This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

Dev: this will take around three sprints to complete.

Product owner: weeelllll I think you can manage it in one..

We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!

Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!

You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.

We're building some pyramids.

What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!

Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?

We require a giant pyramid.

For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.

The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.

Now go build already!

Front End programming is the worst of all worlds.

I am a Full Stack developer that during every interview says "i can do front end stuff if needed". Something gets lost in translation and becomes "I do only front end stuff".

I don't mind front end development, but i hate urgent nitpicking that happens every time. Everyone else on the team works by regular tasks and deliveries (sprints and release dates), but my work consists of being the brush of the creative mind of someone else, that could not figure out how to make a good design before sending it out to me.

I am not a designer, a designer job is a creative one, i am just a brush that the team uses to complain why this button looks wrong on this not designed platform.

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

Some motherfucker at the gym called me. “Hey @growling, I am here with that gym you signed up with 5 months ago and your card for membership renewal isn’t working.”

“It’s 8:00am”

“Yes sir. It’s 8am.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit too early?”

“Did you get a new card?”

“Hey call me at lunch or something, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay, or you can call me. Goodbye”
Acting like you got better shit to do with your time.

Like he wanted to lecture me and say waking me up at 8am is fine. Like he wanted to say he came from a hardworking family and so he can say waking me up at 8am is fine. Shiiit dude my mom used to work with two broken hips for 7 days a week until I made six figures. Bless her heart, that’s why I got her a new car and money each month to pay all her bills. She’s been out of work for 2-3 years now. So lecture me. Only my mom can lecture me, boy. Cause she raised me to be an engineer.

Also, why do I see this everywhere as well? I get lectured for drinking beer on a Sunday or Monday during lunch at my frequent visits to liquor store.

“Don’t you have work?”
Yes, 9-5. But I’m an engineer. So it can be 10-6 or 11-7. Doesn’t matter. All of the stuff I do follows sprints and not direct interaction with customers!

I get tasks done and I teach interns to help me get tasks done. In time. And sometimes even more.

I know my schedule is so lax you want to criticize me. Maybe you think I don’t work? Or work as hard as you?

Tl;dr I intentionally act like a spoiled baby when it comes to work so that service/retail/manual labor people lecture me so I can tell them that we work differently than what they’re used to.

I have free snacks. Don’t get me started about gloating about free beef jerky. People hate me on online forums for doing that! Drink beer on tap in work kitchen. A glass of wine anytime I want. Sleep in until sometimes 11am. But that’s why I’m an engineer, buddy.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

One week sprints. Pain in the ass.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

STOP. LOOKING. AT. HALF. FINISHED. SPRINTS. FOR. STYLING. ERRORS.

For the love of god I know it's not right yet leave me aloooooone

Yeah boss, lets study Scrum extensively so you can:

- Create variable length sprints
- User stories that are meaningless like 'fixes'
- Tasks that should be User Stories
- Duplicated tasks/stories that are on the fucking backlog already
- Cross sprints on projects
- No meetings at fucking all to determine who will do what
- Assign people on vacation to current sprints

The list goes on...

An when I point things like that out lets just look at the guy who spent 6 months studying this shit, taught you ( at least tried... ) as if he is saying nonsense while our projects get delayed and our code spaghettifies because we are always in a hurry for lack of time to plan anything :)

[PM] - "Hey, <that guy> is joining our team for the next 6 sprints"

[Me] - "Really?, <that guy>? You want bugs? Cos' that's how you get bugs"

We finish our sprints on time.
The PM congratulates us for the good work.
The client gives positive feedback too.

And yet, I have the feeling we're​ sailing full-speed straight into an iceberg.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

I need to fuckinb slepe
5 day sleep deprived sprints don't mix well with assembly

There was this uni project where the teacher gave us a project to work as a team (the entire class, 17 people). We were meant to use Scrum, and deliver the first release in 1 week.

Turns out no one except me did the work, and this went on in the upcoming sprints, even with me telling the teacher what was going on.

Then, one day, a girl (let's call her Rose) did a commit to git, and I thought that something as going to change...She committed and push a new line at the end of a file.

After 2 months, the project was done. I had done 4k+ lines of Java EE + Hibernate + JSP code (which was very difficult to me) and the grading came out. I got a 7... most of the rest of the class got an 8 or 9. They did nothing.

When questioned by me, teacher said (it was a group project...)

TL;DR: I did the work of 17 people in a university project, got the worst grade of them all.

I'm a jr developer. I started off in automation testing and don't mind it but the testing codebase is cancer, doesn't follow basic Java conventions even basic naming conventions like camelcase, and the tests are super slow using hardcoded Thread.sleep(). Since the automation tests are not automated, I have to run manually. YES manually, every morning I wake up early at 7am to run the 2.5 hour long tests (7am because this before people get to work and when the application goes back online). I run this bitch and monitor them but most of them fail anyways. I also have to write a email report on the results which means I have to explain why shit is failing so I have to debug all this crap. This shit literally eats up an additional 2-3 hours of my work day everyday and the time is not even accounted for. ALSO, since it's running on my laptop, it makes my computer slow most of the day. If I have to debug, I can't have the browser be headless so fuckin chrome browsers be popping up every 2 minutes. I did this for legitimately 8 sprints until I decided enough was enough and bitched about it and the team told me I had no choice. I eventually got them to push towards automating it but it's still in progress so I'm still running this dumb shit. The contractors try to take advantage of me any way they can by giving me mindless bitch work they don't want and they know I don't usually say no since I'm a jr resource. I hate running the fucking automation tumor. Sometimes I go into the meeting rooms alone to scream.
I feel like I'm wasting my life away and not learning as much as I could somewhere else

Dev: The requirement is not clear. This seems to be a general usecase which you are thinking we might need but we won't actually need it.

Manager: You have to do it. This is the requirement. No other option. Don't ask any questions.

...... One week later....

Manager: Why is the team not open to me?

Create an web application(a product of our company). Manager insisted on using X third party API instead of Y third party API.

Now the app is complete.
*Very slow, Shitty User Experience *

I feel shameful for creating such a disaster and also wasted 3 sprints on it. But couldn't do anything because I don't have an authority to take decision which API or technology stack I should use.

Business head and manager had a meeting. Now they want to use Y third party API.

So they called me for discussion, lets me know we will now use Y third party API and it should be completed within a week because we just need to change the API calls in code that's all, despite of knowing all the core logic is built around those API.

Don't know how to react to this :( Want to hit my head on a wall

That slow realization that you're hitting burnout due to the toxicity of those in non-technical roles above you is wild. Also, Jira, Scrum, Sprints and all the extra bullshit can fuck right off as well.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

Why the fuck do we set time based deadlines on projects/goals/sprints?

The only way to know accurately how long it would take is if you've done it before. And if you've done it before why are you coding it again?

And of course when these deadlines aren't met it's rarely the manager that gets shit; it's the devs who failed to meet a guess.

I've already forgotten what a week or a month is. Now I measure time in sprints.

I need to stop finishing my sprints work within the first 3-4 days of the sprint.

I get so excited to get work that I loose my sense of time and space so I finish it all in one go...

Now I’m gonna be bored again for 2-3 weeks 😫

-Be a university student
-Work with SCR(OT)UM for the first time
-Divide tasks into 3 day sprints
-Watch the SCRUM master go nuts and the project fail

Never again

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

Starting new game development project.

Coder:" ok guys, I think that this time we have to focus much more on sprints management and documentation"

Designer:"Ye, this time we should use better scrum software, like jira or youtrack"

Artist:"but Asana has the unicorns when you complete a task"

My boss:

Doesn't manage the fucking agile board..

Doesn't call for meetings when we need...

Decides randomly for sprints duration.

Decides to do whatever he feels better with an obvious lack of thought.

Decides what to do based on assumptions instead of FUCKING ASKING THE FUCKING CLIENT!

Oh you stupid piece of shit how many time do we have to go over me explaining you how planning works and you pretending to agree?

Too many to count, but this one useless meeting stands out the most.

I was working as an outside dev for software corporation. I was hired as an UI dev although my skill set was UI/engineer/devops at the time.

we wrote a big chunk of 'documentation' (read word files explaining features) before the project even started, I had 2 sprints of just meetings. Everybody does nothing, while I set up the project, tuned configs, added testing libraries, linters, environments, instances, CI/CD etc.

When we started actual project we had at least 2 meetings that were 2-3 hours long on a daily basis, then I said : look guys, you are paying me just to sit here and listen to you, I would rather be working as we are behind the schedule and long meetings don't help us at all.

ok, but there is that one more meeting i have to be on.

So some senior architect(just a senior backend engineer as I found out later) who is really some kind of manager and didn't wrote code for like 10 years starts to roast devs from the team about documentation and architectural decisions. I was like second one that he attacked.

