The tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else is so true. I had a boss that insinuated I was inexperienced because I didn’t know his specific internal process (which was complete nonsense because he is literally illiterate and cannot read or write).
When I politely corrected him that this was my second job in this specific industry he paused before continuing to ramble as if I’m some intern when I was with the company for 3 years in a midlevel role.
Same guy who once gave me a 30 mins lecture about how much he wants women like me and his daughter to succeed and “have a voice”, literally without letting me insert more than 1 word the entire time.
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
It’s funny that people claim ownership of companies by individuals (capitalism) is so efficient when there are extreme and obvious problems when the distant private equity board needs an entire department to tell them what the company does and how well every few months, compared to y’know, ownership by people who work there and would know how well the company (and their part of it) is doing just by actually being remotely involved.
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be “scalable agile”. By “scalable”, they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about “Extreme Programming” or “Agile” being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
We have SAFe at my office too. It seems to me that it’s just a way to say you’re agile while still being waterfall.
We also do SAFe, I think they buy it for the name. We’re reasonably agile except we don’t choose our work, our input on feature sizing is ignored, we get told off for failing to deliver on time, we’re not encouraged to demo work to business
At least we do have scrum masters and sometimes product owners and work vaguely to sprints
Test is the least agile as they have an 80 page document on how to document testing and it’s impossible for them to have admin done in time to actually start testing until sprint 2. Since we went to using Git, build is unlikely to finish anything quickly as the automated unit tests are time consuming
I have been a scrum master and it’s almost fun in that role to try to make a team more agile
I wish I could upvote you more than once
Not every person is the same.
Rules and processes and documentation and change management often times equals stability and repeatable successes. Some people thrive in this environment.
Moving fast and breaking shit with no rules or processes or documentation or change management often times leads to outages and an environment where you have to be the hero or a real IT “rockstar” to be successful. Some people thrive in this environment.
If you don’t like all the rules and processes and documentation and change management, then you should know thyself and find a different job.
Found the bootlicking manager! Be sure to always remind the people doing the work that they are easily replaceable. They should be grateful right?
Found the IT “Rockstar”.
there comes a time where you have so little supervision that you can actually do something interesting and productive
Those are the days. I can even sometimes sneak in some tech debt reduction.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: “Write good code and hope no one notices”
Oh god, add in “random scripts throw errors that you’ve never seen before” and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
Also every time a techbro tweets something a random number generator may fir- lay you off due to financial decisions.
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we’re in a release freeze.
Agile/Scrum, ISO 9001, ITIL, Six Sigma, CMMI, etc; it’s all cargo cults.
I’ve seen cargo thrown around a few times. What is that?
Build a skunk works, it’s like an IT department’s shadow IT, shave a yak, shed a bike.
attend mandatory training
I love doing big capital projects and spending literally millions of dollars in developer hours just for senior leadership to change their minds after the fact and not want any of what we just built!
Awfully true.
Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can’t set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I’m just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don’t have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.
When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.
Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.
You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.
Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.
