41–50 of 51 posts
An honest question: how do you cope with the feeling where you have much more coding to do and you haven't finished what you were working on, and now it's a non-coding day but you are constantly thinking about the code that you'd better off finish before doing anything else?
This totally misses the point of timeboxing. Timeboxing is an alternative method to goal-setting. The classic case is diets: instead of saying "I will lose 10kg in a month", timeboxing says "I will eat healthier and take some exercise every day for 2 weeks and see what happens". The difference is to do something different for a set period of time, and then see what the result was, rather than set a goal and a deadlin…
This means you'll hear something like: "I'll timebox improving performance of this feature to a single day; it would be nice if we can get a quick win, but it's not really blocking if we do not.".
Maybe within 10 minutes of profiling you see that one line of code that is copying large data structures around unnecessarily and a quick refactor speeds the feature up 5x. Or maybe you spent all day on it and haven't found anything that's quick to fix: You fix up a couple of small inefficiencies and speed up the feature by 2%. You write down your findings and at least now the team will know that optimising that feature will be a larger undertaking and should be estimated as such.
I have also done it for very edge case bugs where no one is really sure what the cause is and fixing it is not high priority. You might get lucky and work it/fix it quickly; but if you don't, then at least you're not spending a week when the remaining 4 days could've been spent on something of higher priority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, every single time I've been involved in scrum, specific goals have been assigned to every cycle, and people expect those goals to be met. > Scrum uses timeboxing for all of the Scrum events and as a tool for concretely defining open-ended or ambiguous tasks.
> And yet, every single time I've been involved in scrum, specific goals have been assigned to every cycle, and people expect those goals to be met. I don't doubt that's true, but it's not how things are supposed to work in scrum: https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast
Edit: I don't mean to say scrum proponents are wrong, but if so many people get it wrong there seem to be a fundamental problem with scrum.
> Musk is an interesting example of someone who manages his time so well that he can work 100 hours a week and still manage to take time out for his hobbies, family, and even Twitter! Could we not do this, please? It's basically shaming people for not being able to reach the super-human level of working 15-hour days AND get a good nights sleep AND have hobbies AND be a family man. This fetishization of "efficiency" i…
> Musk is an interesting example of someone who manages his time so well that he can work 100 hours a week and still manage to take time out for his hobbies, family, and even Twitter! Could we not do this, please? It's basically shaming people for not being able to reach the super-human level of working 15-hour days AND get a good nights sleep AND have hobbies AND be a family man. This fetishization of "efficiency" i…
It's still work and very important and impactful work, but it's not that physically or mentally exhausting. You can do 15 hours of this kind of work. But you can't fix software bugs for 15 hours every day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet, every single time I've been involved in scrum, specific goals have been assigned to every cycle, and people expect those goals to be met. I don't doubt that's true, but it's not how things are supposed to work in scrum: https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast
I never heard good things about scrum. Just people saying "that's not how scrum is done!" all the time. Edit: I don't mean to say scrum proponents are wrong, but if so many people get it wrong there seem to be a fundamental problem with scrum.
It's the same problem with all methodologies - if the management is in charge of the process and it doesn't like some aspect of the process it will ignore that aspect.
This isn't solvable by tweaking the methodology.
I don't believe for a second that Elon Musk works 100 hours a week plus hobbies and free time in any conventional sense of the word work. I don't believe that every random set of 40 hours in his 100 would be something that he would be happy to pay someone else to do. Successful people lie to themselves like this all the time.
We have to be skeptical about "these methods" which, to me, seem more like PR myth they are trapped in.
Like Buffett saying that:
- he never set appointments (he works in isolation? he never goes to the doctor? He now flies with private jets? Everything has an impact on everything?)
- you never "leave large sums to your children" (My wife who works in asset management for (very) high profiles always rolls her eyes when earing that, replying "of course, to optimize the taxes you always create structures of foundations, so that they do not technical "get" the money but indirectly own the structure managing it.).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never heard good things about scrum. Just people saying "that's not how scrum is done!" all the time. Edit: I don't mean to say scrum proponents are wrong, but if so many people get it wrong there seem to be a fundamental problem with scrum.
> but if so many people get it wrong there seem to be a fundamental problem with scrum It's the same problem with all methodologies - if the management is in charge of the process and it doesn't like some aspect of the process it will ignore that aspect. This isn't solvable by tweaking the methodology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet, every single time I've been involved in scrum, specific goals have been assigned to every cycle, and people expect those goals to be met. I don't doubt that's true, but it's not how things are supposed to work in scrum: https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast
If Scrum is X, but everyone saying "Scrum" is referring to Y, is Scrum X or Y? The answer is it doesn't matter. The problem here is that people are doing Y not X, and discussing semantics is only useful as an appeal to authority (which to be fair can be pretty darn useful sometimes).
It's the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual applied to project management.
Any work accomplished is entirely accidental, and will be remedied during the next sprint planning meeting.
An honest question: how do you cope with the feeling where you have much more coding to do and you haven't finished what you were working on, and now it's a non-coding day but you are constantly thinking about the code that you'd better off finish before doing anything else?
Hard exercise. Hard to think of anything when you’re physically exhausted. That will at least help you sleep better without the aid of drugs