Our most senior and most competent backend developer got fired, he got told he "wasn't committed enough". This dude did the most complex tasks really quickly (and competently), could configure the most boring stuff off the top of his mind, and brought great culture to the company from his previous 20+ years of experience. He was about to implement some cool automation stuff, and improved our processes a great deal.

Now he's being let go. I was fearing *I* would get fired because I'm much slower and less knowledgeable than this guy.

When I talked to him, he figured the so-called "lack of commitment" was because he had missed a few standups the last few days, and got late to today's standup.

Now the boss (who is a less experienced than this dev who was let go, but co-founder of the company) was changing the database credentials (which we somehow have access to) and had the product down for like half an hour because of it.

I don't think firing this developer was a wise decision at all, and that's putting it generously. What a shame. Now I'm also a bit scared because the responsibilities of this developer might likely fall upon me. But generally I think we're worse off without this guy, and getting someone as good as him will take time.

One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

She wasn't wrong because most standups are jokes.

The best part of our daily standups is hearing my coworker's daughter whispering "Baba~" in the background, trying to get his attention for whatever reason.

Then when we end the meeting and say bye, you hear her in the background yell "Bye Bye~"

Adds a little cuteness to what usually is a very dull meeting.

OH: "We reduced daily standups to tuesday and thursday. Otherwise we have to stand up too much and this nearly counts as sport."

This is what Daily Standups turn into when a hard baked Waterfall team is forced to adopt Agile... and the Manager is made the SMaster! 😳☹️😫😭

When your morning stand ups include non-tech personnel and you need to get back to the code

I recently left a company where we had 2 hour long standups. I was so tired of them because half the time was deprioritizing what we prioritized yesterday. Everyday there was something more urgent coming up. It was a startup with 6 engineers. Sometimes the conversations were just random stuff that could easily take 45 minutes.

Now it feels so nice doing 15 minutes standups and then having the time to do the actual work.

Dear Boss

Would you.
Fucking.
PLEASE.
Stop.
Moving.
The Standup.
Time.

You've fucked around with the meeting time eight times since the end of Jan. Figure your schedule out, pick a time for our daily shit, and stick to it dude. PLEASE.

I'm a family man and you're making my mornings absolute hell to plan for.

Signed,

me.

> Best part about working from home?

"People don't give me as much shit for having a wank during standups" - not me, but I wish it was

how to become a true scum master:

- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense

- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)

- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.

- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.

- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.

stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

I never have anything useful to say in standups because all my stuff works. which can make it seem like i'm not working on anything.

Just loooovvve working on a day when the people at the client's have a holiday. No calls, no emails, no standups...just me and IDE

Some simple yet underrated tips for staying in the coding game.

* Coffee.
* Shower if your head feels heavy.
* A simple change to your theme or fonts
* Change of body posture: standups or sitting.
* Switch between desktop and laptop.
* Switch OSes, linux and OSX (good way to also ensure your config/build is portable)
* Long occasional morning/evening walks to think of solutions.
* Throw some shit on the political left on devrant..

Send me some coffee if you find these tips helpful. xD

Dev superpower: Been able to remember exactly what I did yesterday in morning standups.

i led yesterday's daily, since PM had no time and asked me to replace him.

in the beginning, i started the round with exactly the same words the PM always used, which made one of the Indian colleagues burst into laughing with muted mic

daily was held.
after the daily, 3 colleagues thanked me and commented on how awesome daily was, which made myself burst into laughter.

my theory is that people like daily standups where they are not steamrolled, interrupted and snapped at all the time.

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

'ate Mondays
'ate standups
'ate node (not racist just don't like et)

luv me caffeine
luv me music
luv devrant

simple as

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Today we had our first standup. We sat for all 90+ mins of it. The irony. Maybe the standing part isn’t that important? Or maybe it went for 90 mins because we weren’t standing? Sigh. Save me.

fun fact: nothing is funny about a stand-up....ever...

