ways and don't want to change.
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I actually don't totally object to the standup thing in the group but the groups shouldn't be huge and each person shouldn't talk more than like 30-45 seconds.
It really means you can't hide under a rock and accomplish nothing because you have to state what you're working on each day. Anybody loafing will be obvious right quick.
It really means you can't hide under a rock and accomplish nothing because you have to state what you're working on each day. Anybody loafing will be obvious right quick.
Yeah but this is where agile starts to fail at scale. Almost every single stand up I've been in started out as the quick burst, done in 15m or less but then always the scope of what was talked about grew and the chickens would cluck over the pigs and suddenly you're all sitting down in a meeting room for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. Personally I blame the managers but the developers who also won't shut the fuck up are to blame. Talk about what you did, talk about what you're going to do and let the manager know if there are any roadblocks. Done. Shut up. I don't care how you did something and I don't care about what problems you're having with implementation. I don't care about your daughter's soccer practice. I just want to leave.
As one agile coach told me the purpose of the daily stand up is to make it so the developers can only lie to you in 8 hour increments. If you have a weekly group meeting they can lie to you in week long chunks. It also becomes horribly obvious who isn't pulling their weight when daily face-to-face reports are generated.
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Any process will be shitty with bad management you're just pointing out how agile fails with bad management. Any other development methodology will also fail with bad management just with other telltales and wastes of time.
The thing is agile shouldn't be effected by bad managers. It should be managed by the developers with input on priority from the product owner. It gets bogged down by over managing. This is a very scary concept for a middle manager because effectively they shouldn't have a job. So a ton of required management practices are put down upon your project manager so the middle manager can report to his high-middle manager just how much more effective his teams are since implementing management practice XYZ. For large companies it always feels like following agile in the purest sense is a pipe dream and even following it closely is often times not obeyed.
Khane
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It sounds fine in theory but try to get neckbeard developers to try to explain or teach anything to anyone. Especially since they all had their own idea of what Agile should be.
Most developers aren't even people man. They're weirdos with no social skills. Either that or they really suck at being a developer. 80/20 and all that.
Noodleface
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The people here drive me fucking nuts.
"Can I have a report on every single way possible that the BIOS would issue a power cycle?"
What kind of lazy-ass fucking bullshit request is that.
"Can I have a report on every single way possible that the BIOS would issue a power cycle?"
What kind of lazy-ass fucking bullshit request is that.
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Find the subroutine that issues a power cycle. List every function that calls that, then every function that calls any of the ones that call a power cycle. Make it into a spreadsheet.
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
Noodleface
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That's exactly what I'm doing. It's stupid, I'm not analyzing every case that the system goes into a 'power cycle' especially with the mountain of work I have.
In case it wasn't clear, it's a very non-trivial task with results that will help 0% anyone.
In case it wasn't clear, it's a very non-trivial task with results that will help 0% anyone.
This sounds either like UHG or medtronic given the MSP location. Though lot of dinosaurs outside of Target/BB up there.
Siliconemelons
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Our devs have been doing scrum, the team I am on - our systems team is doing Kanban, 10-15min standup at the board and we are done.
moontayle
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Weirdness for the day. Put out an app update last week, then came in this morning to find out things weren't updating. Dig further, the file being installed was the last update from three months ago. Go to server, and the file being downloaded has the correct date/time of the build I created last week. It even has the correct size. But it's not the correct file.
No earthly idea what happened here, but I've corrected it. Friggin hate computers sometimes.
No earthly idea what happened here, but I've corrected it. Friggin hate computers sometimes.