god, this is the scariest question I've been asking myself every day.

I don't feel like you know enough to think of that as the scariest question.

It's totally possible that the use cases your customers have are all about performance and they're willing to sacrifice something else. You mentioned something about using it as a high speed cache. There could be a bunch of reasons why performance is super important but something like durability is less important.

I think the scariest thing about your situation is that you're in what sounds like a relatively small company and 3 of your 4 top people seem to be far removed from the thing your company is building. And even your CTO seems at least some-what removed from the thing your company is building.

Second scariest is that the company doesn't seem to have any good feedback loops with your actual users/customers to figure out what you should work on.

No I think you’re right

All that being said, I agree with LL that that doesn't make this a bad situation for you. Lots of personal growth/learning opportunities which is pretty nice.

I dunno guys, she's pretty cute and makes some good points. Why don't I plan for get my blockchain certified?

Blockchian, not blockchain!

Perfectly demonstrating why he should pursue certification.

nothing to do again, **** it i'm just gonna make a scrum presentation

jmakin,

I've written out a post like this 3-4 times now and deleted it everytime because it goes too long and loses meaning. I'm gonna try and just hit the high points.

An agile manifesto writer was a client of mine. We did a project where we combined our company and his company (One of the most major scrum certification issuers) and worked on a software project using Scrum. We use scrum at my company pretty religiously.

In short, I've seen a lot of pretty decent Scrum in practice, and people generally don't understand that it is not a magic bullet. It will not make a 10xers out of normal developers, it will not make procrastinators focus.

What it will do is provide a basic level of organization to the work you all do together everyday. If you are looking for it to do more than that then you are deeply mistaken and "doing it wrong".

Stop wasting your time trying to convince these people that scrum will solve their issues. It won't, and you will be proven wrong, and take an L when a W was never possible.

Instead, you should focus on becoming a proficient software engineer.

I would rather punch myself in the balls repeatedly than create a scrum presentation if I were you.

Doing that is just wasting precious time you could be making steps toward becoming a capable programmer. But imho, you are also literally wasting time and giving people an easy excuse to say you are not providing enough value.

You have free time and incredibly smart people around you who will review and edit your code, start writing some ****ing code!

I want to adequately perform the role that I am required to do, and is in my job title.

My manager has stated that project outcomes are going to be "my responsibility" eg, if **** doesn't get done the boot's going to fall onto my head.

I want to implement a basic system. Right now, we have some of the basic elements of a primitive scrum implementation - velocity has definitely increased, but there are a few holdouts. We also don't really have any concept of a user story and a fairly weak definition of done, and there is no group accountability whatsoever.

I basically have two team members that are completely resistant to communication and finishing their story items on time/at all. They also, perhaps not coincidentally, revile face to face communication.

What I want to do with a presentation is sell the daily scrum to the team in a way they can digest. I'm going to run the presentation pass my boss, first - obviously - and I know on some many levels he desires the same things to happen so I expect his endorsement. He's a very timid and soft spoken guy, more of a developer/architect type, and I can tell he needs someone to enforce the stuff he wants to get done.

I'm just going to make a few slides with basic terminology, motivations for implementation, and a lot of citations from research papers (these people are all lifelong academics, remember). Then I want to get everyone's input on a process that will work for everyone, and if there are disagreements, those can be discussed.

Basically get everyone on the same page because right now everyone isn't. A presentation feels the easiest way to accomplish this and I am an excellent speaker and have been told I have a lot of charisma. I think it would be stupid of me to not leverage these qualities here just because there are a few sticklers. I also plan on bringing beer and pizza to this meeting.

Then, once I can get everyone to agree on a process, we just stick to it and gradually iterate onto it.

That's the best way I can think to get this **** done. I kind of have an impossible/vaguely defined task ahead of me. I also have absolutely nothing to do.


Re: programming, I've messed around with a few tests but honestly I am nowhere near being able to program anything meaningful on this project, the C is very complicated and the code is dense. I am understanding the higher levels of it, but the baseline implementation still escapes me. I can make a few tests, probably, but it'll take me 5x as long as the other devs and they are already kind of twiddling their thumbs for stuff to do so those are easy-ish kinds of things I can throw at them to keep them busy.


I think this is the best way to accomplish what I need to, and yea it isn't fun or even optimal probably, but it's the best I can think of right now. If i try and fail, oh well, I just wasted a few days of my time and I can focus on other areas where I can bring value to the company.

