I think scrum at its best is meant to just keep teams accountable to each other. At its worst it’s for middle managers to show the upper managers that they are doing something regardless whether the final deliverable is complete or even good

Ah, I misread your previous post. Definitely agree about the coming back rate. No favours. Even if it makes life tough for people you use to work with.

yep victor I'm sure something like that might happen.

And I think I turned off the cron jobs the other day for testing and didn't turn them back on, and I don't think I've ever shown anyone where they are at. Oh well, not my problem.

and Victor thanks for the stories, reminds me of the last big company I was at. Luckily I was the CTO at my last two jobs so I could set agile the way I wanted it to work. I would go insane with that set up as I'm a get **** done guy, not a procedure guy.

By the way, the reason I say to not be helpful isn’t because I think you should be vindictive or anything like that. Companies gotta make money and I don’t have a problem with laying people off if it’s necessary (although I think you still need to do that the proper way).

But if the company is going to make pure business decisions you need to play the same game. And make sure they realize the costs of their decisions as well. Otherwise you’re just increasing their incentives to keep laying people off and then relying on those peoples’ good nature to minimize the cost.

Jeez you can't change story cards? That sounds awful, honestly in this market I might quit over something like that. I know what needs to be done in our project and do it. Usually I am working on a branch called "business form" then when I am done I create a card, do git checkout -b cardnumber, push it and make my pr. Then when it gets approved and merged I move the card all the way from backlog to done. All my cards are 5 points regardless of task. But I actually like write tests and don't write 2000 line components and stuff. I don't include both the minified and non minified css for the same library. I reduce the bundle size from over 20mb to 1mb because I actually give a **** about the project rather than playing JIRA theater.

Sorry about that blacklab, ****ty. You sound like you are a fine person and will bounce back quickly.

gl blacklab

we just have a ton of process around our cards too. like, we gotta meet with QA before the dev work starts, then we meet with QA after code is approved and make sure it works to their satisfaction. then we meet with business.

honestly, I think QA should be completely eliminated. totally worthless. all they do is ask the devs what to test, but obv I have already tested it. if QA came up with some novel things to test or ever found something that I didnt think of, then ok that would be great. but nope, they just copy whatever the dev tells them.

like, we seriously carry cards to the next sprint bc we didnt get QA signoff. which shuld just be a 10 minute inpromtu meeting but it just never works that way. they usually have too many other ppl to meet with so you need to actually schedule it days in advance and I cant just walk over to her desk and show here the functionalityl. nope, no time for that.

ok I will stop now. but I wont.

ya I should leave. but I been looking and the other jobs are garbage. like no, I dont want to do sql updates and backend xml work. I guess no one does Angular anymore.

@blacklab - gl it sucks big time. Getting an hour’s notice is completely unnecessary and FWIW pretty low. I am sure they made you sign something to get the severance pay too. What jjshabado posted, don’t give them anything for free.

I've seen it at a lot of places. One time I got laid off while I was on vacation. As soon as I was back in the country they called me and told me I didn't work there any more, and to come pick up my stuff at the front desk. My coworkers who were laid off were just walked out of the building right after they were told. It adds to the humiliation, and I wish they wouldn't do it, but there you are. I can understand some of what they're afraid of.

Blacklab (or anyone else in Austin who's looking or a job), PM me. We're not exactly hiring right now, but we hope to be again soon, and I know people around town who might have openings of interest.

My company is hiring like crazy in Austin. Feel free to PM for details

No Silver Bullet

Written in 1986.

Scaled Agile Framework - SAFe

Large Scale Scrum - LeSS

Disciplined Agile Delivery

Lean

The “silver bullet” industry is alive and well.

You haven't lived til you've been through Total Quality Management or 6 Sigma training (might be the same thing I can't remember).

Oh, you think that's the balls, wait till you spend a little time auditing CMMI and Sarbanes Oxley compliance!

I've been through CFR pt. 11 compliance for clinical trials. Brutal. Inception-level-stuff like how do we document the processes for documenting the processes for developing our app.

I asked our internal compliance guy if this was supposed to help catch bugs or make the product better. No - it's to ensure that all processes are documented. If they're not followed or not executed properly that's another issue.

Yeah, that's the dirty little secret of the whole process and process audit racket. They just want all the forms filled out, they don't care if they they were correct, only that they got a J21-5a form saying the forms were valid...

I assume that's for lawsuit/govt sanction purposes if push eventually comes to shove? (which it almost never does)

But for us it was a ton of extra time we could have spent making the app better.

Yeah my experience with PCI was, aside from some rules about data handling, you have to have a process for everything, and the question is
a) do you have a process
b) are you following it
and nothing else matters

(They do audit both a and b, but the audits seem to be done by private companies and let's say there's some wiggle room)

It's not all BS though... allllll our accounts went to MFA only, access to prod environments basically went away, there's a process to get one-off access to a prod machine. It's annoying but it probably is more secure.

Had dinner last night with wife, wife's friend and her husband. He runs a IT/development shop that has $8M in annual sales. Has openings for head of a couple of different departments, wants me to run one. Said any of the jobs are mine if I want them, we just need to figure out salary and benefits. Would have 40-50 people working for me if I took one of them.

Then he said if you don't want to do that just build a customer survey tool and we'll pay you a fourth of a penny per survey sent out. He had a power point of a demo of a company they were contemplating recommending to a customer. Basically send customer an email or text, ask them to rate the interaction from 1-5 stars, then ask 2-3 questions like net promoter score and then have a reporting engine on the back end. Pretty much right in my wheelhouse as I've been doing similar things over the last year and can reuse a ton of code. Customer has 6000 service agents. Could be a ton of money.

The value is only as good as your process and the temptation at Accenture and EDS was to that each step in the process had a document that had boiler plate fields in it which became quick review sessions at best. So we built processes with extra work just to show that we had a process.

Process isn't bad, process for process' sake is.

Anyone have any suggestions for good tutorials/courses to learn Python?

I have pretty much exclusively used embedded C/C++ variants in my career and I think I'm gonna try to branch out and learn some new things on my own in case I ever want to do something besides embedded firmware.

You sound like the ideal candidate to learn rust! /hipster

it looks like i am going to vegas this summer to present the demo i made to like ~600-1k sales/solutions people for a major company and their partners. pretty excited although Im sure it will be stressful. I consider myself an exceptional public speaker so I am a little excited about it.

are these vegas tech conventions usually pretty wild or are they lame?

And you pick Python?!?

Go learn Haskell, that’s more hip.