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Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

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Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#31

Post by smegsicle »

andrekandre wrote: post #25
trifit wrote: post #4

1) Sprint boards are not locked and things are added close to end. 2) Sprints are made overly ambitious because if not everything is done it makes it seem that someone slacked off when the achieving all targets was impossible in the in the first place.

> when the achieving all targets was impossible in the in the first place. slightly related: when managers keep pushing for "increasing velocity" every sprint, causing those impossible-to-achieve targets (and ends up demotivating the team like nothing else)

unsolicited advice: "like nothing else" is a meaningless intensifier that sounds like something a 10th grader would say, distinct from "more than anything else" which would specifically imply that the demotivation is more impactful than any additional work towards the impossible

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#34

Post by andrekandre »

smegsicle wrote: post #31
andrekandre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the achieving all targets was impossible in the in the first place. slightly related: when managers keep pushing for "increasing velocity" every sprint, causing those impossible-to-achieve targets (and ends up demotivating the team like nothing else)

unsolicited advice: "like nothing else" is a meaningless intensifier that sounds like something a 10th grader would say, distinct from "more than anything else" which would specifically imply that the demotivation is more impactful than any additional work towards the impossible

thanks for the reply, actually i was thinking the same after i had submitted the comment... appreciate the feedback ^^

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#35

Post by madmax108 »

Insisting on a CI/CD "deploy-direct-to-prod multiple times a day" process without ever investing in the things that are needed to allow this to happen successfully.

I've worked in the past with teams that have cargo-culted "Build fast, break things" to mean "If CI can builds it, let it deploy to prod". No tests, no Dev checks, barely any code review (The namesake "LGTM" on 1000 line PRs within 5 mins of it being opened or the worse Reviewer=Self), and things pushed to prod which invariably breaks and then everyone is scurrying to push hacky fixes because "it's a prod issue". And rather than fix the issue, it's always suggested to add more folks on call for critical issues etc.

It's okay when junior engineers do this because they're still building up their best practices, but when senior/staff engineers still bat for this process, it really grinds my gears because they not only mess up the company but "teach" junior folks that this shit proces is an acceptable way to build software.

Everyone will acknowledge that customers are seeing a lot of bugs (to the point where customers have attritioned because of buggy behaviour), and we need to be better, but noone acknowledges that CI/CD is not a silver bullet, but a rather intricate process that has many moving parts and needs to be built up accordingly.

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#36

Post by potatochup »

john_the_writer wrote: post #24
jvans wrote: post #8

not letting devs push code on friday afternoon

I'm with the bosses on this one. Nothing more fun than having some small side-effect out in the wild for a full weekend. I have a personal rule that I won't merge to master after lunch on Friday. I'd just rather wait until Morning.

Yeah I have this personal rule too. I have another rule for any interns I have: if you break something, you have to fix it AND add tests ensuring it can't be broken again (although I'll be fairly pragmatic on this one)

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#37

Post by atonse »

jvans wrote: post #8

not letting devs push code on friday afternoon

Not sure if you mean to production but we have this rule. We only deploy bigger things to production on Tuesday/Wednesdays since that gives us enough time during the week to fix any issues without having it bleed into the weekend. It’s important that we don’t encroach on weekend time.

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#38

Post by cookiengineer »

Mine is when people start talking about XDR, SIEM or SOAR systems.

There's so much bullshit going on in the cyber security scene, it's ridiculous. From supposed "AI driven network analysis" to "data enrichment pipelines"... everything is built as Enterprise as possible, and as useless as possible.

An XDR system that costs more than 500k per month and cannot even show the geolocation of an IP it's supposed to be able to block traffic from...I mean, come on...

Let alone the alert fatigue Blueteams have to deal with every day, where 99% of alerts is just noise, and the supposedly "intelligent" system doesn't even correlate the OS, let alone the programming language its services are running on.

Analysts are so overworked because all the products suck and use UX from the 90s, and are not even capable of batch-closing alerts when they are identical. It's so stupidly built that I don't even know why upper management buys that crap.

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#39

Post by daviddever23box »

rektide wrote: post #27
pipeline_peak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its just someone willing to gun for it/jump through hoops You mean motivated people with stronger work ethics? There’s a lot more to life than being smart.

The impulse for leadership rarely corresponds with the impulse to be a maker of great things. The best leaders arise of necessity, but would rather not, is a phrase I've heard mamy times that somewhat resonates. How you get as belittling & insulting a turn as "people with woth stronger work ethic" (as though people who like doing work versus being overhead/commanders are all low ethic) is a sheer mystery to me

Agreed - most leadership arises out of a necessity to ensure that the boat stays clear of the rocks. I know (and have experienced) a few managers that were equally hopeless on both technical as well as people management fronts; their proclivity for using the boat's hull as a depthfinder made for some frustrating efforts, so to speak.

Re: Ask HN: What practice by a tech team pisses you off to your core?

#40

Post by worthless-trash »

superchroma wrote: post #9
yuppie_scum wrote: post #2

Just any kind of “cheating”/intentional tech debt/low quality to meet an arbitrary deadline.

yeah it has never been worth it so far in my career and I always expend 10x the energy cursing such compromises

A true 10x engineer.
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