How did I get so unhappy working in tech? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#101

Post by UweSchmidt » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 7:42 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #75

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

There's a very simple fix if you believe you have too many meetings - decline them. If you don't think you're needed in a meeting, say so. Give a reason like "I have nothing to add to that discussion." or "There's no agenda so I don't know if I'm needed." or simply "I'm busy, I think my time would be better spent on story 123." Make the people who invite you start to consider if you're really needed[1]. Also, create…

That can require some standing within the organization and mental fortitude. Absence can be interpreted as a failing, important information can be droppend throughout long meetings, people expect you to be around to answer questions that come up.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#102

Post by spc476 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 7:50 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #89

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

But how many meetings are enough? Each week, I have eight meetings only with my team (that is, aside from other company meetings). And us mere developers are not invited to the design meetings. No, work is handed out piecemeal to each developer by our team leader, and we're only expected to work on our pieces, bug reports be damned! (they have to go through him first)

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#103

Post by onion2k » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:09 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #92

onion2k wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Yes you can. Just send a note saying why you won't be there and what you'd have said if you had been. Agile ceremony meetings are practically the definition of meetings that could be emails.

Sight. I cant refuse agile ceremony while working employment in that company. I can leave the job for non-agile one or make myself fired. However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available. If your point is "then put up your resignation", then yes it is available. I am not a serf. That is not however what the "I cant do…

However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available.

I hear this from lots of developers. I also hear that none of them have ever raised the problem with their management, or attempted to suggest that they could submit notes instead when they have a lot of other work on, or anything that would reduce the number of meetings they need to attend. Practically all developers just coast along believing that because that's how things are it's impossible to change anything. This is despite the fact that agile includes a retro meeting specifically for raising these things. However, FWIW I wasn't actually suggesting missing all those meetings. Just some of them, when you have other priorities.

I've worked on teams where I've been invited to multiple daily standups and I'd have lost a couple of hours a day if I'd not been willing to push back. In every case I've been listened to and been able to communicate what I've been doing and whether I need any help in other ways instead (usually just by editing the standup notes myself).

Here's a suggestion. One of the key things about agile is that you have to 'process your processes'. If something isn't working for the team then you should iterate on it. At your next retrospective raise the problem - say "We should stop spending N hours a week on standups because it's stopping me finding clear blocks of time to focus on delivery. We should find a way to reduce the number of meetings I have. How about we have them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and email our standup updates to the PM on Tuesday and Thursday." If the team agrees that would save you 40% of your standups..

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#104

Post by mariusor » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:12 AM UTC

timalmond wrote: post #91

galoisscobi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. How do people deal with this? I'm expected to take on more and more meetings and my time to do deep work diminishes as I go on. I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well.

Mostly, I refuse and explain why I am refusing. I write replies like:- "I have nothing to contribute to this, so I see no value in attending this meeting." "I see that point 3 on the agenda is relevant to me, can you bring me into the meeting at that point"? These are professional answers. You are telling whoever has invited you that you think your time is better spent, on behalf of the company, doing something else.…

> "I see that point 3 on the agenda is relevant to me, can you bring me into the meeting at that point"?

This to me sounds like you are equally disrespectful of other people times as you complain that they are about yours.

What having them "bring you into the meeting at that point" means is that now everyone else has to wait the 5 minutes it takes the host to message you, wait for your arrival and then go over why they brought you in (for your benefit, and maybe everyone else's), instead of just going on with the point. I would be bothered if this would happen in one of my meetings. What you're basically saying is that your 30 minutes saved of the meeting are more important than the 5 minutes it loses for everyone else.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#105

Post by gherkinnn » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #89

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

Decisions made in meetings? 9 out of 10 decisions are made far away from meetings. Meetings are there to tell people about a decision.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#106

Post by csande17 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:20 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #77

spaetzleesser wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions…

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#107

Post by onion2k » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

theknocker wrote: post #82

onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

Yeah and it doesn't. In practice, it just enables managers to become even more useless by blaming devs for their poor project management.

Agile projects can still fail obviously, but when they do they tend to fail in smaller ways (eg 4 weeks late instead of 6 months late, or almost hit the requirements instead of completely missed). That's a massive win.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#108

Post by csande17 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:24 AM UTC

galoisscobi wrote: post #54

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. How do people deal with this? I'm expected to take on more and more meetings and my time to do deep work diminishes as I go on. I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well.

Sometimes, I've just kept on coding through the meeting. It's like listening to a podcast as you code. You do have to keep one ear out in case someone asks you a question directly, but listening for your name Alexa-wake-word-style isn't that hard.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#109

Post by 0xedd » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #89

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

Have yet to meet a company where a developer's opinion is taken into account in software architecture and solution design. And, usually, like some other guy here said, they aren't invited to these types of meetings, at all.

The best line I heard, from a team lead that wouldn't back a "don't implement a task queue using postgresql", was "because I don't understand it/am not familiar with it [the alternative solution, RabbitMQ/whateverelse Q], we're not doing it". Other times it's just silence and, then, in an email or through somebody else "we don't want to do the incorrect solution". Without offering alternatives or what's "incorrect" about them.

These are common scenarios in mega corps. The above couple of anectodes were from one of the largest payment processing company and one of the largest b2b security company.

Oh, and you'll forgive my endless rant, the best one was out of some multi-billion nasdaq blabla company: CTO was absolutely ADAMANT how to implement encryption at rest. Using some tool from his college days. But, that tool wasn't maintained for years and didn't make use of Intel's AES-NI. Even though we explained him about latter, showed him the numbers using simple Linux tools, he kept scheduling meetings "to show us". Needless to say, using Intel's AES-NI was a good approach, compared to software-level encryption. Absolute waste of a couple of weeks.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#110

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 8:28 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #89

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

> Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you need to make sure what you are building is actually what you should be building. I've never seen a way to figure that out without having meetings with other people.

If all you're doing is sitting around in meetings all day, you won't get any actual work done.