Me: “So, I completed this time critical task a week ago, had it QA tested, and it’s been awaiting approval since Tuesday. I’ve posted my PR with links in the dev chat, I’ve pinged each of you individually each day as well. It is still awaiting approval before I can merge and pick up a new card from our backlog that is dependent on these changes. If literally anyone has the bandwidth to do this review, please do. I’ll post the link here again as well, to make this super convenient for you all, as well as the Jira card for reference, and the changes and requirements themselves are extremely straight forward. It should only take 5-10 minutes, tops. And I will be sitting here useless until it is done. Somebody, please, for the love of god…”
My team: crickets
Scrum Master: “Thanks for the update, kryptonianCodeMonkey… next up is…”
Every time I see these comments, I wonder if I was just lucky with my scrum masters and most actually suck, or if it’s confirmation bias. We don’t have a scrum master where I work, but my whole job as lead is keeping things rolling, and this would be just unacceptable.
Yeah, I also wonder what kind of shitty culture they have in these teams? I mean, who would leave a coworker hanging like that? That’s just a collective dick move.
My Scrum Master is nice, but her role seems to mostly revolve around enforcing documentation standards, coordinating refinements and retrospectives, tracking metrics on task completion, and maintaining our Jira board. She doesn’t have a lot of involvement with the specifics of development, delegation, or how we execute our tasks.
“manager, person_a and person_b are the reviewers on my time sensitive PR. I’m blocked. You are aware of everyone’s priorities, can you indicate prioritization of tasks and delegate how we should act?”
We have big red magnets representing blocked to put on the board. We have to speak about every single blocker every stand up and what the team’s path forward is to unblock the thing. If it’s waiting for vendor, then that’s all we can do. If the ball is in our court for any blockers, and its still there tomorrow without a really good reason, there is hell to pay.
Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows
When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors
He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.
It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.
I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better
My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so
Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity
Me: “So, I completed this time critical task a week ago, had it QA tested, and it’s been awaiting approval since Tuesday. I’ve posted my PR with links in the dev chat, I’ve pinged each of you individually each day as well. It is still awaiting approval before I can merge and pick up a new card from our backlog that is dependent on these changes. If literally anyone has the bandwidth to do this review, please do. I’ll post the link here again as well, to make this super convenient for you all, as well as the Jira card for reference, and the changes and requirements themselves are extremely straight forward. It should only take 5-10 minutes, tops. And I will be sitting here useless until it is done. Somebody, please, for the love of god…”
My team: crickets
Scrum Master: “Thanks for the update, kryptonianCodeMonkey… next up is…”
Oh I can see your problem: everyone is still waiting for JIRA to load.
That about sums it up. Even escalated to my boss at this point, still crickets. It’s not even a big or complex PR.
Sounds like paid time off to me!
If your leadership doesn’t review productivity, sure…
And then you have a great big fuck off stack of documentation you can slap in their face with proof that it’s someone else’s problem.
Unless you aren’t actually pinging all the people you say you are.
Hah I was dicking around but it got approved during my lunch :(
Oh well, better luck next time!
Every time I see these comments, I wonder if I was just lucky with my scrum masters and most actually suck, or if it’s confirmation bias. We don’t have a scrum master where I work, but my whole job as lead is keeping things rolling, and this would be just unacceptable.
Yeah, I also wonder what kind of shitty culture they have in these teams? I mean, who would leave a coworker hanging like that? That’s just a collective dick move.
My Scrum Master is nice, but her role seems to mostly revolve around enforcing documentation standards, coordinating refinements and retrospectives, tracking metrics on task completion, and maintaining our Jira board. She doesn’t have a lot of involvement with the specifics of development, delegation, or how we execute our tasks.
That sounds like a great boss, someone how is involved with what should be done but not always how, as long as the team deliver what is requested.
“manager, person_a and person_b are the reviewers on my time sensitive PR. I’m blocked. You are aware of everyone’s priorities, can you indicate prioritization of tasks and delegate how we should act?”
We have big red magnets representing blocked to put on the board. We have to speak about every single blocker every stand up and what the team’s path forward is to unblock the thing. If it’s waiting for vendor, then that’s all we can do. If the ball is in our court for any blockers, and its still there tomorrow without a really good reason, there is hell to pay.
Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows
When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors
He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.
It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.
I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better
My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so
Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk