Quote:
Originally Posted by jmakin
I cant write a lot about my job here but funny update while we’re on the topic - the problem child chick literally *quit* (with no job lined up) over my 1x a week eng meeting. Lol. It’s a 20 minute standup. She tried to pull a “him or me” thing and they just said fine quit and she did.
Worked out great for everyone because they wanted to let her go for like, 2 years. Of course there was more to it - I think her major objection to the meeting was it was an attempt by me to finally implement tasks tracking across our eng team and it became extremely obvious after 3-4 weeks that she wasn't getting any work done. Even really, really trivial stuff. When asked if she was blocked/stuck she just wouldn't participate or talk to anyone but my engineering manager and he was at a loss too. I fed like 3 months of data into my PM tool the other day, finally using those now that I have more freedom to do what I want, and saw she didnt do a piece of meaningful work for that entire period. Like holy crap man. Of course I knew it was going on, but I didn't directly manage her, my boss did, so it was just really glaring seeing it jump out at me like that. So I think that's why she fought it so hard.
This is the best case for agile imo - it keeps people from slipping through the cracks.
Not just malcontents like your BFF here. When I worked at a waterfall place in the early 2000s after a while the project went into maintenance/smallish new features mode and I got bored. I'd dick around for weeks doing nothing - then rush to get it all done at the last minute. And of course I'd feel guilty about that and it would stress me out. Not to mention quality suffered.
My next job was my first agile shop. I really enjoyed the daily standups. They kept me motivated and prevented me from getting too far behind. YMMV - not all devs are as immature and procrastination-prone as me. But I know there are plenty like me who are otherwise very productive if you keep some guardrails around them.
I've also come to realize I'm motivated by talking things out. When I can't get the motivation to get started on something - I try to go have a deep dive with one of the other devs on some concept - then I come back a lot more motivated. Standups help give some verbal motivation and spur more in-depth side conversations. On my first job the other key dev who I worked with on most things and sat next to me - never wanted to talk - made obvious by his body language that I was disturbing him. That sucked. I get that we all need to concentrate sometimes. But he was always like that.
You can debate about all the scrum-nazi stuff. Retrospectives have always seemed kind of dubious to me. Sprint-planning is painful but I think overall worth it. But standups and testable tasks to me makes all the difference in the world vs. waterfall/go off in a cave for weeks at a time.
Last edited by suzzer99; 06-25-2019 at 02:30 PM.