I explained why I think his opinion doesn't matter to me as he is explaining server side related issues and I'm on the client-side and if he wants to argue we can argue on actual client-side decisions I made.

He tried to discuss thinking that he is far superior to some noob UI developer (Which I wasn't, but he didn't know that).

I started asking some questions and soon he felt lost and offended. We ended that discussion with conclusion that I made my own decisions on the client-side. That lasted less than 10 minutes.

So I just sit there and eat popcorn for next 4 and half hours listening to their unnecessary discussions where some angry manager that did programing decades ago wanted to show that we are all noobs and stupid.

what a sad human being.
what a waste of time, but hey I got payed for this 5 hour meeting.

Ever work on a codebase that's so shitty, that if you do something in a generally accepted and expected way the entire product shits the bed? Cuz that's the situation I am in. Been working on the same fucking feature for like 4 sprints because it keeps being sent back because every time I adjust it to the shittiness that is currently in the baseline, someone changed something and it explodes again. And the worst part is that this is a well known and established problem. Basically every engineer, except the guy who wrote it of course, hates this system. Hates the baseline, and hates the platform. Yet I'm the one who is "losing trust" with the team, even though I get my shit up and running early all the time. They just break the foundation every time.

!rant

Designed and written > 1.3k lines of code this week and 98% test coverage..
CI and CD set up and working..

Was a Long week and very exhausting but I feel really good now, happy to start the weekend with whiskey and beer.

This is gonna be one of my most productive sprints so far..

Hope you all had a successful week as well.

Happy Friday 🍻

And please don’t start with any „that’s nothing, I’ve written 5k lines ones“ comments.. It‘s professional, stable, optimized code and code I can actually be proud of.

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

PM: I need a brand new feature that we haven't had before and it has to have a framework backing it so that we can extend it to anywhere in the future. It also has to have X, Y, Z, it has to be able to tell the future, cure cancer, fly, and have a return on investment for us of 1000x. How long will that take?

Me (or any dev ever): Umm... well, that's kind of asking for the moon. The first few pieces will take as least 5 sprints. When do you need it by?

PM: Tomorrow. When can you have it?

Me: ......

Three week sprints. Weekly deployments. Sure, ok.

> Be me
> Be the new dev at the company.
> "I'll take it easy in the first few sprints and pick the easy tickets that dont seem to have any creeping in them"
> Pick the worst tickets there are and only find out they're a pain in the ass afterwards
> The whole sprint is full of these tickets, we're essentially refactoring the codebase.

Why is it most companies think being “agile” simply means “let’s say we do work in two week blocks” but without planning or showcases or reviews, without estimations, with ad-hoc tasks inserted continually, priorities changing, tasks moving to the next “sprint” over and over …

But yes, these companies proclaim they are “agile” and do “two week sprints” when it is nothing more than chaos and rhetoric.

How do you guys prevent yourself from overworking? With deadline pressures I feel like it is very easy to work more than your regular 8 hours

Is there anyone else who works at a company that takes longer to plan sprints than the actual sprints?

Management in big corp I collaborate with has decided they want intermediate releases every 4 weeks. That's kinda OK, we work in two week Scrum sprints.

However, not this sprint. Because of Easter it's three weeks. And because the 4 weeks rule is absolute, the one after that is only one week. Which implies we do the whole review-presentation-planning ceremony twice in a row. That's fucking absurd. But when management agrees on a plan, it's reality that needs to comply, right? Argh.

I recently have been delegated the responsibility of managing a 4 people team by planning the sprints, scheduling tasks, and in general "take charge" (as said by the boss).

What bothers me is there is this "developer" with a heavily toxic attitude, who feels he is above all laws and knows everything just because he joined some months ago all of us.

He is basically a human linter. When he code reviews, you can get away with any major mistake if your linting and indentation (and all that shit) is according to "his standards".

A new guy recently joined the team and was given an overwhelming task by the boss just to test whether he belongs here. (Again, wrong, in my opinion). He didn't know any of the technologies he needs to work on to complete that task but he still learnt them and got a working product. Albeit not according to our God's "standards".

Cut to the chase, the asshole dev is now mocking him in PR comments and demeaning him in every discussion. As a "team lead", what should I do? If I let it go, it'll make the environment toxic and I don't want him to get away with it. If I do take any action, I don't want to be seen as as pussy who can't take such minor insults. Please advise.

