Been there, done that. Everyday would start with a 2 hour session of meetings. Daily for 30mins and then 1.5h of refinement. Day by day, for 2 years of me being there.
It, without an ounce of irony, leaves a fucking scar on you and makes you despise having meeting for the rest of your life.
I remember working in the office and the customer visited and took part in our task estimation meeting. We've spent about 3 hours in one block estimating their tasks because they had so much input.
This stuff is purely for my manager and I’ve recently noticed he’s basically not paying attention. Losing so much time for a ritual lol.
I've lost my shit with people over this lol. Just sucks when you are like 3 hours in on something and then someone just comes along and makes small talk.
I was fired from my last job because I was expected to write features AND do helpdesk support at the same time and just no... I was also fired because I suck at programming but still...
haha yeah writing code while dealing with distractions is effectively impossible
It's funny because after I got fired my production went through the roof because I was able to work on my own stuff without dealing with other people's bullshit.
It really does lol. Now if people would just pay me to make them websites... I am making a freebie for some friends and hoping I can get some traffic from that though.
I've never been good at finding work through freelancing, some of my friends to it and seem to like it.
I live at home and my little siblings with ADHD* knock on the door to tell me stuff all the time ughhh
*I have ADHD too which is why it's extra tragic when I lose my train of thought.
I have ASD so once I get into that hyperfocus flowstate, and get pulled out of it, it's like everything around me just shatters lol. My partner and oldest kid have ADHD so when either or both are around I mostly don't even bother with code. I was able to get a tiny bit of stuff done this morning but it was mostly stuff I have on mental autopilot like git stuff.
Learn to document more. It gets a little better with age once you must resign yourself to the fact that you will be interrupted at any point. If you document, you can resume easier and there's less mind shift inertia.
This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I'm working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we're doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There's always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I'm writing more emails than code these days.
My most successful standups have been like:
“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”
“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”
“Sure.”
“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”
Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.
I find daily stand ups are completely useless because most of the useful communication can just be done by the people involved directly over email, messaging, or just talking to each other. I find it's useful to have a whole team meeting maybe like once a week just to see where everyone is at and how different parts of the project are going. There's very little reason to do that every single day.
About a year ago, I was working with an east coast customer while working remote on the west coast. Scrum was at 7am my time, with the customer on the call.
Probably should have been a stressful situation as they were a tough customer, our largest account in terms of ARR and PS dollars, and they loved to tell us which Data Enginners or PMs they didn’t like, who would promptly get reassigned. But honestly, having that call so early was the least stressful thing ever.
I would roll out of bed at 6:30a and make a cup of coffee, just to get my computer tuned on and ready to join the meeting by about 6:57.
Worked out great, cuz I never spent time thinking about scrum beforehand, and frankly always felt a bit energized afterwards cuz it was now time to start my work day.
Ended up working out well I guess, cuz the customer kept me on the team the entire length of the engagement.
I normally go "what the fuck did I even do yesterday?" five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.
I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It's very boring. "Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does."
10:00: programming
11:00: quick meeting
12:00: #### getting back into the zone
13:00: ####
14:00: ####
Because that's how it often goes. I find there are two types of scrums in practice. First is when it goes fast, and everybody just says they're working. There's no time to give any detail or context so the status update is largely meaningless. Second is when people start giving details about what they're working on, and that quickly explodes to an hour long meeting.
Participants need to find the right balance of information. I noticed it is productive when developers give just enough information for other to understand but not too much to confuse them and loose time. This is not easy to achieve..
Indeed it's not, I also find developers tend to be really bad at this task in particular.
Me when I have a 30 min meeting in the middle of the day where I am the organizer and need to lead the discussion.
I have meetings from at least 9-12 every day, which are the hours I'm the most focused. So rough
