Job woes/wins

[MindFreak]

8 hours ago, Will said:

What framework were you using before? I feel like the whole point of scrum is to cut down things like that so not great if it’s adding more time you’re not being productive.

We didn't really use any framework. We had a team manager who would ensure that the team members had tasks to work on and if we ran out of tasks they could always get something from another team. 

5 hours ago, Ashley said:

This is why I hate project managers and their methodology nonsense. I get the idea, I have just never seen it implemented well.

This. I need to talk to a developer who is working with Scrum and actually find it better than another non-waterfall methodology. It's always managers who want to implement stuff like this. I just want to work with the code and do my job... 

[Will]

Bad managers ruin everything. Pretty much everywhere I’ve worked have had Scrum as the base methodology used. I’ve definitely seen it used badly but the last really product related role I had it really worked amazingly well. I think if you actually have the right people on the management/product side Scrum can be one of the best things to keep everyone locked together and working towards the same goals. My current role is about as far away from product as I’ve ever been and I’ve semi-implemented some Scrum stuff into how my team works and it’s worked well even outside of development imo.

Disclaimer - I am a manager type and you are free to discard everything I said.

[Ashley]

Yeah I'm sure it can be done properly and the basic idea of Agile is fine and makes sense, but usually these PMs gum up the works to justify their own existence and just get in the way.

Probably doesn't help that most of the ones I've dealt with are contractors and most of those are basically snake oil salespeople who can get away with it by just hopping around enough.

[nightwolf]

As a manager in QA I can tell you waterfall is awful and disregards QA by most teams, whereas agile allows us to be seen at the same table as developers. I'm all for it. I honestly could go on about it for a while (and have qualifications in agile so I'm also biased there too). 

[MindFreak]

Just came back from the first four hour meeting, Sprint Planning. We hit a dead end because we are 6 developers and 2 testers. The testers have enough work for one sprint (2 weeks) and thus, we developers cannot take in any more tasks because the goal is to close tickets. So we will continue working on the tasks we brought into the sprint but under the radar. We will then see if we can put some of those tasks into the next sprint so that they can be formally closed. But I guess next sprint will see the same issues... Good lord, this is really bad. It's clearly a management thing. I asked who would complain if a task is not completely done during a sprint and the answer was something akin to "Well, we promised our clients that we could deliver this and this during a sprint so if we cannot deliver that they may not trust us and will start bugging us again with estimates on how much time remains". 

It makes me sad. Hopefully, in a month or so, things will work better.

Edited October 5, 2021 by MindFreak

[Ashley]

Yeah that's what I was talking about earlier. You want frequent smaller updates to test fine, but let me say what these can be and the timeframes rather than have someone else either try and dictate from above or spend time asking me what would be possible and thus increase the amount of time it takes to get to that point. 

[Happenstance]

I'm still looking for a new job but not having a lot of luck at the moment. Applied for a few things but unfortunately none have moved onto an interview. I think a lot of my issue is that I'm trying to shift career paths into something more creative but also can't afford to drop my salary all that much so the entry level jobs just don't pay enough. Fun.

I actually quite like the idea of freelancing but have no idea what I would do.

On the plus side the other IT guy who works here did get a job offer the other week but ended up turning it down so I won't be stuck here on my own like I originally thought. It's basically turned into a race between the two of us to see who can leave first. I'm still hoping it will happen at the same time so we can leave everyone in the lurch.

[Will]

2 hours ago, MindFreak said:

Just came back from the first four hour meeting, Sprint Planning. We hit a dead end because we are 6 developers and 2 testers. The testers have enough work for one sprint (2 weeks) and thus, we developers cannot take in any more tasks because the goal is to close tickets. So we will continue working on the tasks we brought into the sprint but under the radar. We will then see if we can put some of those tasks into the next sprint so that they can be formally closed. But I guess next sprint will see the same issues... Good lord, this is really bad. It's clearly a management thing. I asked who would complain if a task is not completely done during a sprint and the answer was something akin to "Well, we promised our clients that we could deliver this and this during a sprint so if we cannot deliver that they may not trust us and will start bugging us again with estimates on how much time remains". 

It makes me sad. Hopefully, in a month or so, things will work better.

It sounds like your team are implementing this in a really weird way. Where are these tasks for the QA team coming from if the devs are unable to work on anything? Are they not testing the stories that the devs complete during the sprint?

It sounds to me like whoever’s managing this has absolutely no idea what they are doing.

[Ashley]

1 hour ago, Will said:

It sounds to me like whoever’s managing this has absolutely no idea what they are doing.

Well yes, it's a project manager 😋

[MindFreak]

1 hour ago, Will said:

It sounds like your team are implementing this in a really weird way. Where are these tasks for the QA team coming from if the devs are unable to work on anything? Are they not testing the stories that the devs complete during the sprint?

They come from the tasks that we have already worked on before going full scrum. 

I have some tasks that I worked on last week that I have to continue working on but since there is no test capacity, I cannot bring them into the sprint we are currently planning. Terrible management and problems they should have foreseen. 

[Will]

Yeah that doesn’t sound fun at all. Not the best way to transition but hopefully it’s just a short term hiccup as things get back on track. I’m not surprised you hate it right now but at least give it a chance - I really do think Scrum has a lot of value when run properly.

[Esequiel]

Anyone else just feeling burnt out and pissed off. My house has become my office and I feel like I’m at work all the time, I have never really felt like this but Jesus Christ I seriously hate working right now.

[Sheikah]

Anyone else just feeling burnt out and pissed off. My house has become my office and I feel like I’m at work all the time, I have never really felt like this but Jesus Christ I seriously hate working right now.

Mate after you won £250k I kind of thought you wouldn't ever need to work hard again. [emoji14]

[Will]

7 hours ago, Esequiel said:

Anyone else just feeling burnt out and pissed off. My house has become my office and I feel like I’m at work all the time, I have never really felt like this but Jesus Christ I seriously hate working right now.

I’m exactly the opposite, I love the fact that I have my office at home and can just switch off from work and be ready to enjoy my free time. I have everything set up just as I want it and nice equipment rather than any old crap I might get in an office. I don’t think I’ve ever felt less burnt out and pissed off about work.

[Happenstance]

I definitely miss being able to work from home. Being back in the office just means that I’ll get grabbed and asked for IT support when the majority of stuff I get asked for help with isn’t my job.

[Goafer]

9 hours ago, Esequiel said:

Anyone else just feeling burnt out and pissed off. My house has become my office and I feel like I’m at work all the time, I have never really felt like this but Jesus Christ I seriously hate working right now.

Do you have a dedicated work room/area? I find that helps with keeping things seperate. 

For me, I have a desk set up. When I'm sat there, I'm "at work". When I'm not, I'm "at home". I do sometimes use the desk for other things, but I'll never work from other areas of my house. Work gets left behind as soon as I step away from that desk.

I also stick fairly rigidly to a routine and rarely work out of my contracted hours. A lot of people in my place work through lunches and into the evenings, because it's so convenient to. My job has always been working from home, even before the pandemic, so I made sure to ask what the expectations were regarding working out of hours during my interview. I clearly said up front that I didn't want work eating into my evenings, just because I was still physically "in the office".

Edited October 11, 2021 by Goafer

[Ashley]

Yeah I think having dedicated space would help, unfortunately my desk is in the living room/kitchen but I manage to separate it fairly well. I try and go for a walk (or normally gym) before and after work to separate them too. 

I did consider trying to get a two bed place a while back but wasn't many decent options and some weirdly insisted on two tenants. 

[Raining_again]

i hated working from home, its really not for me.  I had quiet space, and could work fine, but that space was my *home*. This is my gaming space, not my working space.

I like the finality of closing the door behind me, the processing time of the drive home.  I would never permanently work from home again unless i absolutely had to (aka another covid shut down for CEV). 

[nightwolf]

On 05/10/2021 at 4:40 PM, MindFreak said:

They come from the tasks that we have already worked on before going full scrum. 

I have some tasks that I worked on last week that I have to continue working on but since there is no test capacity, I cannot bring them into the sprint we are currently planning. Terrible management and problems they should have foreseen. 

Do your dev team test tickets? From my understanding developers can test too which maybe useful here if your ratio is 6:2. 

Do me a solid though, don't sneak stuff in under the radar. You'll piss off your QA who are already 1:3 Devs which is really hard! My ideal is 1:1 max 1:2. 

[MindFreak]

15 hours ago, nightwolf said:

Do your dev team test tickets? From my understanding developers can test too which maybe useful here if your ratio is 6:2. 

Do me a solid though, don't sneak stuff in under the radar. You'll piss off your QA who are already 1:3 Devs which is really hard! My ideal is 1:1 max 1:2. 

I've heard that before - that developers need to assist with testing. However, there is a reason that Tester is a role in itself, it's rather complicated and a general developer cannot take on the Tester role. What we on the other hand should do is to create automated tests - and that is what we spend the time on at the moment. And as such, that is work under the radar but it's not something that's not beneficial and it doesn't need testing.

In my previous team, I had three testers and I kept them busy...

Edited October 13, 2021 by MindFreak

[Ashley]

Yeah we do developer testing (which is largely technical/the happy path), then an internal tester who does more rigorous testing and then it's passed to the client for testing. 

[nightwolf]

On 13/10/2021 at 9:25 AM, MindFreak said:

I've heard that before - that developers need to assist with testing. However, there is a reason that Tester is a role in itself, it's rather complicated and a general developer cannot take on the Tester role. What we on the other hand should do is to create automated tests - and that is what we spend the time on at the moment. And as such, that is work under the radar but it's not something that's not beneficial and it doesn't need testing.

In my previous team, I had three testers and I kept them busy...

Its not really about them taking on the tester role. If you're in an agile test the whole point is that everyone is responsible for the quality of the product. Which means developers should be able to test anything that comes through. It doesn't mean taking over for testers, but they should be able to lend a hand. They coded it after all! 
Testers should also be able to create automated tests, so I wonder if there's just not enough cross knowledge going on in your team? 

Sounds painful either way! I've really been pushing for developers on my team to do more than self-testing/happy path, they've found it (it seems) really interesting to learn and we end up learning from them in return. Its slow going, but worth it in the end. 

[MindFreak]

16 hours ago, nightwolf said:

Testers should also be able to create automated tests, so I wonder if there's just not enough cross knowledge going on in your team? 

The tests are Java code. The testers cannot write that but a long term goal is that they should be able to do that. 

And we got introduced to testing strategy the other day (better late than never I guess) and the overall philosophy is "You build it, you test it". That's fine, I'm happy that writing functional tests is now part of the task we estimate. We just need better tools for it now. 

[Happenstance]

Just been asked by someone at work  to contact a staff member who is on holiday to get a load of information because they don't want their boss to have to work during their holiday next week so need it now. They then got all arsy with me when I said it should have been asked for before we broke up for half-term and someone by the end of the conversation (it had moved on so I don't think I'm responsible for this!) she had started crying about working too many hours...

 

[Ashley]

Surely you can just claim GDPR reasons. 

At a former job someone on another team once got in touch with someone else while they were on leave to ask trivial questions. Always felt if they did that to me I would put in a formal complaint upon my return. Nothing is that urgent.