153 posts tagged with "icymi"

I'm sure sales understand the issues. They just don't care because they're paid to close sales. That's how they get their bonus.

After that it's not their problem.

In a sane world, sales would be paid on delivery and customer approval not on close. Which would require negotiating realistic deliverables with the people doing the actual delivering.

But if you try to run your company like that, the sales people leave. The entire sector is used to its privileged and unrealistic status, and the clean up is left to developers.

It's a political problem and needs a political solution - one where the relative status of sales and development changes across the industry. No amount of scrum/kanban/whatever is going to fix it.

Scrum Teams are often Coached to Death, while the Problems are With Management

In a partner I look for aligned:

1. Values.
2. Lifestyle.
3. Sense of humor.
4. Neurotype. (Don’t think I’ve ever dated someone neurotypical.)
5. Willingness and ability to grow/change/heal.
6. Honesty.

If even one of those doesn’t align, I don’t move forward with that person.

I honestly think of “personality” as more of a myth based on the above as well as past, attachment style, trauma, upbringing, habits, and the specific social situation the person is in.

If you were on Love Is Blind — what would matter most?

In capitalism, we aren't just producing commodities, we are producing surplus value on those commodities.

The surplus value (sans the cost of the labor) goes to the capitalists. The ones who own the companies, the property, and likewise the means of production.

As it is in pre-AI driven production, workers still get a paycheck. They don't reap the profits of their labor past this paycheck, but at least they are paid.

Post AI driven production, all surplus will go towards the owners of the production. There are no longer human workers, so there is no longer a workforce that will make any money.

So you can see that without solving this inherent contradiction in the capitalist system, an AI workforce will completely divide the capitalist class with everyone else.

IBM CEO Krishna Says It's a 'Good Thing' if AI Takes Your Job

I find it very funny that a lot of these techno-capital-libertarian arguments pretty much boil down to justifications for dictatorship.

The system has determined that person X is the best at allocating resources, so they should be infinitely given all resources and all control over everything so they can allocate it the best.

This is literally the kind of argument that the Egyptians used for their god-emperors.

Marc Andreessen just dropped a ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ that sees a world of 50 billion people settling other planets

I'd include on the Death Spiral By Stupid MBA list:

1. Measuring productivity by lines of code, number of commits, ticket count, or story points.
2. Firing people for making normal human mistakes
3. Offshoring development work to developing countries to save money
4. Relying on contracting companies to build your core product
5. Rarely or never giving staff raises or promotions... to save money
6. Stack-ranking staff or otherwise creating career incentives for self-centered employee behavior
7. Micromanaging staff or burying them in process B.S.
8. Insisting employees have to always be in the office... especially late at night or on weekends
9. Walking around the office always striking up conversations with technical staff in heads-down work... or demanding fast responses by Slack constantly
10. Doing something that clearly breaks the law and expecting it'll never be reported (AKA the Uber problem)
11. Building "cool" technology with no idea of how to make it profitable (see: AI today, Blockchain a few years ago)
12. Hiring people they know or like rather than people that are capable
13. Hiring "brilliant assholes"

Zero tolerance for prod issues

If you had a dollar for every dev who complained about the fact that they don’t do agile right, you’d have a small fortune.

First, whatever “real” agile is, the commercialized version of it that is sold today is absolute crap.

Agile has become a toxicity that has infected this industry. So much time and money is wasted with overbearing, low value ceremonies that it’s actually sickening.

Imagine if other industries adopted this bullshit. Seriously my last two companies waste an entire week every 10 weeks where devs sit around in meetings all day trying to figure out what they’re going to do in the next weeks.

I think most agile today is 50% ceremony / 50% actually work. It’s disgusting and feels worse than no process at all.

"Agile" company that is (really) not agile.

The main problem with these "free speech absolutists" is that they really aren't. None of them. What they've always wanted was to be able to say what they want to say (no matter how cruel, stupid, or factually wrong) without any social consequences, and that's just not how reality works. There are always consequences. The only way they can run away from the natural, expected consequences of their beliefs is by taking away all power and rights from the ones they hurt. And that's not free anything.

Kiwi Farms webmaster Joshua "Null" Moon is shocked to discover his Neo-Nazi userbase are pro-censorship

In a nutshell, while I do believe estimation is fundamentally hard (even in traditional construction/engineering, and even more so in software by at least some significant margin), I don't think that's really the problem with estimation.

The real problem with software estimation is that I think it's not worth pursuing. What is worth pursuing is speed of delivery, which necessarily means you have to build your engineering muscle around things that are vastly more important than estimating, like:

• Building small things that are good enough
• Iterating on them rapidly
• Running experiments

It's not so much that software can't be estimated, it's that I don't think it's really all that useful to do so.

The number of times that specific dates for software releases actually matters should be small, and even then, the importance of the date itself should be minimized.

When tech companies release software these days, even if it's a big splashy public announcement, usually the release date is extremely fuzzy, and that's because by the time you read the announcement there's probably already been people using a dozen different versions of it and when it gets "released" to you it's mostly just random chance of how the experimentation framework includes you in the treatment group.

What are everyone's thoughts on moving away from the concept of Story Points?

Ideally, you just let go of the whole concept of 'sprints' and just go for some form of kanban with a continuous flow of work together with CI/CD so you continuously deliver. For me personally 'sprints' is just an 'in between' to a full CI/CD flow. Unfortunately, very few companies are willing to make this jump, even though you will deliver more value for less money.

It's always hard to get clients to understand that all that's going to happen if you ask for fixed timelines is that you're going to get overinflated estimates and shitty software. I'm not saying that you should not be able to give a ballpark idea of when things are done, but everything beyond that is overhead.

What are everyone's thoughts on moving away from the concept of Story Points?

Here is my overly simple but not unreasonable method:

• (1) “i know what the problem is and know how to fix it and it is tiny”
• (2) “i know what the problem is and know how to fix it”
• (3) “i dont know exactly what the problem is, but i know how to fix it”
• (5) “i know what the problem is, but dont know how to fix it”
• (8) “i dont know what the problem is”

I use these. They are generally as-good-or-better than any arbitrary assessment ive used other times.

How do you guys decide story points