101–110 of 218 posts
As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers. You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't. 15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life. I don't get it at all. It might make sense…
I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?
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I like some of the principles of agile but like the problem is the ceremonies chew up so much time. I have an none technical project manager who is absolutely in love with everything agile. I am in a project where basically 3 of us are going to do the work. I sit next to one of the people but we still have to have daily stand ups. I am one of those people who works in longish chunks, I can sit for two solid hours or…
Ceremonies are part a process to get shit done. Being agile doesn’t mean to follow a strict process but to create a process that suits all stakeholders and the dev team in particular. I’m trying to say your team isn’t agile, it’s using a cookie cutter process template most likely. Print out the agile manifesto and tape it to the cofee machine.
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You mean emergencies such as your hot shot boss calling you 2am because he wants to discuss some bullshit idea he just had? I’ve worked in a couple of places where this kept happening. First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. Everyone understand: this is not normal. Unless you specifically signed up for pager duty sort of job, no one should put up with this.
> First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. I think that's the game at a lot of companies, to just prey on the young and hungry who probably don't know any better and are more likely to put up with bullshit like that.
In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US. I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly…
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Why do we need to work? edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it , to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most wo…
If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
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There's a very good reason why story points in scrum do not directly relate to time worked. You guess story points only in relation to each other. Over time, you can see how many story points you finish per sprint. By seeing how many story points are still on the backlog, you can estimate how long it will take. Add one or two sprints for unforeseen problems, and there's your estimate. Not based on anyone's guess, but…
If nearly everyone is doing it wrong, the problem is Scrum.
The problem here is toxic corporate culture. Scrum and Agile are not magic spells that miraculously turn idiots into reasonable people. Sure, they could be used as levers to change that culture, but the culture absolutely needs to change, otherwise it's not going to work.
And that's something you can throw in their face: that they're not taking Scrum and Agile development seriously. If they say they want Scrum and Agile, then make sure you understand what they really mean, and hammer on it every time they trample on the autonomy of the developers. Every time they ask why things aren't done, tell them management is interfering with the process.
"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty an…
But I can see why people would think I'm working extra hours if all they are looking at is my Slack availability. The connectivity of my devices !== whether or not I'm actually going to respond if you send me a message.
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Why do we need to work? edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it , to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most wo…
I'd like to see a source for "It is already economically viable...". Maybe at current levels of production, but you can't just assume current levels of output in every sector while removing incentives.
I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
So why do they stay at these awful jobs? Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars). Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as…
"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty an…
I work remotely as well and I observe that a lot of people are available outside their regular working hours. I think remote work is part of the problem: the additional blurring between work and life will askew your work life balance. Pager duty can burn you out, but it really depends on how much you get paged and how many people are on rotation.
I had one boss who acted very concerned and would keep telling me not to work so late. But at the same time he wanted the same amount of work done, which meant working overtime. When I finally did stop working as much overtime, he was disappointed that I wasn't getting as much work done, and my reviews suffered.
Also, commuting time should be paid as work time. There are so many people with crazy commutes that don't get paid a dime for it. I seem to recall that some European country had in fact required companies to pay for their employees' commutes. The US should follow suit.