ProgrammerHumor
pleaseBacklogIt
Discussion
Buddy, if you tell me you're done I have to find you something to do and that is more work for me. If you keep your mouth shut we're golden. Next sprint let's work smarter not harder, OK?
Is that guy really expecting his lead to say "Awesome, now sit on your ass doing nothing till sprint end". Because that would be insane.
Yeah, best I can do is telling them to go do some personal development training for the rest of the day. I can't get away with telling a dev to take the rest of the sprint off.
The number of important people and managers that had to be involved in meeting to plan and schedule more work at AT&T cost more than it was worth to add a few extra tasks to the last week of a sprint. If I got through my assigned work early I would start playing with the html5 canvas API.
Your sprints are more than 1 week? Ours are 1 week because the managers can’t plan any longer ahead I guess.
The AT&T sprint I think was 3 or 4 weeks, with the last week being testing. All devs would run through test steps of fixed issues in a UAT environment to make sure they were actually fixed / not broken by other fixes. At the same time a handful of operators would be switched to UAT but asked to do their job as normal to verify any issues they reported have been fixed and also to help discover new issues.
It worked well enough, but sometimes it's hard to take meaningful advice/application away from faang without hurting a smaller company.
Ours are 2 weeks. I think that's a pretty nice length for what we're doing. Most tasks are like 2-4 days with the largest individual tasks around a week of active work.
I always tell my juniors “you know all those TODO comments in the code base? Go make some of them TODONE, preferably some you wrote.”
I feel attacked
Genuinely how can I tell if this is my bosses mindset?
I work in a small business with about 200 employees in total, and I feel like I blow through projects way faster than my boss can assign them.
The few times I've taken extra time on projects were fine. I got the occasional "where we at on project xyz?" And I explained my progress and got a "k"
When I do projects faster it seems like he's troubled with finding me extra work.
I'm thinking I should chill out my pace, but I don't want to do that while misreading the situation and I actually need to be doing more lmao. We don't use jira or any sort of agile/scrum methodology
Just ask your boss what their timeline and expectations are when you get a new project, that way you know what they expect you to complete and the timeframe. If they're open you can also just ask how the workload's looking for the team, make it sound you're interested in how planning is going.
I mean not every manager will tell you everything, but in my experience people usually welcome you getting interested in those things.
It's crazy how obvious that sounds in hindsight. For a minute there I thought I'd have to beat around the bush and gather context clues lmao
Thanks
It works both ways indeed. But, the metrics works better for the lead because it is HIS team; the amount of work completed reflects on the lead, not on individual contributors unless the individual contributors are properly recognized.
To a point, but as a lead my key metric is did we hit our sprint velocity? If we exceed it we just get a higher velocity next time. I'd rather everyone just hit their targets and we have a little wiggle room in case something goes wrong and we need to handle an emergency.
This is the most exhausting shit.
I am discouraged from ever doing more than my goal because it means higher tension the next cycle. Until it breaks and then I'm scolded for not meeting the ever increasing goal.
And it's so much easier for the goal to go up than lower when it isn't getting met.
You’re paid the same anyway, why do you care?
You can always refactor stuff or study on how to do the next feature set or get a certification if you like. Or get a 2nd job making extra money on this free time?
If I don't lie about my achievements to downplay them, I am rewarded with more work.
I can either waste processing power on carefully hitting but not exceeding metrics, and thereby never feel rewarded for my actual skill, or honestly report my output and have the bar raised until I can't meet it. Then when I fail because I do eventually hit the limit of what I can feasibly produce, I am scolded for failing to meet the velocity that was raised beyond what I can stretch to achieve.
That is why I care. Perpetually increasing velocity only ever creates burnout.
Sometimes some sprint items take more or less work than planned, that's normal. When there's extra time you take more items, and sometimes some of the planned ones will overflow. That's just how it works. If your manager is at your neck every time your estimate of a task is wrong, you should find a new manager...
The only reward you'll get for being faster is more work.
The only reward you'll get for reporting being faster is more work.
FTFY
That's why they want you in the office!
I mean it was literally the same when we were in office.
Yah but if you were in the office you would pace yourself, if you're at home you can work fast and then just respond and do whatever.
But you will get promoted /j
promoted to getting more work
But think about how well it will reflect in your official feedback from all your dear stakeholders and very important users!
You gotta learn how to queue up finished tasks and sprinkle them in throughout the week in the order of most to least important to the team. Stay above average on quality and as close to average on quantity as you can. Remember that you are most harshly judged on your mistakes.
2 years into the IT industry, I have learned one philosophy: Tell more than you actually do. Admit less than you actually can.
You need to live by the Parkinson's law.
Either decide on tasks as a team on planning or stop using sprints and story points as what you're doing is probably not agile.
If you have a jira and also stories with words and numbers then agile!
As a development manager I don't care how quickly you finish your tasks, I care if the team meets its sprint goal. Go help someone.
If you did your bit but everyone else missed tasks or was stuck it's still a failure.
If the team clears everything then we get a nice few days of less pressure.
Oh yeah, tell me you never pushed tasks from next sprints to look nicer in the board meetings...
That’s why I’m sitting on PR until last moment. Playing games, fucking around. To avoid this bullshit.
Do leads actually assign you work? My current place the cards are a first come first serve basis. If there is nothing to grab we just assign from the next sprint. We only moved cards into the current sprint when we were confident we could finish them before the end of sprint.
No, you're right. in agile leads aren't supposed to assign work.
2Sp?! Oh no! Thats like... 3 S size T shirts. Or seven bananas and a star!
Idk man, you got more work. That's what we're here for. I close the laptop at 5pm and I'm glad for the paycheck.
3 days for 2SP? Where are you working at.
OK but you DON'T set your tasks on done until the very last day and use your time to refactor and do those imporant things business said they had no budget for.
Those important things like playing Mario Kart.
To my defense, it improves my mental wellbeing making my productivity per hour worked higher.
It’s the same logic as waiting until the last day to write your term paper: efficiency through procrastination!
You can choose what to train, and that doesn't have to perfectly align with what university or business expects from you as long as things get done in the end!
...if they would want you to actually pace things properly rather than "done at all", they'd have several midpoint checks. Not doing that is admission that they don't really care, even if they grumble that many fail "doing it wrong".
This helps with burnout
For real. What's that nerd talking about?
World has some really good tracks
But did you ask them if they had the budget for that?
I did that once because our business team (which also happens to be our bosses in hierarchy for some reason) wants to always be shipping so I started giving inflated estimates to fix old dept.
Then the same business team explained we had too much technical debt because the stack we chose was wrong and we should rewrite our app in another framework. It started a shitstorm and now half the team is looking for a job. I also finished my tasks for July and NOT fixing the app that will be rewritten anyway I guess.
Sorry for the rant.
Until you get a PM that bitches at you because now the burn down chart doesn't look nice
Wait, that chart is supposed to go down? Ours goes up
burn up chart
We abandoned sprints and burn downs after a full year of never ending "burn up" charts. Now we just do kanban and our po organises the new column by priority, and we just slide over our next ticket when we get to it.
So mich nicer then the sprint burn out game
The alligator should always open his mouth.
It's either too few new features or too many bugs. PM will never be happy.
Exactly, if my boss asks why I wait until the last minute to close, I tell her I work my cards in parallel to ensure I maximize the amount of time I spend on each one.