I hate scrum

I hate stand up

I hate sprints

Fuck Toyota

How have we taken the most autistic job and tacked a stupid, worthless, autistic unfriendly process on to it? (the answer of course is capitalism)

I want to quit but I can't get another job and even if I could it would just be more of this shit.

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    There's an old saying that a pig doesn't get any fatter by being weighed and there's a lot of pig-weighing going in the software industry.

    To me personally scrum rituals like daily standups are a minor nuisance. They are unproductive and often boring but most of the time you can get them over with relatively quickly.

    What I really, really, really hate is the time registration tyranny where you have to do estimates, have meetings about estimates, remember to turn on and off timers, fiddle with timesheets when you forget about the timers, answer questions like "how will this change that everyone agrees needs to be done affect the estimates?" and defend why a task that was estimated to six hours took eight to complete.

    I have ADHD, I have trouble making a realistic estimate on how long it takes to cook pasta and you expect me to be able to accurately predict how long it takes to compete a 3000+ hour project with a ton of external dependencies, arcane legacy code and agile constantly evolving requirements?

    I understand that you need something to put on a bill that the customer will pay without complaining but come on, how can this be effective? Sometimes I feel I spend more time wrangling timesheets than actually coding.

    • kittin [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      There’s a 2:3 ratio of time-estimators to doers at my current company and the devs have to spend about 20-25% of their time estimating their time.

      I had enough pull to make a “hit squad” unit that “just executed” and everyone was stunned at how we managed to pull off a from scratch release in “just” 8 months, honestly compared to previous companies that was slow but I also had to train up 5 junior/mids who had never worked with Go or Kubernetes at the same time, saving the company potentially millions in expenses and making a product they are already selling to clients.

      Now they’ve assigned a product owner and have asked us to start doing daily’s so I’m going to quit.

      SCRUM is middle-management capture and all the middle-managers know they are not necessary.

      • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        SCRUM is middle-management capture and all the middle-managers know they are not necessary.

        Exactly. Management in the since of coordinating teams/organizations is not a fake job in and of itself, but the amount of bloat/inflation that has occurred to management has made a solid 90% of the "job" a make-work job.

    • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      What I really, really, really hate is the time registration tyranny where you have to do estimates, have meetings about estimates, remember to turn on and off timers, fiddle with timesheets when you forget about the timers, answer questions like "how will this change that everyone agrees needs to be done affect the estimates?" and defend why a task that was estimated to six hours took eight to complete.

      Same. The time tracking is one of those things the more you spend time doing the more you realize it's a waste of time.

      I have ADHD, I have trouble making a realistic estimate on how long it takes to cook pasta and you expect me to be able to accurately predict how long it takes to compete a 3000+ hour project with a ton of external dependencies, arcane legacy code and agile constantly evolving requirements?

      That's one big reason I hate how individualized software development. It's crazy that it's all YOUR job to handle all that. There is no team, no collective, just single nodes in a collection of nodes. It's really a shame.

      • SoyViking [he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I get your point about how individualised development is part of the problem. I just want to point out how these rituals to divine the future of a project can become absolutely cursed when done as a team effort. Sitting by yourself and pondering how long it will take to make the computer go beep is a miserable experience, having to discuss the minutiae of how long something will take because management got the idea that this will make the estimates "more accurate" is many times worse.

        • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          having to discuss the minutiae of how long something will take because management got the idea that this will make the estimates "more accurate" is many times worse.

          BIG AGREE on that one