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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?

#481

Post by JTbane »

T-hawk wrote: post #326
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…

Look up the 72(t) rule relating to a 401k. You can retire early and start withdrawals at any age without penalty, as long as you continue the withdrawals for sufficient time (the longer of five years or until age 59.5.) This fixes the "too much in the 401k" situation.

The problem I see is that if you're 30 and use that rule, you are basically forced to drain your 401k over the next 29.5 years.

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

#483

Post by jrochkind1 »

ftio wrote: post #89
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…

Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done. When you do, it can easily confuse folks who aren't deeply involved in your project ("haven't I seen this already?") and can hurt team morale because they never get a "shipped it" moment that feels good. More to the point: enforcing this rule incentivizes teams to build things in small, shippable components. Nobody…

The problem with this is that to produce quality, you actually need iterative feedback from stakeholders and users/user representatives. If you don't show anyone anything until it's "done", you are doing work in a direction that would have been better informed by more feedback.

(Cause another lesson is that people have a lot of trouble giving worthwhile feedback on a verbal/written description of something, they gotta see a thing in front of them).

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

#484

Post by jrochkind1 »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #349
caymanjim wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a company that understands and embraces agile software practices, this works well. You demo small things that are done, and prototypes are understood as just mockups designed to drive future work. Alas not everyone in power gets it. In more egregious cases, I've been in adversarial environments where teams were pitted against each other to appear "more done." Obviously a recipe for failure. I'm fortunate enough to…

Urg agile, scrum, some-other-magic-words I've come to realised this, "true" agile is more like being funny and smart(not that I am either). If you have to tell people you are smart or funny, you probably are not. Ever noticed how smart people(the really clever ones) are just absurdly smart without walking around telling everyone "hey I'm smart", usually the nicer they are the more intelligent they are(yea you get exc…

Yeah, but there's a big difference between working on a TV show that's meant to be a comedy where people are trying to be funny, and working on a TV show that's meant to be a drama that isn't a parody. Both might have the same "actual goal" of trying to get good ratings, but if you're trying to put jokes in the show that's meant to be dead serious because you mistakenly thought everyone in the writer's room was trying to be funny...

If you want to be working with a team trying to be funny, at some point you have to use the word "funny" and "comedy" to make sure you all are actually trying to do the same thing. And make sure the producers and show runners agree that it's a comedy you're making.

Same with agile.

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

#485

Post by NateEag »

Aeolun wrote: post #455
NateEag wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that was hilarious. These days I can only look at it and think "the expert is terrible at calm confrontation and good communication. There would be no problem if he had developed those skills."

That has to come from two sides though. The people in this sketch are clearly not interested in listening to what the expert says either. Getting sensible requirements is not only on the expert.

Sure. Both sides need to have good faith.

But the expert is the one who can know if the requirements are sensible.

In requirements gathering, the whole job is to hear people's attempts to describe their problem and figure out what problem they actually have.

By definition they don't have your expertise, or they wouldn't need to talk to you.

So, of course they will say contradictory things and use terms completely incorrectly - they cannot do anything else. That's why they hired you.

The expert in this scenario gets hung up on their incorrect language and gets flustered and stymied, telling them "What you want is impossible!"

What they _said_ is impossible. It's our job to persistently, patiently, calmly help them understand their needs, without judging them for needing our help.

I'm not particularly good at it, but I understand the mission.

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

#486

Post by blablabla123 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #483
ftio wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done. When you do, it can easily confuse folks who aren't deeply involved in your project ("haven't I seen this already?") and can hurt team morale because they never get a "shipped it" moment that feels good. More to the point: enforcing this rule incentivizes teams to build things in small, shippable components. Nobody…

The problem with this is that to produce quality, you actually need iterative feedback from stakeholders and users/user representatives. If you don't show anyone anything until it's "done", you are doing work in a direction that would have been better informed by more feedback. (Cause another lesson is that people have a lot of trouble giving worthwhile feedback on a verbal/written description of something, they gott…

But I think that's still possible. For example when testing a new idea that just takes some months, it's pointless to show an alpha version where half of the buttons create error messages - even if it solves a much more valuable problem and these errors could be ignored. Instead one should make a presentation of a mockup or a screen recording how a single feature will work. That's much more digestible for everybody and gives far better results if the one watching has anyways only 3 minutes time.

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

#487

Post by MBCook »

torgian wrote: post #371
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…

I’d like to pick your brain on how you got this started. My current company seems to run into this problem occasionally, and we use Sketch for a lot of our UI designs.

I was there at the time but to be honest I don’t remember exactly. I know that we used to use Photoshop for mock ups. I think one of the other developers found Balsamiq when they were looking for something that would be less work and we found the side benefit that the doodle looking mode prevented confusion.

Whether we realize that immediately or only after we stopped having misunderstandings I’m not sure.

But once it was realized I don’t think it took very long at all for it to become a rule. It made life so much easier for us developers.

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

#488

Post by MBCook »

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.

If you can do it that sounds like a very good strategy. We needed to be able to show mock ups of what things WOULD look like before we even start at the project so that everyone was on the same page. So we couldn’t develop functional prototypes or full working implementations to show.

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

#489

Post by Beldin »

This reminds me of the story about an older engineer called in to fix a computer problem. Previous efforts by the local IT staff had failed. In two clicks, the problem was fixed. He charged $100 for it.

Outraged at having to pay $100 for two clicks the customer demanded an itemised bill. The engineer wrote:

- 2 clicks: $0.05 / click

- knowing where to click: $999.90

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

#490

Post by adrianmonk »

MBCook wrote: post #231
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…

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…

For mockup images, you can use an unmistakably prominent watermark.

Superimpose the word "MOCK-UP" in a gigantic font that takes up nearly entirely the image.

Make it translucent and red or make it black outline. And maybe tilt it diagonally to catch attention and to make it easier to visually separate it from the rest of the image.

To streamline the process, you can just keep an image like this around to import as a topmost layer into other images.

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