I Have Never Worked | Prime Reacts
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- I do not work at my job, ever, and get paid VERY WELL
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This is not about software development, some corporations just work this way. There are entire TEAMS of people who don't have anything to do. I experienced it in the past, working for, you guessed it, an investment bank.
Lol same.
Banks seem to have the least effective IT teams across the board.
Same
My experience working for a bank was different: We worked hard just to discover later that our project was scheduled to be replaced before we even start developing it.
It's called bullshit jobs, and is nothing new.
m.ua-cam.com/video/uK3OBAxCi6k/v-deo.html&pp=ygUNQnVsbHNoaXQgam9icw%3D%3D
I'm a software developer for the largest telecommunication company in Australia. I actually work about 2 hours of my day. The rest of my day is spent working on my own projects. I hated the job at first because of boredom. But as soon as I realised I could basically do whatever I wanted with the rest of my time as long as it looks like coding, the job grew on me
Nbn? Lol
Telstra lol?
this is exactly the way.
complete the job in an hour, dedicate the rest to your own business
@@Phasma6969lol, I was thinking the same as someone who worked for a big US sat company up until recently 👀
Its such an _EASY_ solution. This guy, should've just been in contact with linkedin recruiter after 2 months, he seems smart and have a good personality. he could probably switch to somewhere where he 'like' to work. Instead of dragging his feets for months to come, until he finally disburse into an intangible object and writes his memorial in a world-wide blog post.
I feel like I have the opposite problem to the difficulty bloat thing. I always think "Ah, I can do that in an hour" - Three hours later I conclude it'll take 6 hours
I've heard "Uncle Bob" Martin suggest to give three estimates: best case, probable case, and worst case. I've heard that quantified as 5%, 50%, and 95% chance of meeting that estimate. Maybe not so practical for the "give me ten minutes" type of jobs.
Yeah....these "it'll take an hour" tasks always end up taking about 5-6hrs.
Yep, been there, done that. and then 7 hours later I realize it's a 2 day job.
I can confirm this. I was a lead SRE at Home Depot, which is #17 on the Fortune 500. One time my team spent 4 weeks just producing estimates for a set of features that nobody ever even ended up implementing. I would say 95% of every engineer's time was flushed down the toilet. The amount of meta work (sprint planning, standups, retrospectives) was staggering. Can easily say that 10 hours were spent coordinating every 30 minutes of actual work. I personally know people who worked at Intel and Nike and experienced the same thing. Never underestimate the lumbering incompetence of huge bureaucracies. I am now blessed to work at a company where all 20+ engineers get to code all day every day, and the sense of fulfillment and well-being is infinitely better than all those bullshit Fortune 100 companies that can't ever make the rubber hit the actual road.
Do you get paid well at this small company though?
@@jel1951 If one wants but is not allowed to work it is infuriating and bad for the psyche. Maybe he just likes to stay sane.
How was the pay at HD for little work?
I don't get any of this. 2 week sprint. 1-2 hours at the end of day to demo and chat with stakeholders. Some hours the next day planning. Then 2 weeks of sprint again.
Is the team pure gen-z and on the phone with their girlfriends or boyfriends 24/7. Explain this garbage pls.
@@jel1951 Way better at the smaller company. No glass ceiling, so now I'm VP of Engineering at a company that does over $100m / year revenue
Can confirm that such jobs exist. Had basically the same situation in one of my projects. It started productive, but after a while progress was slower and slower until it stopped and the only "solution" were more "agile" meetings, discussions about why things were slow and more junior developers. I have seen several departments that "work" like that as well (big automobile manufacturer(s)).
Such a big yikes. It's also sad because it makes people hate engineering, which is a really amazing thing we get to do for a living
90% of my family and friends work either in or around the automotive industry (guess which state I’m in) can confirm the only ones working for their money are those on the assembly lines and those closest to them (the assembly lines) the further out you get from said lines, the more meetings and the less actual productivity there is. Buddy is an automotive “pen tester”, he basically found the pot of gold, gets paid an insane amount simply because no one knows anything about car software security and works about 3% of the time. Mostly traveling to opsec/devsec meets and hack meets likes defcon and stuff 🤯
@@ThePrimeTimeagen can confirm, this has caused me burnout and im on a self-funded sabbatical. Not sure if I will return tbh.
And I thought i was crazy, when I quit two previous jobs just because one lost the client and we were about to be benched and the other lied at the interview. I did not want even one month to f*k up my career. My fear of being irelevant on the market is stronger with me.
junior developers are a huge slowdown on productivity. it's up to you and your organization if you want to partake in raising junior developers. you can look at it as community service. you can look at it as hiring future senior developers. it requires a pipeline tailored to achieve whatever result you are going for. if you don't like what the organization is doing, then you should probably speak up or find a company that has goals better aligning with your own.
Now I understand why a lot of people are freaking out about AI replacing them.
My first 4 years in tech were exactly this. My worst offense was taking a task that had 80 hours planned for it, I completed it in 4 hours and spent the other 9 days on vacation with my family with an AHK script keeping my computer awake.
At the end of that project I was given recognition for my hard work and contribution to the project.
Eventually I got bored of being bored and have since found better, harder, more rewarding jobs. But even still, like right this second, I‘ve watched this video and am writing this comment on company time because I’m done with everything I need to do for the next day or two besides attend meetings.
It happens everywhere, all the time, in big tech.
Personally i’ve found the most fulfillment where the job is somewhere between what this article describes and an all out grind like a small start up. You can do work you enjoy but also have time for family and other shit besides just coding. There’s more to life IMO
So you work in low performance teams. Hasn't happened to me in corporate or big tech or small tech since the teams are high performing. Work is never done. Finishing the sprint tasks rarely happens.
@@hannesRSA Define low performing? I built and am the product owner for a tool we use that generates about a Mil of revenue per month. I think you’re trying to take a shot but I think you might just be dumb?
I once did this course, it was a govt required thing to satisfy some conditions they had at the time, and it was supposed to be full time, like 40 hours a week or something. Each week of work in their system would be locked, so you had to work on it each week, I guess. The thing is it would estimate the time required at like 40 hours a week, and I'd each unlocked weekly-chunk in under an hour every single time. It was like that for the entire 3 months course, so the rest of the week you couldn't do any extra work.
@@hannesRSA so?
Good for you or sorry it happened...LOL
The way I see it, complete the job in an hour, dedicate the rest to your own business, get paid the same as the guys in "high performance" teams.
@@alessandromorelli5866 1) any responder adding "LOL" to their answer shouldn't be taken too seriously 2) I didn't comment on which is better - but if you can "complete the job", you're in a low performance position - either clueless employer or too junior a role.
I think a large reason for this behavior is agile metric tracking. I think it is completely insane that people could care about the percentage of tasks completed in exactly two weeks. I've been at places where people would be discouraged to take on issues at the end of a sprint since it could possibly mess up the metrics 🤯
accurate
so accurate. there were so many tasks at my old job that I couldn't push through because I was legitimately waiting on somebody else but I wasn't allowed to pull in new tickets in the meantime cos metrics.
Specially since there is no repercusion for vastly overestimating efforts
unironically sounds like communism (read about their quotas and metrics), as the OP suggested
That last part pissed me off the most!!! The amount of arguments I’ve gotten in with managers and pos from other teams that wanted to protect their velocity was staggering
I've worked in places like this. In one specific case, my mouth ran ahead of my self-preservation instinct and asked why in a planning meeting. It went about as poorly as you'd expect. Now, when I find myself in that situation, I accept the policy (at least, externally), get my work done, focus my energies on side projects so that I don't atrophy, and then figure out an exit plan.
Sounds like a rap song about a drug dealer I once heard, was it Too Short? "Praying for forgiveness / And looking for an exit out the business"
Yeah there's so many meetings about nothing
yeah happened to me too. Upgraded my powerbi skills and reigned to move to a developer role 😅
Sad to see stuff like this, and I understand it from a perspective. However, your job is to do your job. I also learned the hard way that part of your job is using your interview/first few days to quickly judge whether this truly is a company you'd work for.
My work experience has been between the two extremes, I'm either hired to save a project that's 6 months late, with shouting matches in my boss' office, overworked like hell or I'm hired to do absolutely nothing. I think the real problem is the amount of middle-men between those who actually do things (devs) and clients. My best work experiences have been where I actually could sit down right next to the client and show him what I'm doing and do what he wants me to do.
Do you think this is because editing next to your client, your effort is quantifiable? As such not a weight of fucking iron on your neck was to when you'll be discovered for the fraud you are?
Just work like 15 mins a day and then contribute to Open-Source sounds like the dream
Right? Like you keep your skills up, get to make what you want, and get a bit of that unethical "do nothing, get paid" money the executives have been getting all their lives.
I really wonder what task the author was completing in 5 minutes… no way they are properly testing and documenting their work. They should have brought the issue up with managers if it was really that bad. There is way too much crappy & undocumented software that other developers are forced to use… and I would bet there are small businesses failing all the time because they trusted some large software company to deliver on their promises to only have their small development team realize when it’s too late that it was mostly empty promises. It’s honestly so disgusting that this is happening… what a bunch of spineless asses benefiting from corrupt economic privilege.
Remember you have also attend "non-focused zoom meetings" - so in reality you won't have that much time and it will be fragmented.
@@Eshelion Set up transcription to convert the audio of the meeting to text, then do whatever you want. Work on own projects, watch videos, etc, in the rare event that you're required to respond, quickly read the transcript and go from there.
you are not wrong but you tend to feel like a fraud for not doing anything. It feels really bad to be lying how you spent your last week on a progress meeting.