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

Daily standups- yea or nay?

Welcome to Whose Sprint Is It Anyway, where the estimates are made up and the story points don’t matter!

Out of nowhere, someone called me from a jobs board and said that they really liked my profile and that they sent me a job invite and they were in a hurry to get someone new - with my profile exactly. I haven't logged into that jobs board for a couple months, but upon checking, I see that their company sent me an invite and that the working environment was great. Remote first, no daily standups, competitive pay, and the site was legit. So okay, I accept their invite.

The next day I got an email back saying unfortunately they would close the application because they were only hiring people with a couple years experience in some tech... which was listed in my profile in the jobs board.

I'm like lolwut you invited me, don't you turn that around like I'm begging you for a job.

What's up with the meetings and schedules? If you involve 9 people for a 3 hour meeting, you're wasting 27 freaking hours and no it's not what standups mean. Startups! ugh

My team now does daily mini-standups: what you did, what you will do, what's blocking u

But with this wfh, I feel like slacking more or just seen to have less critical work to do... but not sure if the other guys are just "padding their list" or actually really busy.

So wondering when I have nothing to do for work/no defined deadlines or deliverables... How do you look busy?

I do have a lot of optional tech debt improvement work I could do but basically these are like backlog... And not really fun.

Teammate has been slacking since a week: not joining standups, not joining calls, stuff like that. Upon asking , he does give info which is needed from him, over slack. He is a pretty good engineer and has won a company award this year.

Today manager scolded him pretty harshly. No direct slangs, but very rude tone and sentences like ‘do you need special invitation to your house to join this meeting?’ , ‘If you don’t want to work, just fuck all this shit’ and things along this line for 10 mins. Basically manager lost his shit completely.

I didn’t like the way he was treated. What options does my teammate have ? We’re based out of Hyderabad, India.

my boss some months ago: so there is this new project, and we're planning to slowly fade in and gradually increase the time you guys work on this project

new pm last week: welcome to the project, you're now 100% allocated to the new project, that's your highest prio now
me: ...what about the other projects? they might have questions xD
pm: don't worry about that, dealing with that is not your job

my boss this week: yeah no, the other releases are most important for our company. the new project needs to be subordinated and has lower prio, at least lower prio than critical and highly prioritized bugs.
me: so.... who decides which items from which projects i shall prioritize higher than the new project and how much time i shall spend on them?
my boss: it is your job to talk to people, give them estimates and tell them how many items you can work on, so they can decide which items they pick

so basically i'm having the feeling that i need to manage myself here. it will be fun to attend the new project daily standups and tell the new pm all the time that i couldn't do anything because i had no time. anyone else with this experience? is this normal? actually i liked our new pm's attitude "dealing with that is not your job". i should have known it was too good to be true ^^'

Thought hard for dem advice and dem advice is about softskills / collaboration:
- do dem ticket administration right
- prepare dem standups
- use dem dem where needed

Daily stand-ups might seem like a joke when done remotely, but I believe they help unite the team, and they play a key role for project managers, even if they're brief. The bigger issue might be just some of the dev's attitude towards it, and the lack of communication through out the project development.

RANT! Clown VISA developer (you know, the one with ”extensive experience”) has still not finished his task which he was assigned after failing the last one which was easier. I wrote that they would fail and they have not even deployed anything to any environment. Not even dev. They just fuck around on their machines and this VISA guy says some nonsense shit on daily standups using mother fucking big words like it is really some difficult task they are doing. NOTHING has been done. It’s such a moral sink for the team.

When I asked nicely and asked if they have automated test they responded with a yes. So, I just dive into the repo and… no. There is no tests at all.

It is almost like they _think_ that tests automatically ate induced by osmosis or quantum mechanics or something. There is no tests. None. Zero. Why the ”yes”? 🤔

I looked at the commits and I can see no actual brain activity.

