My coworker is sick so according to "Agile" I need to work on the weekend?

Literally go fuck yourself. This shit doesn't fly in literally any industry but this.

It doesn't fly in this industry either unless you let it.

No, according to "agile" you drop features from the current sprint and bump them to the next one.

There's not a single agile methodology I know of (scrum, Kannan, xp, etc.) where it says "work the weekend if someone is ill." If your boss is telling you to do that, you're not doing agile, you're probably doing some bastardisation of waterfall with daily standups so your boss can pretend you're doing scrum.

It's one of the biggest cons in this industry, and it needs to stop.

it's just some indian slavehouse. isn't it?

It’s simple, unless it’s in your contract just say no. They can do fuck all to make you. Fuck them exploitative bastards. Fuck them!

Agile and all the funky words (mostly bullshit bingo since it's seldom done right) aside.

When a deadline cannot be met, it should be escalated.

Highest form of escalation is telling the client that a new deadline needs to be negotiated.

Delivering an unfinished buggy piece of garbage that someone hot glued together is never better than to delay and renegotiate.

And yes, delivering shit leads to the neverending problem of not learning to not make promises one cannot keep.

And yes, such a delay can lead to painful costs, eg by a penalty of contract.

But having an completely fucked up process / project management because of several overlapping delays and no spare work force due to heavy regression / bug phases is usually way more costly.

Simply because you cannot generate new income, since your entire work force is dedicated to cleaning up shit.

And new features suffer from the psychological effect of working overtime, which increases the pile of shit...

@shakur is your tinfoil hat ringing again?

@C0D4 oh I abso fuckin lutely ain't gonna let it. But this mf had the balls to ask.

shit ain't flyin' in this one either

"Flying shit controversy" 🤣🤣

I think managers are often under the impression that "agile" just means "faster". And that's it. You're getting stuff done faster. If you're not getting stuff done faster, you're not working hard enough so you have to work harder/longer.

My previous manager was like that. I'm so glad I don't work for him any more. When I said we had to push back a date because there was no way we could get the work on time, he said this:

"You know, I really don't mind if you want to work overtime. You could come in on the weekend and get it done."

Not only was he trying to make it sound like he was "allowing" me to work overtime, but he also conveniently forgot that I was salaried so I don't get overtime pay.

@EmberQuil This kind of behaviour is disgusting and leads to the effect that "project manager" in general is more of an insult than a job description.... *sad* human scum...

@IntrusionCM oh he got his comeuppance, sort of. He still works for the company but the only thing he manages now is maintenance of legacy stuff. He used to be in charge of cloud development and other buzzwordy things that look really good to upper management and now he's the guy who only speaks in meetings if some ancient system is broken.

Definitely not an industry thing. I've never had to do that and neither have my colleagues. And besides labor laws here crack down on shit like this hard.

@EmberQuill And just for clarity, if any managers are reading this:

The goal of Agile is not speed, it's maneuverability. You detect problems early so you can make course corrections early.

The tools to do so are self-organizing, multi-disciplinary teams which work in small iterations. Frequent but short meetings serve to keep people from being stuck, get into conflict or lose their focus, while (bi)weekly meetings serve to track overall results and team health.

In Agile, deadlines should be nearly non-existent.

The drawback of Agile can be that changing requirements can be difficult to develop for, so the job of the manager is to find a balance between "make deliverables as tiny as possible" and "create polished, clean features which do not leave behind any technical debt".

@bittersweet I agree with you. Except for one tiny part, which is the reason I also mention @shakur .

A deadline isn't a negativ term per se.

Agile doesn't mean that deadline is dead.

Agile means that a deadline is very fine-granular, which is an direct opposit to the long term deadline which is mostly associated with the term deadline and which is "this thing noone wants".

Whenever you allocate time, you'll actually set a deadline. Be it story points, fixed hours or anything that involves an expectation of "when" things SHOULD be done. And the should is in capital letters, because the word deadline is mostly associated with "must" be done.

Which is completely nuts. This was nuts in the 90s, and this is nuts nowadays and will be nuts forever.

Bad things happen TM. You cannot make an promise that things will be done, you can give an expectation and calculate based on risc factors and experience. But even that can be completely off.

The second word I want to mention in that context is escalate.

An escalation does not mean violence, it usually means: We / I cannot decide this, let's try to find a decision with the higher ups, since this is stuff that we shouldn't (or can't) deal with alone.

Both (escalate|deadline) will always be part of an project management, since both are things that are necessary to have a clear, constructive way of dealing with time based processes in a larger team / company...

Yeah in any other industry people just work on weekends regardless of their work colleagues presence. Weekends are normal workdays pretty much anywhere else.

@IntrusionCM

Fully agree. The idea of a sprint is to have a soft two-week deadline for a packet of work. And yes, "The sprint is holy" — but only in terms of organization over OTHER work.

It means that according to your best estimations, the scheduled work will be finished.

But that promise is more about "We're not going to work on the purple buttons, because this sprint we only focus on the orange toggles" than it is about "The work will be done, even if a meteorite hits the office".

@bittersweet exactly.