"Soooo, I ... uh ... investigated the println() function and ... uh ... benchmarked it and then I ... um ... prototyped some strings it can print, like "hello" and, uh, "world" ..."
I know groups at my company that have had sprints where they didn't do a single bit of "pushable" work. 2 weeks spent doing basically nothing. This got me labeled as a "10x dev" because our team decided not to use sprints, and we just focus on continuous delivery. Being able to push through 4-5 stories a week per person has basically generated a group of corporate hypemen around us waiting to know what the next awesome thing we did is while every other team just sort of... sits there
You're not being trolled, Agile scales extremely poorly for large orgs
did we just become best friends
I'm just getting in to this industry, but I would love to be completing 4-5 objectives a week. The feedback loop of implementing those solutions must feel awesome.
I love this comment. Love hearing no sprints is way more productive than SCRUM.
The way we ended up getting it is that we got an internally promoted manager who was a real no-nonsense senior engineer, and he spent months arguing with upper management and POs about timelines and estimatability of work at a company of our scale, we have thousands of requested features/reported issues and some very spoiled customers wanting delivery very soon. After some time, they relented and basically said "Fine but if you don't use scrum we are expecting you to crash and burn, and POs will NOT help". Lo and behold, if we don't have to spend hours per week meeting to do "meta-talk" about a feature/issue and pretending like we know implementational details from the get-go, we can just let people focus on it and finish it at their own pace, supported by other engineers also working at their own pace, which often ends up being a lot faster than 2 weeks. You can support this by actually doing real time communication with stakeholders, I talk to the dudes in customer support all the time to get clarification on customer requests, issues, etc. Initially we were tied to one product, but as time has gone on, our team has grown and we have started to cover other products within our company. This is also nice because now I get to fool around in multiple different codebases, sometimes many times a day
We have had some team members who struggle to keep up, and I do feel bad for people who joined our team looking to coast, but although the workload is high/stressful, there's nothing that will develop your programming skills like having to constantly context switch between feature/defect/etc work in multiple different codebases, at an accelerated velocity lol
Thanks for reading my article and sharing your thoughts. I really enjoyed this. :)
Thank you for writing it, one less thing I need to write. I have experienced such very rare, or not so intensive, but the problem is real.
Dumb article
@@radiantveggies9348Thanks for reading my comments
Did you get fired for publicly saying that you don't work?
I remember this being common place in 1999. The hype around the world-ending y2k bug meant companies just threw endless money at hiring IT contractors to "mitigate" the risk. The result was a lot of contractors for big firms just having no work. I spent 4 months in '99 "working" for a large finance company. We built a server or two in the morning, done with that by about 10am and the rest of the day was just sitting around and going for very long lunches. As appealing as it sounds, it was actually really frustrating having nothing to do all day and I was happy to get out of it.
Ha! That means the movie Office Space is actually historically accurate
@@notquitehim I don't think you remember the movie too well, a key plot point was the main character being asked to work both Saturday and Sunday because the team is drowning in so much work and they have to "play catch-up" according to the boss.
It's shown that much of the work he's doing is stupid/pointless, but there is an endless amount of it.
When he stops actually doing any work it's entirely because he decided he doesn't FEEL like working anymore.
1999 in our shop we were coding overtime so hard for so long most of us burned out or hit eject.
Emmanuel has what David Graber calls a "bullshit job"--an often comfortable, well-paid job that you know is useless, and you even feel slightly guilty for having, but feel helpless to change. Often it's the result of empire builders accumulating staff like points, to make themselves feel more important and to gain influence. I think Agile is only a means to that end, which has always existed as long as leaders have.
That said I work for a very big famous tech company right now and this absolutely does NOT describe my day to day experience. We work very hard, sometimes too much (crunch time has happened twice in my 7 months there). So it isn't universally true.
Bullshit Jobs was such an excellent read. It went a long way to giving form to partially / poorly formed thoughts I had been having for years.
Agile has nothing to do with that. These jobs existed before and exist without it. I would say Agile feeds useless jobs different from Software Engineer. But the useless software Engineer position is eternal.
You can't lose so long as your time went into something that you value.
@@erickmoya1401 Agile is just a culture that promotes collaborating with co-workers and customers, lol. I don't see how a culture that supports something such as this could possibly also have the goal of promoting "processes" and poor organizational structure.
the banking sector is much more like this than big tech, big tech on the other hand had overhired and had people with no projects to work on meanwhile the established employees were overworked
The take on Agile are spot on. It’s collectivized micromanagement to make sure the meta work is being done correctly.
The thing is tech work is basically magic to people who don't understand tech. It's not like other work where you can easily see the output at every step and understand the result as sometimes in development work you can toil away for a while without much to directly show a customer if it's not frontend related. I've had the same "job" for about 10 years and in that time had 5 managers. I've experienced both managers who understood development work and managers who thought it was magic. If they don't understand what you do, they can't explain it to upper management, they can't understand the metrics of output and it makes it incredibly easy to do nothing and sell it like you are doing something. In an effort to combat the mysticism they fill your calendar with useless meetings and the end result is you don't even have the time to do any valuable development work. I can totally see how this person's experience could be a common experience.
