rock star

At conferences, big data thought leader.

so we have moved from srum to something called SAFE.

this is the "planning sprint". so we have 2 weeks of doing no work except planning the next 6 weeks. no coding. no code reviews. no PRs or merges. no business value. not allowed.

3 all day meetings. really have no idea what the other days are gonna entail. just sitting around in meetings and going over requirements in excruciating detail and "retroing" on some crap.

its just so unreal stupid. like, I could do actual work. I could fix a bunch of crap and add some features. nah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

haha come work for me i don't do any agile bullshit except 1 day of planning (friday) for the next week. I set my tasks to 2 weeks duration maximum.

Man I just had a whirlwind of the last 16 hours. Some really elaborate system I built on 2 servers running a demo somehow managed to break when we moved it outside of the system. The scripts I wrote were rock solid and started breaking in a way I didn't understand and made absolutely no sense. Some partner of ours wants to demo it today so I worked all night trying to diagnose it.

I'm such an idiot. It ended up being a wrong filepath because one of our repo's names changed for some inexplicable reason. I knew that had happened but had ignored it because I assumed it didn't matter. Violated all of my own devops rules - 1) create a clean environment (didnt do that and it would have exposed the problem immediately) and 2) make no assumptions about anything.

Feels good to have fixed it but now I look kind of bad.

I hate when you notice the change that ends up being the cause but just kind of mentally ignore it. I try to be aware of anything even if I'm sure it couldn't be the cause, but I still subconsciously ignore things like that

I'm trying to get out interviewing but I realized I have only ever done 3 white board and 1 online coding interview so now my realization of my total lack of experience is making me incredibly nervous for each one

Our first day of those all day meetings people actually participated. Then after that they had them in on screens conference rooms (the team was too big for one room), so everyone just brought their laptops and worked through them will the PMs babbled on. After I think they just let people conference call from their desks and have it on in the background. People were so far behind already - no way they were going to take 2 days off every 3 sprints.

The demos were cool though - forces team to show something that actually works early on in the process.

But of course SAFE failed to address the biggest problem of all - no app level governance. The system guys had built this amazing platform based on Netflix's architecture. But for some reason no one thought they would need to coordinate between all the teams building APIs on the platform - to reuse stuff, makes sure they're doing things consistently, best practices, etc. They thought if they just had code analysis and test coverage requirements that would be good enough.

So you wind up with an API - which has multiple REST clients, but each client consumes basically the whole API - where one back-end team has the version number at the end of the URL, and one team has it the beginning, another team didn't have it in the url at all - and all kinds of other inconsistencies. That was when I knew that there would be a lot more mess under the hood. And there was.

It was true democracy - and it turned into a giant mess of trying to change the wheels while the plane is flying once they finally got someone over the whole app.

eh, once a week is a lot of meeting.

ya its not just the all day meetings. its that we have 2 whole weeks of planning. at least its only every quarter.

not sure if we are doing the whole day long show and tell stuff every couple weeks. I think only the program leaders need to see that. at least they recognize how much a lot of devs hate this stuff.

I think I mentioned this before but my old job moving to SAFe was a big reason I left.

I don't mind grooming / planning once a week but that sounds like pure idiocy

I don't even want to know how much the "SAFe Consultants" get paid to have the devs spend tons of time doing nothing.

Haha no i dont plan all day. Just 20-30 mins with my boss. Then i have one weekly eng meeting thats just a standup format. It lasts 15 mins.

My devs i dont expect to be involved in planning unless they want to. Why would i involve them in that lol

Basically my principle is this (and I gleaned a lot of this from posts I've read here).

Every minute that my developers are not programming is a wasted minute. I do not include them in any meetings except our standup which has a time limit of 15 mins max, 30 mins if it's a triage week. I schedule extra meetings when NECESSARY only. Not a super common thing.

I have an open door policy. If any dev wants to be in any meeting they know they can just ask. Sometimes they want to, sometimes they just want to get some requirements so they can do their thing. One guy likes to be in all meetings and provides input which is usually good. But I'd never think to waste any developers time because I know what we're paying them and my deadlines are usually tight.

It's been a working system. Everyone knows what theyre supposed to work on because I send out the tasks every monday (from my friday planning). Part of my friday planning usually, sometimes I do it monday, is to ask a dev what's in their pipeline. They can generally choose what they work on as long as it serves a business purpose that aligns with our business goals/roadmap.

it's been working really well and we're hitting all our deadlines and I've completely two very successful, long projects with it so far.

Just go out and bomb the **** out of one at some place you don't really care about. That is the worst it gets and it can only get better.

Working on this. I think a person could have let their cat step on the keyboard mid interview and they would have done better than I did today lol

I bombed the technical interview at my current job (they even told me so) but they liked my ability to quickly bullshit answers and come up with likely solutions on the fly.

Even bribery couldn't save what I put up today

I once went to move some code in a coder pad type environment. The copy didn't take so I ended up pasting the last thing I had copied. Which of course was a link to a not very vanilla video on a pornhub like site.

Haha that is amazing

Did you get the job?

I did something similar in a live, unrehearsed demo once. It was an embarrassing link to something i had searched earlier. I played it off like “well, that’s not correct”

It was the only screening I did that did not lead to the offer of an on site interview

One of my last projects was a piece of software that gets installed on a lot of computers and reports to a mothership - think something like antivirus although not quite. I used my own computers to do most of the development and I used the same network to record the demos that I presented. And then I realized all my machines are named things like "lolbutts" or "dickshake" etc