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Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

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Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#441

Post by coldtea »

matwood wrote: post #403
logifail wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked[..] If in the course of one's work one becomes blocked, would one really wait until the following day's stand-up to tell anyone about this? If so then I think both the worker and the company have bigger issues than whether the stand-up itself is a good use of time. The mind boggles.

On this same site you can read all day about developers complaining about interruptions. Now a company has big issues if someone puts a task aside to do something else until the following day where they will avoid interrupting someone?

Somebody communicating about a blocking situation depending on your input (or output) is not an interruption.

BS "can I pick your mind", chit/chat, questions that could be Googled, and of course, micromanagement BS are interruptions.

DSUs themselves are also interruptions -- it's just that they're scheduled and not event-based.

In other words, necessary communication is not interruption. Accidental communication is interruption (to be read as the same concept as necessary and accidental complexity).

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#442

Post by rajin444 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #353
nokcha wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, we've entered an age, where a farmer can't milk their cows, if the software of the milking robot has a hitch - can't plow their fields, when the gps-software that drives the tractor isn't working. Seems like quite a dangerous situation, if something like the Carrington Event knocks the grid offline for an extended period of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Seeing how we coped with Covid has made me wonder how well we would manage an event like that. Supposedly we are well prepared in the UK but that was also the case for Covid and we know how that turned out.

The average age of death for Covid is higher than the average life expectancy. You’re going to have a hard time convincing people that is a true crisis.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#443

Post by nigma1337 »

BirAdam wrote: post #437

It ends the same way it did the last time. A giant tech market crash, more market consolidation, and massive cultural change. At this point, things move so fast that operating systems are shipped with known bugs, security flaws, and half baked ideas. They are then patched via over-the-net updates. I think this will stop. People will go back to more traditional development paradigms out of necessity. They also won’t c…

What/when was the last boom?

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#444

Post by bluGill »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #420
nikau wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it always is. They go around the room and everyone has to say something and it ends up being a status update.

To be honest I would just throw SCRUM into the trash if I could I think it's garbage but following some not quite SCRUM method which is what most companies do is actually insane. The whole process becomes a micromanagers wet dream.

I have come to really like kanbahn methods. No two weeks sprints, no committing to work you will get done (thus needing to sandbag to ensure you meet them - management will measure this to ensure you hit your commitments 100% - though to be fair SCRUM itself says don't do this, but it happens anyway), just get take the more important story off the stack and work it, and repeat. If management changes priorities then reorder the stack and we will get to it.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#445

Post by edanm »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #292
edanm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I'm not defending every single workplace here. Obviously some developers aren't treated well, and in those cases, they should find another job. I was commenting on the fairly blanket statement made. But the way the conversation should go isn't the developer deciding when refactoring should happen. It's the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save…

For non-tech people the code should be a black box they shouldn't know the internal details. In terms of refactoring there is no way to give a Cost Benefit analysis as that's too subjective. This should be a maintenance cost that's factored into the project at a high level. So you would say there a X days per year (normally about 20%) of the working days of the year spent on maintenance. Company I'm at has this and i…

> For non-tech people the code should be a black box they shouldn't know the internal details.

Ideally, yes, though in practice this usually breaks in various ways, especially when problems occur. E.g. the President of a country probably doesn't need to be a firefighter, but if there's suddenly a massive fire, I assume he'd need to be briefed in far more detail to help call shots around the type of response.

> In terms of refactoring there is no way to give a Cost Benefit analysis as that's too subjective.

I mean, you probably won't get a very correct Cost Benefit analysis, but you have to do something. The rest of your post is you describing that something - if you elect to spend 20% of your time on maintenance, that's effectively giving it a certain amount of weight compared to other things you can be doing with your time. That's certainly one way to work.

Personally, I think a more flexible approach is better. E.g. new startup-ish projects should usually spend a lot less time refactoring, for multiple reasons, whereas more established long-term projects should spend much closer to 20%, or maybe more.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#446

Post by lm28469 »

JackMorgan wrote: post #417
lm28469 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. If these people weren't there half of the programmer population would be stuck in and endless refactoring loop. Programmers are tools, tools need people to use them

I don't care for the dehumanization in this comment. Sounds like the thinking that calls employees "resources" and considers them fungible cogs.

There is no dehumanisation intended. Everyone has a place and a function. You don't let a car mechanic drive during the race, or a jet pilot do the maintenance of his plane, well same for a programmer, you don't let them make project/business related decisions, because it's neither their job nor their responsibility and most of them are inept at making decision out of their little world, that's why we have project managers, executives, &c.

I've worked in companies in which programmers were gods and decided pretty much everything, I felt like I was back in uni projects, and that's not a compliment. Tech and codebases are virtually irrelevant in most companies compared to project management end business decisions.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#447

Post by Kye »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #362
AitchEmArsey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I don't know why we're doing this, it's going to cost a lot of money and make things worse." I'm a step outside the domain so not totally confident in my own cynicism, but I feel like this phrase could be applied to practically every B2B startup I hear about these days. Selling CRM, project management and time tracking tools to (mostly) other VC-funded companies is just a way to skim more cream out of the economy…

You better not look too closely at the rest of the economy then because most of it looks like that.

You mean we don't need 5 different grocery chains at every highway crossing selling the same 100 products under 500 different brands from 5 companies?

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#448

Post by marcellus23 »

mstipetic wrote: post #244
jseban wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors and lawyers have way more integrity and status, because they are well rounded people as well as experts. They can put their knowledge to the best possible use. In the software industry there is a lingering stereotype of the eccentric genius who is really good with computers, and really bad at everything else in life, and their computer skills make up for lacking a lot of basic skills of a functioning adult, s…

As someone who has managed developers And worked as a developer I’m not sure that’s completely untrue. I’ve seen bored devops people starting to build their own ci/cd system, massive meetings where people started building their own micro service framework, a dev in my startup spent a month reworking things into sagas with no consideration that we have no product market fit yet, people that insist on “contributing the…

This is not unique, at all, to developers.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#449

Post by gls2ro »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #282
lelanthran wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefl…

The DSU shouldn't be for non-technical people. They literally should not speak at all during this daily meeting if they are even there. It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering. It is not a daily status meeting! If it has turned into this then it should be scrapp…

> It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on.

If this works for you then this is good.

But I think these meetings are not for devs or something is very wrong with the setup. If they are Devs are are in the same team and working on the same project then I assume they have access to version control => no need top update on what everyone is working one. Instead teach them to do small commits and to write better commit messages.

If the meeting purpose is to communicate what is blocking someone => this again fails IMO because then someone might wait 1 day blocked? And if they don't wait that much and do an action about it what is there to communicate about in a daily meeting?

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#450

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

shubb wrote: post #322
ggm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. I think other professions may do the same.

It's interesting to consider the difference between project and event driven (ops) work. Engineering project teams doing Scrum struggle when tasks need to be initiated and completed at a faster cadence than their sprint cycle - for instance an engineer doing development work planned monthly gets 3 calls a day asking him to reboot a server. There are apparently better ways of managing operational work - for kanban (wi…

>I don't know how to manage an ER department, but I'd understand a lot of work has been done in that area.

Even so, the long work hours of younger doctors are infamously sub-optimal. We shouldn't submit to the assumption that something is right because everyone does it and they operate in a free market.

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