281–290 of 424 posts
Full time work just doesn’t offer a competitive amount of holiday. I can contract 2/3 to 3/4 of the year and take the rest off to travel, work on my own projects, meet friends etc. The money works out about the same but 25 days leave (or whatever the standard amount is) just doesn’t cut it for me. The older I get, the more I value time over money.
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Why do I 'defend' agile? I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change. And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work…
Thanks for the detailed reply! I have to say, everything you wrote sounds great. We'd probably agree on more than we'd disagree. That said... > But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them It's not that I've been subject to "a bad implementation." It's been multiple, across a decade , ever since Scrum became a thing, really. Disaster after…
Most businesses do not know how to manage software projects. That's not entirely special to software - most businesses don't really know how to manage anything.
Agile tools offer a framework for technical teams for fighting off and thwarting crappy management that doesn't understand how to make software.
But some crappy management organizations are really, really hard to thwart.
Worse, some crappy management organizations have figured out how to neutralize agile tools, by co-opting them and trying to use them to continue crappily managing the software project. Sometimes they do this pre-emptively, neutering one of the only tools a technology organization has to fight back.
I would love to know what else people have had success with as a way to fix crappy management other than setting up a properly agile 'safe space' for tech to happen in.
I work at a big 4 (not tech, consulting/accounting) company as a contractor. They recently offered me a FTE role. $40k less pay for 10-20 hours more a week; meaning they expect their FTEs to work 50-60 hours a week for 4/5 of what they'd pay contractors to only work 40. The work is interesting, I love my team and such, but cannot and will not give up 10-20 more hours to what amounts to just another job. There's no in…
There are a few options I can see: The primary way is to pay more. Technical skills are in a (global) marketplace, and right now it is a sellers marketplace. If demand outstrips supply, this is the natural path. That said, if you can’t match the pay of the top bidders, you need to provide an environment they can’t or won’t, and how you go about this is specific to individual target developers. Some things I might con…
>Don’t do “dog and pony show” interviews. If I have to write code on a whiteboard, or even in an editor live on a call, or look at an extensive take-home test (anything more than a 15-30 minute task), I’m highly likely to pass for anything except an a top shelf package at a company I’m highly motivated to work for. I'm always interested in this point of view, because I understand why candidates don't like it but as a…
I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…
You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…
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I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you. If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity... ... why would you work for anyone ?
You're assuming that agile is a "positive spin on the working environment". In 11 years of professional work, it's only ever been used as a weapon against the development team.
is all you need.
Oh, and don't handle us as a piece of shit, who just crank out code because we will leave.
I think ultimately though if you can't compete on salary you're looking at attracting a certain subset of engineers. There may be great engineers among them, but few of them will be paying down a large mortgage for instance. A lot of property markets just don't allow people to take significantly lower salaries and you have to accept that and go after the engineers who can.
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Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way. However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
So I wonder how you feel about:
Individuals and interactions VS processes and tools
Customer collaboration VS contract negotiation
Responding to change VS following a plan