It sounds to me like you are doing a good job in a fairly weird situation

It sounds like he is in a no win situation being set up to fail. He has been given responsibility for the output of a bunch of cowboy programmers with no process in place. He doesn't appear to be getting strong support from management for trying to put some kind of process in place.

jmakin, if you go ahead with the presentation you probably want to spend some time on the benefits of a repeatable software process. These guys sound like the devs I worked with at Worldcom when I was at EDS and we updated their process to CMMI Level 1. Good luck.

Thank you I will look into that

I have a week to do it, because my rock star dev just randomly took off this week and didn't tell anyone. Lol.

I mean I have tried everything, literally everything to figure out a way around the daily scrum. There's just no way around it.

I floated the idea of a slack channel, which could provide at least some bare minimum level of communication - was told it's been tried before and people threw a fit. Idk. They want results but aren't willing to do the basic things required to get those results.

If I get my boss's support, which I anticipate, I don't think it'll be shot down - but I definitely expect a fair amount of resentment from a few people. I'm kind of past caring about that.

Man I love slack. Maybe because I'm remote, but I don't understand these people at all

the worst guy i guess didn't even accept the slack invitation, is notorious for reading and ignoring all emails, and has to be physically dragged from his office into meetings now. We seriously all take turns doing it.

It was kind of funny at first but I just want to ask "what in the holy hell is so important over there that you can't spare 10 minutes of your time?"

Tbf most meetings are a complete waste of most of the attendees time, and process switches (ie interruptions when in the zone) definitely aren't free.

Of course the above arguments are actually reasons why Slack is a good alternative I have no idea why he would be against that.

yea my idea was slack could be used daily as "what are you doing today/are you experiencing any roadblocks" etc.

I was told "github comments" could function that way. I guess they are pretty visible, I could just keep commenting on the guy's tasks every day "Status please" and it's visible to everyone via email notification - but that seems like a stupid way of doing things. I did that today and of course got no response.

I agree it's mostly for my benefit but it's the only way I can think to eliminate a little bit of organizational slack here, through the peer pressure provided by that meeting.

I don't know why he's opposed to using slack or being a part of the process at all but it seems like he just kind of wants to sit in his office all day and browse FB/work on his little side projects. I know he's really unhappy - but I dont really have a way to address that.

Another idea I had, which kind of fixes everything, is to just barge ahead without this guy and focus on my deliverables with or without his help and let the big people decide how to deal with him

Bingo

Though really, I think you have a very very stubborn personality, and you are looking at your job and the company and thinking about how to be successful at your job and what it will take.

I absolutely agree with your response to me being in the ultimate best interest of the company.

Sometimes, people get their ego caught up in their ability to help their company. Sometimes, you should be worried about how to help the company and also help yourself.

You have an amazing opportunity to push yourself and become a world-class coder. Scrum managers are a dime a dozen.

Good managers are exceedingly rare

+1 to slack being amazing. I'm also biased by being remote though. It's also a tool like any other and very easy to misuse.

I'm with LL's long post. I think there's way more value in becoming a proficient developer here and it feels like you're neglecting that side of things because its a lot harder.

It's not that I think developer > project/product manager. It's just that I think there are some very messed up things at your company that will make it very hard to succeed in this part of the role.

Edit: Also, my $0.02 if I were against "formal" things like meetings/slack channels, I would definitely be against a presentation about said things.

Edit2: If you want me to shut up about my thoughts on your situation, just let me know.

Think of it from a business perspective - i was reading in one paper today that the difference between high-performing teams and low performing teams can be as much as 2000 to 1. I would have to think that we are on the extreme end of that ratio. If I can bring that ratio down a little and bring productivity up, I have the potential to bring infinitely more value to the company than being a good programmer, which we are kind of flush with.

My real answer to that is that I think if I really wanted to focus on both I could

I don't think anything you're going to be doing is going to have a significant effect on that ratio. I don't even think its a guarantee that you're going to improve the ratio and not decrease it.

Edit: To LL's point, scrum isn't a magic bullet. It's especially kind of useless (imo) without clear direction from the top and from customers.

Edit2: Maybe another way of phrasing it - Just because you know more about what people are working on doesn't mean that they're now working on more stuff.