PS. The asshole developer once wrote a "friend request accept" API endpoint in such a way that when any single person accepts a request, that'll cause all pending requests (from any person to any person) get accepted. Fucked up the DB queries basically. This is just to give a perspective on what I'm dealing with here.

I'm a tech lead for a new agile project for a manager who knows nothing about agile. Having to work on a chart that shows exactly how many sprints each milestone will be and when it will complete for like, 17 sprints from now when requirements aren't even set. Wtf?

Stop the long coding sprints if you are stuck upon something. Take a break. Come back.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

I fucking hate 1 week sprints that include review, planning, and retrospective, so technically the sprint is 4 days.

Question; if you've got a team member who's been phoning it in during the last few sprints and their inattention causes extra work for others, what do you do?

- Have a private word directly one to one.
- Say nothing but bitch amongst yourselves
- Complain to the team lead
- Call them out during a daily standup and tell them they're producing shit.

Any opinions?

Our "agile" process uses one-month long sprints, ending on the last day of the month with a demo. (I'll rant some other time about non-consistent iteration lengths.)

Our sprint ends today (Monday). What was the most logical time to introduce changes that affect the architecture and break every single build? How about 4PM last Friday?

We're still waiting on the build breaker to show up while trying to figure out what the heck we can cobble together and run to show that we actually did something in the last month.

What a week... I feel like I am on here ranting more than usual.

The Marketing Director and Project Manager keep telling me to let them know when I am stuck on tasks so they can unblock for me, but I FUCKING DO. I don't understand why they keep telling me to speak up, because I use multiple channels to tell those who are the blockers that I need an update.

I add comments on my Monday.com tickets and @ the relevant people, I send MS Teams chats to them, we even have a daily standup where I mention that I am stuck, as well as a OneNote daily update that gets sent to management where I mention that I am stuck and tag the people who need to help me out.

I have been stuck on a task for two sprints, which should have taken me a couple of days to do.

I really feel like I'm talking to brick walls, am I that unimportant? This is supposed to be "agile scrum kanban blah blah blah sprints story points people over process bullshit". I hate it. Y'all are doing it wrong... Fuckin robots.

I need a fuckin drink, thank God it's Friday.

New product owner colleague has a question like every hour, walks right over without considering that I am coding or if my headset is on for obviou reasons.

The questions are not even programming related and more to do with him updating story acceptance criterias for like the next freaking 5 sprints. These are stuff that could take hours to explain what the planned features are to begin with let alone discussing individual stories. I've actually taken my time and spent hrs explaining this shit to him now. Won't take any notes, jus shakes his head and says he understands and comes back asking same question again and again. Best part, he never gets to the point. Instead of asking 'hey for xyz feature do we need that component' he goes on to tell me he talked to this person and that person and he found this out and that out bla bla(like I give a fk..) and then somewhat formulates the question which I swear takes like 10 mins.

Lost count on hw many times he has interrupted me now when I am deep into some debug cos he needed to tell me about how his day went for some reason.

It's one thing to train a new developer but a product owner.. For fk sake. Trying to not be offensive but damn he is pushing it.

I made one tiny comment to our manager about agility. Now said manager and my scrum master are in a huge fight about in what 'currency' (story points vs hours vs sprints vs flurps vs whatevs). They've been going at each other for the past 35 minutes. Also, my headphones died today....

Music, but if it has words they need to be foreign. J-rock, deadmau5, gogo penguin, carrion... All are good.
Dark themes everywhere unless it's java, because it helps me compartmentalise my languages.
Second screen hooked up with the stuff I want to be viewable all the time, as it doesn't change when I switch workspaces. (bug or a feauture?)
Door shut to muffle sounds from the rest of the house, window slightly open so I don't suffocate.
Pomodoro timer on, but put phone into silent mode so no notifications disrupt my focus.
Drinks and bathroom breaks happen in the 5 minutes between pomodoro sprints. Food happens in the 15 minute breaks.
Extra RAM stick is in the mail so I lose less time waiting for android studio to exhale or whatever it's doing as it holds up the whole computer.
I might just do the java parts of my project in bluej if this ram stick doesn't alleviate my problems. I could go outside and drink mud through a metre long straw with a filter on the end sooner than android studio gets unstuck.
If anyone can add more sensible ideas I'd be happy :)

Making me stay late evenings to make up for shitty unrealistic sprints.

We are in middle of sprints where neither tech lead or PM knows what we r trying to achieve. When does as team member I suppose to start panicking???

