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You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

mrlacey.com

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Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#301

Post by caymanjim »

colordrops wrote: post #275
caymanjim wrote: post #31

A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see som…

> They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work. You say this in present tense which makes it seem like a generalization. This is also a mistake that non-technical managers (and others) often make. The frontend frequently rivals and sometimes exceeds the backend in complexity. It is very application specific.

Fair enough, although in the case of a complex browser-based application, the same problem exists. The "backend" is complex code that happens to run in the browser.

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#302

Post by afterburner »

caymanjim wrote: post #31

A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see som…

I mean... are they dumb, or just playing dumb to bully you?

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#303

Post by kijin »

distrill wrote: post #252
quickthrower2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comeback

it's a good point but pretty cringe tbh

I prefer to just tell the client to go with the guy who says they can do it in a week. Often, the client returns to me in a few months' time, having wasted a lot of time and money on the other guy and equipped with a better understanding of why they require my services.

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#304

Post by hedora »

ramraj07 wrote: post #169
akhilcacharya wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defense I've seen is that it works reasonably well as a measure of productivity _if_ you're working in a similar team and in a stable codebase. From what I understand a lot of product teams at FB have nearly frictionless development tooling for their use cases so the pressure is to produce volume.

Was the team that caused the outage of half the apps on iOS one of them?

Didn’t the same team do it twice?

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#305

Post by Izkata »

detaro wrote: post #159
touristtam wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try changing the colour and getting told it isn't the same shade of red as the drawings presented by the designer on his PDF presentation.

I mean, that's totally reasonable if that's the spec (not to mention hopefully trivial to fix). Now if there's 5 drawings with different colors, or asking "what color do you want it?" leads to a 5-week email chain...

Oh, that's actually also pretty reasonable (sorta): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=44872

I discovered that bug report after our designer noticed at a glance walking behind me (I use Firefox) that the colors on our site were far darker than she intended, somewhere around 2017-2018 (that bug was opened in 2010).

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#306

Post by bmiller2 »

Izkata wrote: post #300
MBCook wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a hard and fast rule at my last job. ALL demos were either 100% real, or were mock-ups from Balsamiq. If it looked like someone doodled it on paper we didn’t have to worry it would be taken as working. We came to this rule after far too many incidents where some sort of mock up (Photoshop, HTML, whatever) was shown and taken as done. Then we got the questions (possibly unhappily) about where it was and when it…

Our non-technical stakeholders are almost guaranteed to have some minor design thing they jump on, so our equivalent was to show them only things that were functionally done, no matter how un-polished. That way they were the ones blocking any release.

Always include a duck https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1220...

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#307

Post by hedora »

reaperducer wrote: post #207
detaro wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's totally reasonable if that's the spec (not to mention hopefully trivial to fix). Now if there's 5 drawings with different colors, or asking "what color do you want it?" leads to a 5-week email chain...

that's totally reasonable if that's the spec I don't think you grok what's happening. Some middle manager sees a shade of red on his screen in a PDF, and the dev is expected to reproduce the content in that shade of red. There are simply too many variables. Even if you have access to the PDF, the red will often be rendered differently by the browser than it is by the PDF engine. I've had middle managers tell me to "f…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#308

Post by sk5t »

dorkwood wrote: post #294
Jtsummers wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that gets to my other lesson: Save money aggressively so I'm not beholden to any employer. It's harder when you're taking care of a family on one income (and not making FAANG money), but I saved aggressively when I was young and single. I never actually had to use that option, but I was in a position where I could have lived (as a single healthy guy with no debt) for 4-5 years without needing a paycheck. I woul…

> My main mistake was putting too much in my 401k Can you expand on this? I recently moved to the US and people keep telling me to get a 401k, but I haven't yet.

Less than full liquidity. If you get a decent matching contribution from your employer, it's probably worthwhile. Otherwise, it may be kind of a toss-up.

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#309

Post by bfdm »

kgermino wrote: post #266
Jtsummers wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, never use the word "done" in any context in a meeting like that. Do not even say: "I'm not done". They won't hear the "not". Say, "Development is still in progress" or something similar. I got chewed out for something being released (where it was found to be broken) to a customer because I said something like: "I'm about 80% done with testing, but I haven't run into any issues yet." They released it even though…

> Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done. I take a different but similar approach when I run into situations where I want to get something small in front of a business user before it’s completely ready: I make sure it’s visibly broken in a way that doesn’t detract from my goal for the meeting. For example: I have a registration form that I want to talk th…

Honestly, that feels like a huge waste of your own time to game a broken system. And I'm guessing it is, but that it's a defensive move because the darker timeline is miserable.

Sucks it has to be this way so often.

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