That said, this absolutely goes away the minute you have a manager who understands the work and knows how to manage developers. The only reason you end up with a team in tech who does nothing is because you've kneecapped them and took away their soul and given them absolutely nothing to work with. People don't put in years of effort to learn and get into development to sit and do nothing... engineers naturally want to make fun stuff
Two weeks in my new job and haven't gotten anything done because the IT department have been dragging their feet about setting up my machine. Almost a week in and I didn't even had an account to login, then after they finally set it up, everything I need to build up my dev environment is blocked by some AD or firewall rule or another.
On my team we have a multi-page document for new team members listing all of the permissions they need to request, and programs they need to install and set up.
I worked four months on one contract, before they gave me a computer.
They asked me to just write my code down in a notebook, and they'd have someone type in later.
Damn that take on AGILE is so on the spot. I've been frustrated for so long about these issues but this guy worded them so well....
working hard in some of these giant companies is often very painful, and many times there is no downside to coasting because they are SO inefficient that it doesnt matter. Not every place pays like netflix, or even a third of netflix. So its not exactly motivating compensation.
I think your experience Primeagen is more uncommon tbh. I think that the article is pretty spot on for a lot of companies (I mean, why do you think they layed everyone off?). There is just a huge amount of busy small work and "maintenance" work that is done, but many companies have too many workers for the amount of things they ship.
I really do not think his experience is "more uncommon". I work a shitton and code like hell every day and I do think that that is the case for most. Does such things exist? Sure. Does it happen at bigger companies way more than any others? Sure, because there is way more budget for it to not be that big of a problem. But I would not go so far as to say that it is the more common experience for people to have a software engineering job where they do not work.
@@devvorb1571 Consider how "corporate raiders" got rich. A management study in the 1980s found that ALL corporations have about 33% to 50% fat (redundancy). There's various theories of why this is the case (one theory is that corporations hate to hire people from outside the corporation, so they overstaff in case a critical worker dies or leaves, so they can quickly hire from within the corporation and not lose time retraining, but I digress), but because corporate fat exists, and is a constant, the corporate raiders since the 1980s until today have gotten rich by "pruning corporate deadwood".
@@raylopez99 I tried to find more details about your answer since I find the numbers you presented quite wild as logically It is hard for me to imagine that up to half of the workforce is employed "uselessly". I however cannot seem to find said studies to further check their credibility so if you could link some I would appreciate that a lot. Please consider that this answer is not to nitpick, I am just really curious about this since my logical intuition lets me strongly believe otherwise :)
@@raylopez99 now you see, saying that 30% is a rough estimate without citing any source reads a little like a news headline to me (Yes, I have found the article surviving m&a that you cited) but more importantly: "When a merger happens roughly 30%" and "33-50% of ALL companies"(as you stated in your first comment) are wildly different things. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to respond, I appreciate that a lot. Have a nice one :)
@@devvorb1571 Do you own due diligence, as I say, I've read this years ago and it's common knowledge with consultants. And by "all" companies I mean the ones not lean and mean, obviously. If a company has already merged, and the fat is cut, you cannot then cut another 30% on top of that.
I worked in a major US Credit Card company and this article was closer to the truth than I cared for. Agile/Scrum rituals were strikingly similar. Task padding. I've been told several times "DO NOT do any work if you're done with your sprint tasks!". I quit after six months because I was going crazy and frustrated about wasting so much time!
the stark contrast between people that work jobs where they show up at 6am and don't stop moving on their feet until 4-5pm and the people in the comment section saying "this video isn't a troll, i experienced the same thing and quit bc i was too bored getting free money".
@@araaraavery Yeah responses like his is like slapping God in the face. Honestly, if the salary is good, it's almost the equivalent of winning a small lottery. The holy grail is a make work job that lets you work remote hahah
@@The_Conspiracy_Analystfact check: false. everyone isn’t the same. Some may be fine with stacks of cash to do nothing, others may want to do something exciting or interesting.
You're on the engineering team. You're the guys doing the work. All the ux designers, product designers, policy people, middle managers, ethics advisers, admin, etc, are doing very little.
Don’t lump all the ux folk in with them. I’ve worked with some great ones, and you can tell when a product was designed by developers
And those were the ones that got fired. That's why there's plenty of software dev/engineer jobs despite massive layoffs
Ignorant take, all those roles have work to do - maybe not middle managers lol. Engineers stay humble
good designers do a lot to make your job as an engineer easier
Dumb take, without UX or product then engineering is just a bunch of headless chickens squandering budgets on admittedly cool technologies.