Anyone else here suffering under a tech lead who instead functions as a business analyst and ignores their dev process in favor of stakeholder demands?

Case in point: our tech lead actually said in our latest retrospective (yes, we're running on Agile) that we should align our schedule to business. So wtf are we even doing Agile sprints for effs sake (this we did not say for fear of losing our jobs)

Context: large project moves to touch friendly UI, request and initial specs late last year, specs initial mockups early this year, designer promises final design before end of Q1.
Two sprints into development no fucking design, meeting today about it, designer has no fucking clue about what we actually agreed to last time. Promises again to have it for next time.
What the actual fuck? How difficult it is to least read up the fucking notes and do your fucking job that you are being paid for? Had a half fucking year!
After meeting...
Me: why do we even keep him around?
Pm: he is really overbooked...
Me: my balls are overbooked, don't promise if you can't deliver! (Leaves meeting room)
Fairly confident that this is the last project with this guy...
Am I the only one who just hates working with designers?

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.

Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.

Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.

We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.

Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.

Sick & tired of this shit.

Agile Product Owner: How long do you think this task will take?

Me: Probably 13 points.

APO: That is too many can you break it down into separate tasks?

Me: Sure its probably an 8 and an 8. Since i need to work on them sequentially and one depends on the other, the second task will take longer if i need to make changes after the first one is merged.

~ Turned 104 (8 tasks * 13) points into 128 (16 tasks * 8 points) points.

A 13 represents a whole 2 week sprint.
An 8 represents a week and a half.
We cannot fit 2 8 point tasks in the same sprint, so now it takes 2 whole sprints to complete 2, 8 point tasks.
We have no smaller tickets so we don't work for the rest of the sprint.

Anyone else been here?

Spent an entire day clearing the backlog of the previous sprints in JIRA. Now i am seeing jira numbers everywhere :/

I'm not political - but Agile sprints remind me of Soviet/Maoist "five year plans". Agile in and of itself is so fucking oddly soviet...

I feel a bit like shit.

I started a new job about 2 months ago. Company is great， culture is amazing，project is interesting， processes are what i always dreamed.

This is after having learned the job from scratch at a startup that was all you can imagine. Tedious，hoping to be something that was not yet and so on....

So we are coming at the last week of a sprint. Its Tuesday and most stories are competed. We dont have a culture of jumping on others PR， its kind of like this is my PR kind of mentality. This is not established its more like an untold rule. But coming to the end i figured， especially if i knew exactly how to fix the PR that o should jump in a make it happen.

Person who owns those prs unassigned themselves from those and added me instead kind of like: “well take it if you want it....”

What are your rules regarding others prs and sprints?

Slowly I am strongly considering changing the company. Somehow our management is losing its focus on reality. On the one hand, the management doesn't care one bit about what problems we have, especially when we have issues with other teams, which makes it impossible to finish our (necessary) features. But when the management wants something, everything has to be completed immediately and preferably yesterday.
We work in our team (and in almost the entire development) according to Scrum, so we are organized in sprints. However, our CTO thinks that none of this matters and that the whole planning has to be thrown out just because he wants a small (absolutely stupid) feature.
And then, our supervisor thinks he has to force us to do things that are entirely irrelevant for the team. We wouldn't have any advantage and would just be the henchmen of others.
And then there's a neighboring team that refuses to make any progress and keeps blocking everything. But somehow it's management's favorite team and can simply (unofficially) decide about other teams.
Honestly, I'm pretty pissed off now, and I'm not in the mood for that crap anymore.

I work in the Android team in a company whose main product is a consumer facing mobile application. The backend developers around me are always looking to cut corners and do things the fastest and easiest way possible. If they think there might be a dependency to another team they go to extra lengths to avoid it just to save themselves the efforts of communicating and learning things that are beyond their scope of interest. I have to put up such a fight to ensure things are done the right way. Contracts are as optimised as possible.

I once had to fight for half an hour to ensure they processed the response before sending it over to app and left the processing to the end users mobile app. They just wanted to query their database, serialise it and send it over.

For my current project, I have proposed a solution which will not require any app side changes in the near future ever, if we make things generic enough and follow a set contract. The app architects loved this solution, but it was an entire task to convince the backend team. When they finally agreed, they keep hinting at how we should've just done things the easier way to solve just for our current use case because doing it this way is taking time.

Mind you, they are the ones who had set the deadlines anyway. And now they use the excuse of these very same deadlines to try and push out a very sub par solution.

