Almost everything I read in the last few weeks suggest that some scrum is almost always better than none-especially when you consider our alternative, which is no management or processes whatsoever

I’m not even really sure what you’re suggesting me to do. But I appreciate all the feedback

There's no substitute for face to face time with a smarter programmer helping on a problem.

This is so true. The first thing I did when I started as a developer out of college was find a couple of good mentors.

One other place I have found that I learn a lot is in interviews. A lot of times you can pick up little golden nuggets of how to think about things that you didn't know before.

re: programming

how I basically spend my time now is in the first 2 hours of my day I devote to 'fiddlin' with the source code/tests I'm trying to develop. Kind of stalled so I may ask for help on the power crash one, because I learned today that different systems recover completely differently from power failure. Even within installations of Linux. So simply seg faulting 2 processes simultaneously may not be enough to simulate a true power crash.

Then I do my PM stuff which honestly takes about an hour and a half unless I need to organize stuff. Which right now there isn't a lot to do.

Then I split the rest of the day between reading programming books (almost done with Pragmatic Programmer and I have 3 other 'must reads' in the queue), textbooks, blogs, research papers, sometimes more programming. And lately I've been going home and programming more with my personal practice projects, like I just implemented a few basic data structures in C. I'm going down the list of the Collections class in java and just implementing those one by one in C. The C Malloc implementation was particularly challenging. I never used to program in my spare time.

I'm highly skeptical of that statistic. At least if you make your population size include all companies that have tried their own simplified version of scrum with at least some reluctant developers and no clear product vision.

If we're talking about companies that adopt "scrum" because of a top-level initiative I'm still skeptical but its probably closer.


This is fair.

I think I'd focus on pretty small low-touch changes (a lot of what it sounds like you've been doing so far) and build up credibility with the team and individual developers. Managing someone like the guy you have to drag to meetings is going to be hard - and not solved by any sort of process.

In terms of next steps from the product/project management side I'd try to learn more about where work is coming from and insert yourself in that process. Figure out what work is actually the highest value work to work on. This isn't about your opinions but the vision from the top and actual customer/user feedback. Even things like feedback from customers that have tried your free version but don't want to pay you anything.

And if I were you, I'd probably be spending a lot more time on the development side. Figure out who can help/mentor you so that you can actually become more productive much faster.

I'm a big believer that reading books / doing "toy" problems isn't going to get you ramped up. You need to work on real work problems. Ask people to pair with you. Ask someone to pair with them on a simple task they have to do. Ask for a task that is really closely related to a previously finished task so you have some example code to work with. Things like this.

One reason I'm skeptical of this half manager / half developer role is that the manager role requires a totally different relationship to other developers than the developer role. You have to be ok looking stupid/ignorant to ramp up quickly as a developer.

but my C sucks pretty bad. i only picked it up 2 months ago. I still get confused with pointers.

Your C will get much better working on real problems much faster then it'll get better re-writing collections.

I guess another extreme option to consider at some point is to make the case that you're needed as a full time project/product manager. It sounds like this is probably true, but seems hard to convince them of this, that you're the right person to do it, and to give you enough authority/responsibility/freedom to actually do it properly.

Edit: The first step of this is probably still: "learn more about where work is coming from and insert yourself in that process. Figure out what work is actually the highest value work to work on."

Well, I don't know how I could possibly fill my day with being full time project manager unless they REALLY involved me more in the client facing side of it. Maybe that's their intention and they're trying to ease me into it. I still need to talk to my boss about being copied on customer problem emails, which is handled by our sales guy for some reason, who doesn't even come into the office.

I'll figure it out. I really agree with trying to find where the work is coming from and inserting myself into that process.

I sort of suspect they might be grooming me to replace the rockstar who is leaving in October to go get his master's. It seemed like he was driving a lot of what was going on before I came. But probably not, I don't know if there's any long term planning going on. But once that guy leaves i am ****ED, he does like 90% of the work.

If you were going to spend the next year with Larry Bird, would you rather dedicate that time to shooting a basketball or growing corn?

Why spend all your time being an unempowered manager when you could become a rockstar developer?

because i'm not a rockstar developer and that's not my job lol

Honestly, these coworkers of yours sound incredibly unprofessional and immature and should probably just be fired.

In what world is it acceptable for an employee to throw a hissy fit and flat out refuse using official communication channels or showing up to meetings?

You would be shocked at the levels of aggressive incompetence I've seen/see.

I think there are personal life issues at play - he has a baby coming in a few weeks - as well as some personality issues, obviously, compounded by severe professional disagreements with the CTO. The CTO was his PHD mentor or whatever and I'm almost positive they've had some sort of falling out, it seems openly hostile between them.

Anyone who is unwilling to participate in slack / hipchat / irc / what the **** ever better be prepared for me to occupy their physical space and demand real time attention from them until I get what I want. Oh, you hate that? Then join the god damn slack channel and reply at your leisure.

I have had team chat at every job I've ever worked at, starting in about 1998. In 1998 I wrote it myself, which was fun. Since then it's been a wide variety of stuff.

Jmakin, not trying to be a dick but you're coming across as a very unreliable narrator to me. For example, you're simultaneously saying that your company is flush with great developers and yet one guy does almost all the work while several people are outrageously unprofessional and do virtually nothing.

I think there's something off with your perception that it would be really beneficial to work out. From where I stand, you need to find some way to get perspective on your situation. Could be talking to a mentor face to face, a therapist, or even meditation.

Hopefully this didn't come off antagonistic as I'm genuinely trying to help.

Yea slack is amazing. It's a great way to communicate. Though I do have a bad tendency (or really GREAT) to fool around on slack cracking jokes.

One of my favorite channels in slack is #dad-jokes.

You really have shown you have no idea what the job he was hired for is. You are giving him good advice if he was hired as a developer, but fail to grasp that he wasn't.

Kerowo,

I'm giving him life advice so he doesn't find himself unable to find work after a career in tech.

This sounds like a great idea.

LOL, you should get back on the weed, you were less of a dick when you were stoned all the time.

I'm not sure why you think I ever stopped.

These people are academics who have basically no chance of ever building something serious.

But they will know C and will argue syntax and best practices till they are red in the face.

Not taking advantage of that and upping his skills is a massive wasted opportunity in my eyes.

Not that's a big deal, but I'm agreement with the advice above. If you studied CS, you should be writing code. It wasn't so bad when he said his title was software engineer, but when he changed it to PM, there's even more reason. PM's don't provide much value. The ideal team is one of all developers, with the most senior developer writing code 50% of the time, and managing deadlines, budgets, merge requests etc the other 50%. Developers are smart enough prioritize their own deadlines and communicate with outside groups (gasp!).

Reasons I hate IntelliJ, part 4,452.

I'm trying to use Collectors.toMap(), which converts a stream into a Map (Java's Dictionary). The lambda variable x here ought to have the type of a class I created and I want to use a field called matchUrl for the key, but as you can see, It doesn't seem to know what x is.





After going insane trying to figure out why it doesn't know what type x is, I realized that I can't have the value mapper just be OffsetDateTime.MIN. It has to be mapped with a lambda, so it needs to be x -> OffsetDateTime.MIN. You'll note that it did not show me that error in the completed line above. Still, that can't have anything to do with why it can't figure out what type the lambda variable is in the key mapper.... can it?



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