The article is literally describing my current job. I'm a consultant at a decently sized European telecom company and in the months I've been here so far I have written maybe 20 lines of code. Mostly I've done Life Cycle Management (updating frameworks etc.). We have all the meta work he lists, all the meetings, the demos, the retrospectives, the plannings - everything. And this is pretty much what I've been doing for the last five years at several jobs.
I've seen a project like that. Literally nothing was done in months. And it was a bank
Thought this article was a troll too until you got to the agile part where I realized how true it actually is. My last job had agile ceremonies daily every other hour it seemed. I could never get into any kind of productive state for long before being pulled into another meeting where attendance was mandatory but I only needed to pay attention or participate in 10% of it.
This article is pretty on point for many senior/manager level devs in the corporate world. In my experience there is very good reason for this. The company I contracted for had a few legacy systems that were poorly developed and undocumented. Nobody could figure them out to a competent level. I busted my ass for 3 months to learn them and clean some things up. After that, I became the legacy app guy and started migrating some of the code to a newer architecture I developed for them.
Once I had established that process, I spent the next 3 years just casually migrating over code. I could only go so fast because the back-end devs and QA were overloaded. The back end guys couldn't release services that weren't bug ridden and QA could not test and certify my work, so it only caused problems when I got too much done, I shit you not, I would work in small bursts and just hold the code off to commit in the future- I was mainly a font-end dev, but I reproduced most services in Node so I had working code and wrote comprehensive tests. I had nearly an entire year where I did nothing except be on calls and commit work I had already done when when everyone else got their shit together.
When I was bored, I would help other devs that were struggling and created a really good reputation for myself. I was a manager with no team because they didn't need to pay for a team anymore since I did everything. All I did most days was work on personal projects and learned whatever the hell I wanted to. This was all at a fortune 50 company. I'm nothing special, just experienced.
and lucky 😁
So you worked in a place that didn't trust you with access to the backend?
@@retagainez I'm a contractor. Most clients delegate responsibilities that way.
"Provide support to James on his task" is the bane of my existence.
James falls into three camps:
* Junior hire who is doing his best, but gets no training or support and because of that is completely emotionally overloaded and low-key panicking on a daily basis.
* Mid-level who just doesn't want to work, and now becomes pissed that you're essentially forcing him to as you had the audacity to do your job.
* Somehow got to senior by quoting Clean Code to the point where he's allergic to for loops (or any code that ... computes values) and is stuck on something trivial because he's yakk shaving some vague potential future that might necessitate dynamic dispatch at the small cost of not actually solving anything useful today.
all my homies hate james
Man hearing about skills atriffing hits home, I've been burnt out after 2-3 years of attempting to be a product manager and designer as a fresh grad. Now I don't know what to do as my programing skills feel like they are non existent, and no idea where to start again. If anyone has some ideas I would love to hear them
DUDE!! I got super burnt out trying to become a product manager too! its hard
@@ThePrimeTimeagen could you please talk about your experience as a product manager, how it looks like on a day-to-day basis and how one gets to that position
Same for me. Working as a software consultant in a bank. We develop MVP in about 2 months, the idea was to integrate that in other parts of the bank's infrastructure. The teams of the other software were very surprised about our product (an small machine learning algorithm), but none of them were willing to do the integration. So I spend 1 year and a half on meetings trying to sell the product internally. Of course when things don't move on the solution was "maybe we should talk weekly with this other team" instead of "maybe we should improve our product "
So, did you improve your product??
In fact, there's a pretty good book about this. It is called "Bullshit jobs" by David Graeber and describes how the biggest companies have entire armies of workers that do essentially nothing useful but they're there to keep appearances. It is not a problem exclusive to the tech area
His reflection on Agile is EXACTLY the way it worked for me in government. Complete waste of time, we weren't even making software, as in the project wasn't software related. We were just applying Agile because it was a trend that came from tech, promoted by phoney productivity gurus. The only day I got work done was Fridays because it was the only day I wouldn't get disturbed by useless stand-ups, meetings, email, phone calls, etc.
lol same sentiments. Agile is unproductive.
@@javier.alvarez764 and waterfall is a instant disaster. The problem is, business/money people hate agile for its certain kind of uncertainty, and stress managers to micromanage their employees to make sure their money is being well spent, but micromanaging makes things a lot worse.
If you're in meetings daily isn't it just waterfall? With these recurring meetings, it's just following a process...
I shared that link on Reddit. Thank you for this. I was also thinking I was going insane and needed a real senior to read it.
I had 3 real engineering jobs outside of internships. My first job my work was 40 hours/week with no minute to spare. I usually worked more so I can be above and beyond and gain more experience.
My second job was great for the first few months then the company got bought and I ended up doing nothing for a few months before I left.
My third company is a startup and I work way more than 80h/week
I love how prime thinks because he loves his job and wants to do great, everyone is the same. Not even me. I used to care. No longer do.
Programming is a creative process, and the industry treats it like construction or telemarketing. Nobody ever makes comparisions between the programming industry, and the art or music industry, but they should. Artists have the same issues with deadlines and estimating effort of work, too.