My iOS counterpart is no less. We were given two sprints to finish this task. And he kept fighting me every step of the way to make things the easier way. I feel singled out and I feel like I'm being too pushy and uptight and if things are delayed it'll be my fault and not the because these people are lazy and incompetent.

Our manager doesn't care either. He just wants the feature out as soon as possible. He wouldn't care about the nitty gritties of the solution if it was delivered on time.

I'm curious - how strict are you (or how strict is your lead / manager) about keeping stuff both detailed and up to date in Jira (both in terms of sprints & tickets)?

I've always drawn a pretty hard line with this - stuff in our Jira environment always has a detailed description, approximate estimate, is kept up-to-date with who's working on it, assigned appropriately, etc. But others I've spoken to seem to barely care if any tasks are in there properly at all.

It's really fun to not have access to the CI backend and keep only troubleshooting build crashes through a CI that takes 15min to run until it crashes :)))

1 diagnostic command == 1 pipeline run
1 typo == another run :)

it's been 2 sprints now. Still no luck

7 sprints to deliver an application from scratch to production for 7 types of user roles, with different work flows. Am I wrong to get pissed when the tech lead wants to implement RBAC only at the last sprint?

[Paraphrased quote] "We're implementing an Agile methodology with 12 week sprints."

Our client supposedly managed our Jira board yesterday in preparation for the release to live.

It was a mess. We have two people on this project - so our effective maximum workload is 10 days worth of tickets.

The current sprint plus the next have over 60 tickets in them, with the other "light" sprints having about 15 days worth in them.

I know you shouldn't get caught up over estimates too much, but they're in place for a reason.

The client really needs a reality check, and to be reasonable. When looking from a macro perspective he loses sight of all reason and scope, trying to grossly overfill what the two of us can handle.

A junior and student placement dev can only do so much.

I guess time will tell how realistic 16th April is..

Help. We're starting to feel the effects of unnecessary micromanagement.

We're a small startup. The kind with less than 10 devs spread across different domains. We've been fine with a Kanban approach as the velocity/flow of deliverables don't necessarily warrant a Scrum approach yet.

Our boss has been wanting to adopt Scrum-style sprints, even shoved and assumed that were doing these sprints and demanding Scrum-style reports (and meetings!!!) when they are, in reality,
1) unnecessary
2) a waste of time

Absolutely none of the team members want this. But our boss insists on having it. We like our boss, but lately things are getting out of control

What can we do to mitigate and prevent this?

Sales agreed to client to deliver in 7 sprints. It's the 3rd sprint already and the tech lead is still trying to firm up scope MVP.

Tech lead: so for this sprint, please implement this HTML page in Angular

Me: do we know what kind of Angular table we are using yet?

Tech Lead: just use the Angular UI one

Me: do we know if that supports drag and drop and custom filters?

Tech Lead: that's not needed for this page

Me: yeah but like 5 other pages of this web app does

Tech Lead: so? We will find a different table then.

Me: but they will look and feel very different and it will be totally obvious that it's patchwork, and we will need to rewrite this page you want me to write now...

Tech Lead: so what if they look completely different. Stop thinking about future sprints. can you have it done next week?

Me: ummmm.....

... this is going to be a fun project. Oh, not to mention I'm only supposed to work on it for 20% of my time....

I am tired of switching my role at a startup where I work. I was primarily hired as a backend developer but some times i have to handle sprints, i have to become machine learning engineer, a devops engineer and now even frontend. Yuck. I am sòoooooo tired..

Upper management has a huge meeting and decides NOT to merge in buggy or incomplete or untested code just because it's the due date (you know, quality over quantity? And an attempt to cut back PM's unrealistic expectations)
2 sprints later: "So we're going to go ahead with the merge. Yes, we know the feature isn't complete, but we promised blah blah blah"
So much for that <.<;;

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

PM, we are going to go to an agile methodology for working. (despite PM having never done agile, and most of the team having never done agile) But we will have 4 week sprints, as 2 week sprints are too short. We are going to have daily stand ups, oh but we'll only have then once a week... And we will keep the 3 hour mid week meeting. Oh and we'll keep our existing JIRA, but you also need to use *new* JIRA as well, but that's going to the customer so don't post bugs on it.... (all with a ln important delivery in a few months) The suggestion of getting an adviser (either internal or external) who has experience with agile to help us transition smoothly and provide best practice got shot down. feels like the blind leading the blind...

