311–320 of 395 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at an R&D company. While that cadence is possible in a website mill, it’s a laughable blanket statement.
Exactly .... Agile works pretty well in the "execution" phase when all of the requirements are known upfront. For any kind of R&D agile is not a good fit at all. R&D fits the waterfall model better. Ideally it should be like you do your R&D with waterfall and the agile for execution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about. It's hard to feel the joy in creating something when you're only a small cog in the development machine, and every decision needs a dozen voices of input. This resonates with me. I think we do our best work when we have the autonom…
You can just let some people make mistakes, and give them feedback on it for next time. That way, you get autonomy and eventually mastery. We don't all have to agree on everything. I think that's a fallacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had similar experiences. I vocalize a lot (in my head) during the development process, and I've noticed that when I have to engage with another person during this time I start vocalizing audibly, which is where the problems start. The other person gets confused because I'm speaking the snippets and half-ideas that are passing through my mind at the moment (and the internal jargon I've developed over the decades)…
But imagine if you and that other person could develop a common language and share tendrils. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lawyers aren't tracking & billing in 6 or 10 minute increments to punish their clients, they do it so you only pay for the time they actually spent on your account. It's beneficial that, if they get a 5 minute phone call while preparing a document for you, you don't get billed for the time they were on the phone.
Yeah, it's wicked beneficial that you're paying $40 or even $80 just to say hello and ask how their weekend was. I understand that from the other side, talking to you is working and they wouldn't be doing it if they weren't getting paid. But when one's rate is in consultant territory (as opposed to lower contractor rates based on bulk time) then that type of overhead should already be built in. And sure billing incre…
If I start a meeting with a consulting software engineer and spend the first 5 minutes making small talk, that's fine, but my company is gonna pay for that time. The same thing is true for lawyers.
I'm good at working on a team and looping in others. I also find it to be one of the most exhausting parts of software development. It's so difficult to constantly need to get feedback and buy-in from other people, and takes away a lot of the creativity and joy in programming (for me). Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, just that it's one of the things that makes me dislike working on a team. I actually think th…
> It's disempowering to feel like you're never able to make a decision yourself, despite supposedly being hired for your expertise in the field. I'm going through exactly this at the moment. For reasons HN will probably consider fiction, my superiors have started treating me as a toddler that needs oversight on every single decision that needs to be made. It's something I've been dealing with in therapy, and the way…
I'm good at working on a team and looping in others. I also find it to be one of the most exhausting parts of software development. It's so difficult to constantly need to get feedback and buy-in from other people, and takes away a lot of the creativity and joy in programming (for me). Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, just that it's one of the things that makes me dislike working on a team. I actually think th…
In bad teams I end up defending myself from people who want to leave their mark on what I'm doing, or just have different taste than me. Getting feedback in these situations is frustrating and demoralizing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all development fits nicely into day-or-two chunks. Forcing all your work to fit nicely into this type of mold is an arbitrary restriction that serves no real purpose except to check all the necessary scrum boxes, give the illusion of extra productivity, and allow for micro-management. It ends up being completely antithetical to thinking deeply and long term about the the code you're writing. I've worked on teams…
What do you think of the idea that providing finished work on an every-day-or-two cadence allows you to collect feedback from your customers in a way that keeps your work focused and relevant to their needs?
Oh, our customer? It's the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company. They don't move fast. And as a result, neither do we.
I'm good at working on a team and looping in others. I also find it to be one of the most exhausting parts of software development. It's so difficult to constantly need to get feedback and buy-in from other people, and takes away a lot of the creativity and joy in programming (for me). Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, just that it's one of the things that makes me dislike working on a team. I actually think th…
In my team we always publish some form of status report at the end of the day. This could be a pull request or a list of open questions on the task. For us that is less about micro management and more about bus factor: If a person calls in sick the next day the rest of the team wouldn't be able to continue that persons tasks without this process.
I understand that this can be detrimental when it feels like micro management. But I believe it is more a question of framing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wholeheartedly agree, if you need daily feedback you're a bad manager (unless you're in some exotic situation like a rocket launch or something). This issue largely disappears if your engineers are given the proper context, background and system overview. I'm not advocating everybody should take their project and run with it for weeks on end, but daily updates are ridiculous.
I'd actually flip that, and say if you can't give daily feedback you're a "bad" developer (I'd probably use "inexperienced" or "new" rather than "bad", because it's a hard mindset shift and it takes time). In fact, not only should you be able to give daily updates, you should be able to ship functionality on the daily. From first line of code into production and in front of customers should only ever take about 2 to…
This creates unnecessary exaggerated expectations. There is only so much you can accomplish in one day, some functionality take way loger than that. We don't want to ship half baked solutions, but we are expected to do so... In order to accomplish that sacrifices have to be made on everything else that is important in software development: proper testing, documentation, refactoring and a clean codebase. Its perfectly valid for a developer to give the update "I am still working on ..." / "I am still trying to figure out:..." / "I am in the process of preparing the codebase for this update" for a certain period of time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at an R&D company. While that cadence is possible in a website mill, it’s a laughable blanket statement.
Exactly .... Agile works pretty well in the "execution" phase when all of the requirements are known upfront. For any kind of R&D agile is not a good fit at all. R&D fits the waterfall model better. Ideally it should be like you do your R&D with waterfall and the agile for execution.
Agile is, by far, a more effective way to run an R&D shop. By far.
"Agile teams show progress with working software, not documents. Right from the beginning. And that's huge." [1]
[0] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 35 [1] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 8