I once worked for an electric company in IT cyber security and can agree. I only worked at most 2-4 hours a week but would be there the usual 9-5 M-F. At first I would ask what was next and on numerous occasions was told to "look busy" until next Monday. I found it bizarre but apparently was the norm.
Yeah it's weird because on the one hand you're like "well this is a pretty good work-salary ratio", but on the other hand you need to be thinking about your own personal progression, and if you're barely doing anything, say you have to find a new job, you would be rusty at everything, it would only work against you.
The layoffs have been exclusive to tech companies, but the article refers to dev work at boomer companies, which are infamous for treating software as second class
If you do Agile correctly, it’s 15-30 minutes scrum per day. And per 2 week sprints, 3 hours sprint planning, it’s 2 hours grooming tickets, and 1 hour retrospective. Sometimes there’s demos 1-2 hours.
That’s plenty of time to do everything else.
The team should just be under 10 people.
Agile isn’t for everybody. It takes a lot of commitment (not necessarily effort) to do it properly.
With Agile you sacrifice speed for robustness. You try addressing technical debt before create them. Documentation is important for communication, troubleshooting, and future reference.
Sometimes there isn’t much steady work and sometimes it’s a fire hose.
Honored that you decided to end the video with my comment 😂
The “Manifesto” is just what they named the principles of agile development. I think it’s funny you did not want to read that, since I think you *already follow it*, and you would probably agree with most conclusions.
The problem is that vague principles can’t be packaged and sold, so Agile™️ (like scrum) was born. It shares none of the principles, but they have great marketing, and their product took the market.
Companies with tech workers where management comes from a non-tech sector are the most vulnerable to end up like the article described in my experience.
This is 100% true
Most jobs I've had are like this. I don't remember working for more than an hour a day on my full time jobs at this point.
There's a reason overemployment is a concept.
As someone that is EXTREMELY HYPED to develop good solutions, and that ACTUALLY WORK... this shit gets me FUCKED UP.
I don't know how, but I HAVE TO figure out an exit plan of my actual job, or I'll actually develop some life treating illness.
I can't stand that shit up anymore... let alone don't code for 99% of my time, and just pretend *against my will* , but at the end those architects, tech leads and people that actually DON'T CODE and DON'T HAVE A CLUE about what the fuck I just did are going to REVIEW MY CODE?
I'm dead inside right now.
yeah. i am way to much into things to just let myself coast
Extremely hyped to do actual work.....but no self-efficacy? Crap, man that must suck. Hating a job where you don't have to do $hit and have complete intellectual freedom is like slapping God in the face
Time to make an indie game
I'm a software engineer working in Bulgaria I've worked for companies where people would be so lost in the bureaucracies of SCRUM and other minutia that their output as programmers were negligible. Often they would spend more time discussing and planning features than delivering them. I would see people spending 2 days to replace 2 strings, even though we had a CMS and localization. Just crazy. I've seen so many colleagues in the industry making crazy salaries and working 3-4hrs a day at best... crazy
Finally someone's talking about it... i might be 9 months late. But i feel like theres been some kind of unspoken agreement between devs thats like "lets take it easy". Ive learned to cope with being over enthusiastic by just learning other things or exploring other solutions for something. Problem is when it does come time to actually do work its hard to suddenly switch gears, put your best foot forward and be truly invested.
I did a lot of interviewing last year before landing on my current job. The number of people who demanded religious adherence to their agile recipes without specifying what they were cost me a lot of potential hires (bullets dodged). Attempting to explain that Agile was originally designed to reduce the length of iteration cycles and that processes should be tailored to individuale circumstances was met with barely concealed derision.
I like the original goals of Agile, and largely agree with them. I hate what it has become.
"I like the original goals of Agile, and largely agree with them. I hate what it has become." - yup.
When I left school, I had a 2 month internship at a company. I was told, that some PowerShell knowledge would be nice, so I took a look at it for ~3 days. The second team I worked with previously worked with an IBM product and collectively refused to learn PowerShell for the Microsoft replacement. It took me 10 days with no experience whatsoever to make the whole team of 13 senior engineers obsolete by writing a few scripts. I have always thought, this was an exception but doesn't seem like it
We have a 14-day sprint where every other week we spend one day ending the current sprint and one day preparing for the next one. This is 2 work days out of 10 every sprint just focusing on stupid meetings. This means we essentially have 20% of our work capacity being spent working in parallel with stupid meetings.
We do work. A lot. But I really wish that we could just tackle the tickets as they appeared, and not in this rigid and ineffective system.
I feel like this is made to try and fix companies that are already ineffective due to their leadership or tech leads. If a team is good and delivers, despite the constraints of agile, I feel it should move on towards a system that is as invisible to the engineers as possible.
At least you don't have a 15 min daily morning standup meeting, where the client had somehow managed to put themselves in, that bloats into 2 hour meeting every other day. Along with sprint enders and starters of course. Your situation actually seems nice.
