Transitioning.

Perhaps you should try something less grindy - a slightly different role.

(It's very easy to get opportunities like that within a large company if you mention it to your manager)

Just to cheer you up I can say that short retros can feel kinda useless.

We always keep a strict time limit, 1h, and the goal of the retro is to avoid fixing things during it - we just create actions for later.

But this can be annoying. After everyone has presented their issues and ideas we find ourselves rushing towards the end where we're supposed to vote on the top 3 things to discuss a bit further and create action-points for. But we end up having to cut the interesting discussions short and it feels like we just got to vent but not really get to the heart of the matter.

To some extent I feel like over a years time our retros just end up being 90% venting and we never get to go in depth.

So once in a while I would kinda prefer a long discussion.

@donkulator I wish. There's lots of general posts about topics like Ukraine war and dead celebrities.

PS: sorry to everyone for hijacking this thread.

Damn, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

"triennial" = once every three years

"triannual" = three times in one year

They even suggest there's such a risk of confusion it's best to avoid the word and just say "3 times per year" or "once every 3 years"

Bi kinda means "2 of" - not half. For example Bilungual is 2 languages. Not just halves.

Bipedal is 2 legs. Even if you could argue you spend half the time on each leg 🤣

@Demolishun True. I've even suggested to DevRant people that adding some distinction between dev-categories and non-dev-categories, but there's no interest in changing anything.

"rant" is totally open to interpretation.

Nah, I don't necessarily think academic psychology knowledge translates to social skills.

Even if you can analyse a person, you may not be able to say what they wanna hear.

Inspiration. Or inspirational people.

Maybe that I recently haven't met any truly inspirational people that have made it seem attractive to leave my comfortable life for my wildest dream. At the moment the safe and comfy life seems quite nice.

(And no - it's not the lack of watching youtube entrepreneurs like simon squibb)

Since I figure most answers would be negative: I gotta say YES! Great team, great product, good benefits, low stress, caring managers.

I am annoyed over some minor stuff, but it seems insignificant by comparison to others who are stressed out, hate everyone, and hate what they are forced to do.

Just a thought:

There's a lot of hate towards biased media.

But I don't see many people recommending unbiased media (for example, there are sites that explicitly show 2 sides to a story - like allsides.com and ground.news) or even selecting good journalists, even if you're not a fan of their org.

To me - not making suggestions is like saying "music these days suck" without commenting on the types of bands you DO like.

Which browser? This is NOT a problem on a default Chrome desktop setup.

Tested it

1. clicked the + button to write a new post, wrote "hello"

2. closed the modal by clicking outside the text input.

3. clicked the + button again to open the modal once more. My text "hello" persists and I can resume writing.

With the risk of being hyper annoying: could you please tag posts like this with "random" in the future. The "rant" category is mainly for dev related rants, while "random" is for stuff like this which is entirely non dev.

I wanna filter my devRant feed to prevent it from turning into a general forum, but usually I just remove the "random" category as I still wanna read dev related rants.

Yeah. Since the start of my dev career I've met so many successful freelancers I always figured that would be something to explore as I became more senior and got more connections.

But now I just feel like the hassle and anxiety around getting and keeping clients would make me lose focus.

@HighTurtleDev

> Company is technically UK but it was only myself and the founder in the UK, the rest are india & south africa and all contractors

Ah, figures. Seems to me the crazy boss requests are often from small companies or at least small offices where bosses feel they depend on a few individuals that don't have the backing of a large in-house tech org.

So this does actually happen 😳

I've seen some tiktok channels that showcase insane messages from bosses - and I always figured most of these must be fake cause the bosses requests are too ridiculous - like asking someone who doesn't even work there for work.

PS: just curious - which country and how large is the company?

I know WhatsAppForBusiness is a thing but I've never heard of any tech business using it here in Sweden.

hear a lot of talk of "corporate life" angst among a small set of people, where stories they tell feels like they are living inside Dilbert or Office Space .

But personally this isn't something I experience myself - and it doesn't apply to most of my dev friends.

Not sure if it's just that some people have a more fine tuned corporate bullshit radar, or if it's just a vast difference in culture between different corporations.

Don't direct your anger to the person who was late - but rather at the concept of having early meetings.

They are always prone to last minute cancellations, cause it will happen that someone goes to bed the night before thinking everything is fine only to find out the next morning that the are ill, or the sitter cancelled or they are late.

Argue that meetings should be booked later - to make sure there's less risk of last minute cancellations and annoying non-morning-people.

If we DID introduce rules I'd keep em fuzzy like It's fine to use AI as you please as long as it's "reasonable"

Same as with copying code from github/stackoverflow or googling.