I want to rant here but I have a lot of backlog. They’re all pretty deep for refinement. So I want to put them all in one sprint. Because I don’t want a marathon of ranting.
But I do realise in IT sprints never end, and eventually turn out to be a marathon of sprints. I came to a point to deliver over 100 story points in one sprint. Maybe I shall write a book instead of exploding this app.
I could have never imagined the dark side of this occupation.
However I love coding so much I’ll brush the backlog under the carpet😏

But you know there are always saviour heros wanted for refactoring. This honour goes to:

The arrogant guys who think they’re a genius when their code compiles.
The insecure guys who want to overpower the next available when their code doesn’t compile.
The egoists who like to underestimate and show of, where their faulty biased googles display a little girl instead of a developer.
The aggressives when they are invited to the reality and kindly offered to sit back on their place.

I hope this rant wouldn’t ouch anyone. If it does, not sorry, the message is delivered.

If there’s an offence or reaction to this refactoring job, the 4th one would be offered to clean the mess.

We are a remote team of two android developers for this startup. I have 3 years of experience and my protege has 1 year of experience.

One month a new guy with 10 years experience joined our team and hes working onsite. He's supposed to be scrum master and be good ad dividing and delegating tasks, but what he's doing past two weeks is appaling to me.

Basically we got a request for a new feature. He skipped discovery and planning steps, went straight to implementation and one week later showed us his implementation.

Note that at that moment my remote team was not informed about anything. He started reinventing a library to capture a picture and video, while there are tons of other well developed libraries out there.

What makes things more difficult is that his english sucks.

I don't understand what he's doing but now it seems that either he's playing office politics and is trying to stay ahead by not informing us so we would be forced to follow his implementation. Or maybe he is totally oblivious and don't have any sprint management experience, so he's just trying his best by working hard and trying to prove his own worth.

Eitherway it sucks that he is not able to communicate specifications from HQ to us, because even I did a better work with planning our sprints by communicating remotely.

So now I started asking him questions and turns out the guy doesn't even understand specification. He already half implemented the feature and can't tell us why we need it and why we are not using what we already have in the app. So now he's back to square one: doing discovery. It's fcking ridiculous.

My most consistent enemy at work is this fucking system I have to work in, holy shit. Not only is there no default support for shit you would really think there should be, no real control over the interfaces with the UI, and the far too complicated method they use to magically make said interfaces, but we also have to use their build environment to build this shitty thing. So builds take anywhere from 4 to 12 minutes a pop and ridiculous style guide will stop the build, no questions asked, for dumb violations like spaces between if and (. And it doesn't catch these, sometimes, until 7 or 8 minutes in. I have wasted so much time on this. And seeing as we work in 2 week sprints that are really 7 to 10 day sprints based on whatever hair goes up my bosses ass and have to deliver feature complete in those two weeks, I can't really afford all this nonsense. I used to joke about having an alcohol problem, but I think I actually may be developing one at this point.

It's Friday!

Time to close off the team sprints after the team having done 8+ production releases in the last two weeks -_-

Exhausted...

At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?

I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.

I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant

I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.

I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.

I don't know, what do you guys think?

Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.

We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.

I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.

Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).

So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus

Funny how things comes around...
So... project start-up... everybody learning and designing the future new system. Then we get to a point that we saw that we'll probably need someone outside or dev team to setup all the environments CI/CD pipelines... Our PM said "what about we get a Devops guys to take care of that?" Most of our team members agreed but our Techlead said "Devops is not a job, it's a culture.". Ok, nice... I understand that point, but for a system of the size of the one that we're building...It would probably be a good idea to have someone to take care of that for us. BUT, he (the techlead) said that he will be taking care of all that himself (along with coding part of the backend).

RESULT: We're stuck in the point that we're unable to test our system in the correct environment, we've no pipeline for automated deploy of our sprints...

Guys, I think the Devops is no more then somebody that is going to take care of some tasks in the project, like the backend, the frontend, the tests, the management...

How to stop thinking of code 😳, been doing sprints for some days and now got a dissertation to write up. I can think of is code ..

Don't you love the neverending sprint?

You know the one that just inherits all the tickets from the last one? Each sprint packs on new cool features but along the way bug tickets come in for code you haven't even touched or wrote and you deal with them because they are blockers.

before you know it, sprint is over and ok to the next one. I'm pretty sure that is how this is supposed to work right?