@@TealJosh I had that in the past, but yeah, these days it's just the 15-30min morning standup. Those bloated meetings just suck, man, jesus
Can you maybe do a video on how your team is organized at your work. I only had one internship so far, and the team basically worked as he described in the article, "agile" with daily scrums where we would talk about our daily successes and issues, demoing the produced software of every increment and reflecting on it. In uni this whole scrum thing sounded really stupid as a lot of things do that you get teached there but are apparent industry standard. I just don't know how to form an own opinion on this without having the experience, and I'd like to hear from some different approaches.
thinking the same thing!
Yep, this is good summary of a typical publicly owned company in Europe.
Same in Brazil
True
@@nandomax3 in how many publicly companies did you work in Brazil?
Sadly, he's not trolling. I used to work for the largest telecommunications company in my country and what he says about estimations (task bloat) is true.
I've seen seniors (10+ years of experience) give 4-day estimates on tasks that can be done in literally 30 minutes or less. I frequently challenged their estimations and those tasks were always delegated to me. This didn't bother me as much as seeing people unwilling to learn something new and/or try something different. In such a large corporation you really do see that 80-20 rule is true. 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people.
I realized that if I stayed any longer in that company, my skills would suffer so I gave my 2 weeks notice and left.
@tharnos767 how things went after changed the job?
@@toygarozel6261 Much better. I got a job at a smaller company for nearly double the pay and almost none of the enterprise BS.
there's a book called Bullshit Jobs about this topic. It's everywhere, but not so much in the USA
I feel like it is less a thing with the tech sector and more a thing with the type of jobs and companies that guy attracts - especially considering his social circle seemed to have similar experiences. So probably always networking himself into the same job, it sounds like.
I've been experiencing this demo stuff during the first covid lockdown in Germany. My job is 100% onsite, no remote work but during lockdown we were working remotely. My boss wanted to supervise everything so we were in ms teams for 2-3 hours every morning and everyone was listening to everyone else while they said what they gonna work on for the day and at the end of the day we did the same shit and everyone was showing everyone else what they have been working on. So at the end we were in teams meetings for like 4-6 hours a day. Conclusion of the boss man after some weeks? He was right, remote work is bad in terms of productivity..
Now imagine instead of relatively productive Germany you were in Greece...or Gambia. LOL.
@@raylopez99 Germany is not as productive or punctual as the stereotype goes. They are mostly precise and bureaucratic (often to a fault). Just look at Deutsche Bahn, their main railway company for example
@@raylopez99 There's nothing productive about Germany, it's a stupid stereotype.
@@lukasz96 I think the statistics say otherwise, but thanks. One thing about German manufacturing I saw a while ago, maybe changed now, is that compared to the Japanese and Americans they employ a lot fewer robots, for good or bad, probably for bad.
@@raylopez99I live in Germany, I know for a fact that it's a fucking lie.
For almost all of my career we all worked pretty darn hard. Though I did leave one place recently as they were having one management reorg after another (some key technical people left and corporate brought in some suits from headquarters that had MBAs, but no technical background) and for almost 18 months I did nothing except move code from one repository to another, and sometimes change the namespaces to "align with the new company organizational structure". Other teams were waiting on those components and there was no build process, no testing infrastructure, no new feature requests were being accepted. So I finally decided it wasn't going to get better (it didn't) and left.
I've worked at some jobs where I was never allowed to do anything interesting. If I thought there was a way to improve things, plenty of obstacles would be thrown in the way. No tools are ever approved. You can't ask for resources to try and improve things. You just have to keep the lights on. Essentially you just pay interest on tech debt for a living.
LOVE this channel. It not only helps me to learn technical skills, but also teaches me how to be a better manager and gives me insight into what's going on in the world. Interest rates rise a bit and suddenly everybody realizes that all their highly paid engineers are not actually producing anything due to system-wide overcapacity.
I can totally see this in a VC-centric industry. A company *has* to hire the top 1% of tech workers (and pay them accordingly), because it is *the* big player in the field. So it *has* to look big.
But the actual tech only needs two nerds to keep it running so the rest has nothing to do...and actual inovation is of course _too_ _risky_ ... so keeping the status quo but still look like the company is growing is the goal...
Any example of so called companies ?
@@ko-Daegu See the mentioned video "A day in the life of a Twitter employee" :)
And how so many people in tech can be fired right now without much technical consequences.
But yeah, i talk purely based on personal opinion and bias, not anything concrete.
Im 19 and in a corporate bank development job. This is exactly what it looks like.