It will take a miracle. A miracle I say, to get any productive work out of this guy. What should he do? I mean, what should he actually get paid for? I do not understand. And he walks around in these $400 dollar jackets and coats and shit like he knows stuff.

I am having a really hard time accepting that he actually get paid at all.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

Daily Standups

As an ex-manager I now realize standups are used for control.

1. It sets a time when everyone must be present (might as well read-out names like it's school)

2. You, the manager, get to have people giving "offerings" of their work for you to approve, deny or bless with your gracious interest ("can you please stay on the call? lets discuss further")

Damn those 30+ mins long stand ups. A standup shouldn't last more than 10 mins. Discuss your detailed analysis of the project outside of the standup. 😤

So there's this remote guy on my team that basically doesn't do much and when it does fucks up. This is a guy with a lot experience but it doesn't seem even give a fuck. He doesn't pay attention to standups and he has more time than me in the project but doesn't know that much about it. There are rare times when he gives good ideas. However this happena so rarely that it is awful to work with him.

Back in the day when daily standups where still physical, i worked at a place you had to pay a euro if you where late. This money would then be used to buy the team dinner on pizza nights for example. Ofcourse everything changed with the daily standups being digital now.

How would you still implement somekind of correction for people being late unnecessary?

Me: „we are going to reschedule the standup to 11pm“

Coworker: „Ok, sure thing“

Me: „You might want to set yourself a reminder so you do not forget it?“

Coworker: „No worries, I got this“

Me @ 11pm: „Where the hell is he?“

Everyday at our standup with my team we chant "Aaaand Break" at the end, Today my manager gave me a new task to come up with a new routine chant for our team standup tomorrow, I have no idea about what to come up with- Any thoughts ?
I just have "go team" in mind, does anyone here do anything similar, want to hear your team disperse chant.?

Meetings have the ability to slow you down like nothing else. The moment you feel you are about to crack the problem you have been working on.. ding! there comes a notification for the next meeting.

Currently my team has a mid sprint review meeting, an end sprint meeting, a let's plan the next sprint meeting, a team meeting, but the one I have absolute hatred for are daily standups.

As a developer I never understood the intended benefit of standups. Issues + a scrum/kanban board like trello or GitHub project + a chat for quick questions or to schedule an ad-hoc pair programming session should be enough to make everyone know everything they need to know about the project status at any time.

Obliging developers to talk in a group session to reiterate in a more verbose way what they already wrote down when working on it, will make a lot of people uncomfortable. Talking too much or not complying to the talking rules is an expected side effect besides anxiety and reduced productivity.

If you want a talk show, hire talk masters.

If you want software development, hire software developers.

Don't confuse one with the other!

I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.

characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)

tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL

story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.

at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.

i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.

on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!

All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume

!Rant
#podcast

"We do our daily Standups on Friday" LMAO 😂😂😂😂

I really don't like our morning daily standups. They're kind of annoying, feels like kindergarten and I sometimes have to repeat myself because someone's too slow at taking notes from our talking.

Wondering if asynchronous standups would work better.

Starting a project in work learning some new tech. After a brief introduction to the tech, the lead dev can't wait to tell us about how we need to coordinate our daily standups with another team in a different part of the world.
Honestly, I'd rather stand up in front of a firing squad.

In organised "standup" where people either offer nothing or try to clear up an issue with someone mid way through.. 'nuff said.

Scrum standups and standdowns at my university be like: "oh let's discuss everything that comes to our mind and talk about it for an hour" - Professors 2016
(Only ranted this because I had to take a huge dump and had to hold it for a hour ;_;)

We stopped our daily standups for a few blissful months.
But now they are back.
I will never, ever understand why anyone thinks stopping an entire team of developers from working is a good idea.

Did any of you managed to pull off 2 fulltime positions while working remotely? What was your experience? Im working in one job where I have standups late in the evening and in a given week I work maybe max 10 hours. Im thinking of finding another fulltime job.