Having some lazy scrum team members and it is getting out of hand. For the past 1 week or so we have one dev who's daily standup written report is: regression. In our test case summary I can't even find her name, which means she is not doing anything.

Same goes for two of our new QA's who joined like 2 months ago. We have like 20 ready for QA tickets pending, but QA is saying that they are doing regression. Yet when I check how many cases they actually covered, it's something that even I as a dev during my first weeks in the company would have completed in a halfday. Right now we have one senior QA guy who is doing all the heavy lifting and I want to change that.

Wondering how to politely call out their bs during standup? It's kinda annoying seeing them covering their lazyness with "regression" for two sprints in a row now :)

When devs have to test tickets end to end in stabilisation week that have passed in previous sprints because the company doesn't want to cough up more than 2 QAs...

I am not a tester. This is bullshit.

(Obviously I e2e test my tickets during the sprint before deploying and passing them on to QA to test and hopefully move on to 'Done')

I tell a designer at the company to take a look at a (huge) corporate web project we're currently building. He's not assigned to the project, but I thought a fresh eye and recommendations could be good for future Sprints, since we're doing a first release in a month.

The guy knew all of this, yet his "designer a.k.a artistic spirit" couldn't hold him from sending a UI/UX review to the PM, of about 6-7 pages or smth - I dont even remember now.

The whole report had a total misunderstanding of the business logics, because he didn't even wait for me to explain that shit to him. Eventually his versions of UX suggestions were irrelevant. It was pretty funny, now that i think about it.
I'm guessing he just hoped to get some attention...?

tldr: its fucking disgusting when designers try to act as artists;

When we take user stories in sprints but dependencies are not resolved. I have to wait till n-1 the day for the upstream team to go to UAT and then push half my tasks to next sprint for testing \ prod . Fuck the planners - _-|-_-¦

So we work in sprints of two weeks, we are two people in our team, in the beginning, we get assigned work and we continue to work on it the rest of the week, but sometimes my manager adds last minute tasks or makes it so whatever i was currently working on is not important anymore after i have already cut a long shot through it
But anyways i understand thats how work is, but what seems to happen now as well is that i finish all the work assigned to me early so i can work on any bug fixes that may arise from such features or old bugs, so then for example he gives task 1,2,3,4 to me and task 5,6,7,8 to my colleague which is ahead of me in rank but not my leader per se, she has more experience as she worked in another company for 7 months before and i never worked before , but then i finish my work by the middle of second week and he ends up adding some of her tasks to me and forces me to finish them fast as he thinks they are no big deal (hes also a non technical manager) so i am always racing to finish whatever he throws at me last minute and ending up getting the blame if i dont finish those last minute tasks, also if i take vacation and come back instead of giving me tasks to do he just gives me bugs of recent features that was done by my colleague while im on vacation
And when i confronted him about it that at any point in time whenever i check how much work is left for me and my colleague, she has less work than me, he said “i will skip all this because you got this wrong” and then continued to just ask me to do more things on the weekend day
Ofc so i tried to make sure i dont finish my work before time so he doesnt do that
But instead he ends up blaming me and saying i should have finished

Anyone who tells you there is no time constraint is on drugs. There's no such thing. At best, there are just secret deadlines that crop up as you're getting close. It's just a fucking con to get you to build unimportant shit, and work your ass off to meet some artificial deadline at the end.

I've had a hard time getting on board with Google using the "Yes, and..." approach in design sprints. IMHO, it's tough to apply a stream-of-consciousness from improvisational theater to building software. Two completely different arenas.

Personally, I've always applied the "No, because..." approach, designing pessimistically/programming defensively, while still being innovative, creative & empathetic. I get the psychology of public criticism making teammates butthurt & stymieing future contributions...but that's maturity.

Our sprints are 3 weeks. The first sizing for an user story is 1.5 weeks/1person. 2 sprints (6 weeks) after 2 of us are still working on that undersized shit...

I need figure out a way to work managing my fantasy football teams into my sprints this year, or were going to lose again.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

Manager: Can we achieve X?
Dev: We can do with Y. But with the time that you are allocating it is difficult to complete Y.
Manager: Can we do a temporary fix?
Dev: Sure. We can do Z. But we need to prioritise Y in the next sprint else Z will cause issues in the long run.
Manager: Sure

After many next sprints,.......

Manager: Hey, Z is causing us issues regularly. Can we do something about it.
Dev: We still can do Y.
Manager: Come up with document on the implementation. We'll implement it.
Dev: Sure. Will do.