1. Of course we're gonna be alarmed if someone is obviously copy-pasting code, like in a couple minutes they submit 10 PR:s of 1000 lines of code each. We should primarily try to write our own code. But it's obviously fine to look around as much as you want, copy snippets at times etc within reason. It's even fine to look up the best way to write a function, maybe a few times per week copy-paste parts directly, as long as you don't do it ALL THE TIME

2. Alert someone if you find yourself or someone losing skills cause they are constantly using AI (or Google or whatever) - like not being able to read a basic errorMessage without having something explain it

3. It's fine to do grunt work with AI, like "format this csv to json" as long as it's side work.

No rules. Not yet.

We have an org-level copilot license and have invited them over for courses and seminars on how to use it.

In my team we all know we like to code by hand so no risk in over-using AI yet. If we find we tend to use it a lot - we'd have a talk about it.

If a junior dev joined the team and was using AI a lot we might lay down some rules.

I see you mention Confluence as a better option. Didn't expect that, thought it was looked down on. My org used it around 2015-2017 and I have memories of formatting getting in the way - like code having incorrect quote-chars. (Felt like it didn't use proper markdown..but maybe it was just my org who used it incorrectly)

We moved to Github wikis/readmes for code docs, and GoogleDrive suite for non technical stuff.

Now most Github wikis with code docs are nice and tidy markdown.

But I do miss the days when ALL the tech and semi-tech documentation was in one place in Confluence.

The shift lead to a strict separation of devs (with github accounts) and non-devs (like analytics people) and now analytics people write code snippets in god damn GoogleDocs 🤧

Never tried it, but seen people using it and sometimes wondered "am I missing out?" - glad to hear I'm not.

@SidTheITGuy Any examples?

Never feel like I stumbled upon any braggadocious bros when it comes to coding podcasts or other coding related content.

I do listen to some coding podcasts with 2 dudes but the feel very nice and not even remotely disgustingly dude-bro-ish.

Seems so common that I never wanna go freelancing ever again!

At least I would never wanna deal with client payments myself - and the types of deals that have to happen when they demand a big change and it's unclear if that should be extra $ or not.

Such a relief to work for a fixed salary.

In my experience it's always OK to admit that a requirement is overwhelming and will take much longer than a stakeholder imagines.

They will not be upset if you just honestly say you're in the middle of working on 4 other features and this is a big change.

(but they might be short sighted and just say "screw the other 4 features" without realising that'll delay the entire project)

But my advice is: don't say anything in spite like "I told you so" or "We started this projects 6 months ago, you had all the time to think about it." type thing - if you're gonna mention that - talk it over with your PM and mention it a few days later in a retro when you cool off.

Stakeholders are dumb and they hate being reminded of it in snarky ways. But if you can phrase it in a certain nice way they may understand.

@TerriToniAX Interesting. I gotta ask - how the business manage to avoid stuff like versioning and proper deploys for this long.

Is it because the dev-team is so tiny and has no power in the organisation, or because the tech was always ran by the some oldschool dudes for 25 years or because all hires are juniors afraid to change anything?

@TerriToniAX Interesting. I gotta ask - how the business manage to avoid stuff like versioning and proper deploys for this long.

Is it because the tech org is super tiny that no process improvements were ever a prio, or because the tech was ruled by an iron fist by oldschool devs who refuse to change anything for 30 years?

Yeah, I laugh whenever I hear someone say the old "programming is mostly math" - that may be true for 3d and embedded but not for the majority.

feels like I barely done any math in my career, at least not even close to what we had to do in college.

I know you're joking and exaggerating but if someone in my team said they wanted to refactor the codebase for a theoretical 5% COMPILATION perf boost (Presumably this has zero effect on the user) I would've forced them to measure how much time they actually spend waiting for compilation 🤣

Besides - if this is a new feature that may be baked into the dotnet core - is it really worth doing any refactoring to have it for 1.5 years before everyone else?

@lungdart ❤️ Agree.

My product dev team has managed to get rid of the Estimation process entirely - but whenever I talk to colleagues who work for consultant projects I am sadly reminded how "the entire reason we got a contract was that we estimated it could be done in 3 months" 🤣

The one estimate I can appreciate is when the PM uses ad hoc estimates to see if it's worth even discussing building a feature.

Like "I hear a couple customers asking for a bookmark feature - would that be a huge project?" - Yes "OK, I'll tell em it's a no go"

"I hear a couple customers asking for the menu to have a link to customer-service, would that be a huge project?" - No it's done in 2 minutes "OK! let's do it"

Which kinda stuff do people say you should've excluded from your PR?

---

Personally the last "Is the PR too big?"-debate I was part of was when we built a new website from scratch.

Co-worker got the ticket "Add menu bar with userName". The codebase at that time was in it's infancy so it didn't have much CSS for the site layout. And our test-suite did not have the capability to run clientside JS (which would be responsible for rendering the userName)

The resulting PR added a ton of code to our general site layout HTML/CSS to make sure the site looked like the design, and a ton of code to our test runner to make sure it could run clientsideJS.

I felt this was admirable work. But the PR got stuck in review for days and days as people debated the details the CSS layout and the pros and cons of different types of JS-runners in test suites.