153 posts tagged with "icymi"

I've done work on projects specifically for DevEx and, in my experience, the single biggest hurdle is simply convincing the powers that be that it's a good way to spend time (and therefore money).

It's odd because in these organisations will boast about how they're big-picture thinkers, and in the end the whole point of building any software is to make something easier to do later at the cost of effort now, yet they're often terrified of spending resources on anything that isn't an end product or that doesn't produce immediate value.

Even if you can get them to agree in principle that ThingX would be worth having, it's rarely seen as expedient to build it now because of the short-term opportunity cost, and the can is kicked ever further down the road.

"We'll allocate some time for ThingX later but right now we can't afford to down tools on ThingY" they say, ad nauseam; six months later, somebody will say "you know, if we'd just done ThingX back then it would have paid for itself by now," and everyone will nod and agree, but somehow that doesn't become "...so perhaps we shouldn't put it off any longer."

The worst part is that when you finally do get the go-ahead to work on making these sorts of improvements, everybody will agree afterwards that it was a great idea and well worth the effort... but not learn from it. "Remember how we built ThingX, and it was great and made everybody's lives a load easier? Well, we've got this idea for something else..." fails to persuade anybody. Previous improvements are taken for granted, and what things were like without them is quickly forgotten, rather than prompting anybody to change their thinking about front-loading effort.

Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?

It's so baffling

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - LBJ

That's why they vote GOP, because it gives them someone to look down on.

Boomers who spent their lives actively supporting drained pool politics surprised that the pool is dry when they jump off the diving board.

It's truly bizarre given how the entire HP series says how love can conquer anything and Voldemort's evilness is specifically tied to how he clings to hate and sees love as a weakness, and yet she herself is a hateful ghoul of a woman who wants to see some of the most disadvantaged people suffer.

J.K. Rowling announces that she will be using her private wealth from the Harry Potter series to develop the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights "in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces”

It's well known in psychology that humans suck at conceptualizing uncertain negative future consequences. Slower delivery in the future because of getting the shiny toy today is an uncertain future consequence while getting the shiny toy today is a certain immediate consequence. The human brain processes the latter much more easily.

Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?

It’s because they ALL think that they are the exception to the rule, that they are “one of the good ones” that only other people will get screwed. Because these people don’t think in terms of “can this politician benefit me and my family” they think in terms of “how can this politician hurt others I don’t like”

You Get What You Vote For

It’s easy to be a hypocrite like this if you view a certain group of people as sub-human and inherently ‘wrong’. You’ll think acts of violence against them are fine because you don’t even really think they’re people while simultaneously bemoaning how people are attacking you because you think you’re worthy of respect and common decency

Church that promotes killing LGBTQ+ people now complaining about acts of violence against church

It’s not profits that need to consistently be growing, it’s perceived future value for shareholders. Buying and selling stock - that’s it.

CEOs at public companies are financially aligned with growing their stock’s value perception. Everything underneath that are tactics. And, doing so opens up new beneficial opportunities for them.

It’s why private equity is somewhat afraid of ESG…because society/younger people are starting to put more pressure on what a corporation should be standing for.

When Blackrock’s CEO says the tides are changing using the Ukraine war as an example (i.e no one pulled business out because of forced government sanctions, only public outrage + shareholders falling in line), it’s a sign that the rules of the game are changing.

An engineer laid off after over 16 years at Google said 'faceless' tech giants see staff as '100% disposable'

In general, yes, but I’ve been on teams where really trivial stuff — like docs or one-liners — get 0 points. As long as the team is self-consistent, it doesn’t matter.

The key is to never point based on the time. Only risk and complexity. After a few weeks of using this system, it starts to be apparent how many points the team can finish in a week. Combined with a reasonable backlog, you can start to get a feel for when your team will deliver planned work.

It takes discipline but it means you don’t need sprints or scrum masters or burn-down charts or any of the other agile cruft. The process actually frees you up to do the important things: have conversations and build stuff.

How do you guys decide story points

In my experience those who most enthusiastically advocate for Scrum or Agile^(TM) have a near-religious devotion to it and refuse to accept it is not suitable to every task (especially more research intensive projects).

When met with such objections, the response is usually something along the lines of “Well, you are just not doing Agile correctly”.

We Should Stop Trying to Make Scrum Fit for Every Situation

Instead of moving more things to not use code, we should be moving to Everything-as-Code provisioning. At my company, we not only manage the main codebase, but also infrastructure, policies, workflows, and soon, even company bylaws as code. Doing this allows every part of your system to benefit from code toolings.

The end goal for us is not to do everything without code, but do everything as code.

Low Code Software Development Is A Lie