I'm a college student right now studying electrical engineering. Back in middle school, I really wanted to go into software development, so much so that I taught myself almost every language I could learn from a book at the time and worked hard on projects. But, as I got through highschool and took yet another beginner programming class because that was all my hs offered, I noticed a pattern. There were hundreds of "hello world" classes available, but for a middle schooler nothing beyond that, nothing actually challenging where I could learn. So i looked to where software jobs were. All these companies keep hiring and expanding and hiring and expanding... meanwhile I rarely see an increase in quality of the product. Video games, web services, hell even Android on my phone are still the buggy messes they were years ago when small team size could actually be blamed. I didn't think that this infinite expansion and investment would be sustainable, and I wasn't surprised about the layoffs. I then fell in love with the hardware side of things and electronics, and boy am I glad. I like to keep up with programming though. Now I'm about to finish my second year of college and I plan to graduate next spring. Hopefully this agile BS doesn't extend into the EE side of things.
Stay in EE, there seems to be a surplus of CSci devs right now. Karnaugh map rulez boy!
How do you not see an increase in quality of the product??? UE5? Android 7 vs 13 is a hell of a difference. Websites become bloated tho. But everything evolved
@Valentin idk, sure the apps have evolved but like how is it in 2023 we still can't edit elements of a chart in excel mobile? or why is it that my phone randomly gets a black screen after unlocking and then makes me unlock again? Ik I'm nitpicking, but honestly for companies like MS and Samsung who have been around a while and spent billions on development, why does the overall experience still feel... rough? Also have u ever tried using Android for productivity? it's kinda hellish, my college uses Canvas and the android app makes little sense sometimes, hard to download or upload files. Honestly it just feels like a lot of software these days (not all ofc but enough to notice) is untested and unpatched. Sure UE5 is new and flashy, but even triple-A games have become more low effort, less fun, money grabs instead of great game experiences. Look at OW2 for example. Just feels like we've had all this time to innovate and improve, yet we really haven't.
And this wont change until a disaster big enough to pop the "computer error" rhetoric non-newtonian-quantum-magic fluid balloon that is protects software development and software "engineering".
Search uncle bobs talk about stuff like this , and research how things like the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse force engineering to change as a profession.
Lot of people gotta die.
Such jobs exist yes, but most of the time there will be a lot of gatekeeping involved when they are hiring for such roles, not sure of his situation though but most of the people who get into such companies are usually ivy league graduates and have personal connections with the recruiter for the most part. Again this is just my experience, it might differ for many people, I know two people who bragged about watching anime during workhours and they still earn more than I could ever dream of, they graduated from very good university and had good connection with the recruiter when they were being hired.
Lol this happens often with industries where there is not a large amount of deep technical knowledge. You shouldn't have to pretend but there are those that fear they will be replaced and slow things down. I have worked with organizations as a virtual member of their sprints and the agile ceremonies where highly valuable as we worked on overlapping repos and seeing what was incoming allowed me to plan accordingly. And the demo sessions helped as they were generally recorded and used as onboarding materials for new engineers.
dang
Man I'm glad that hasn't been my experience. That sounds horrible
That's not a joke. My buddy here in town used to be a devops engineer for an insurance company and never worked. Now he works for a water company in IOT and still NEVER works. He smokes the green all day and does other stuff. He only shows up for the meetings. Again, this is seriously no joke.
This is my experience in the SWE field so far as well. Ive been given maybe 2 tasks to do over the span of 4 months of being an employee. To say im bored is an understatement. Ive just been tasked with watching education videos on a platform, ive had such a lack of tasks that i watched every relevant video to our tech stack in the first 2 months. Ive asked my manager for shit to do time and time again and get nothing.
I hope you picked up some free software project since then.
It's a tactic. Make you stay at the company with low impact and only a few tasks. After a few years you arn't relevant for industry anymore and you cannot leave.
80/20 rule. Most people do nothing, and a few people do everything. This isn't even specific to tech, but software is such a force multiplier that it makes the divide even worse.
80/20 rule doesnt actually describe doing. it describes receiving. 20% of the people get 80% of the reward
@@buglepongyes it does. 20% of people provide 80% of the output.
@@aFutureSelf nope. Theres literally no evidence such a thing happens, or even can happen
Price's Law: the square root of the number of people do half the work.
My second job was like this. It started great and learned a lot, but then the project grew and they hired a lot of people until eventually I only commited like twice a week. I burned out really quickly after that.
In Soviet Russia, they used the word Bolshevik to mean the majority of Russians. Of course, it was the exact opposite. The people they called the "Bolsheviks" were actually a minority. In software development, the term "agile" is used exactly the same way. It literally means the opposite of what people say it does. Whenever you hear people say, "agile," literally replace it with "slow as molasses, bloated with process, and utterly devoid of productivity."
The reason that this has occurred is due to cheap money since ~2009 coupled with the simultaneous rise of the early blitzscaling businesses (acquire customers even at lossleading rates) . This has driven very low accountability in the tech space as PE, VC and even internal funding sources have favourable ROI on overinvestment (ie: money is so cheap that you have an opportunity cost by not splashing money onto what would normally be regarded as too highly risky tech projects).
It has been 2 years since I've started working in a big tech corporation, and I write maybe 2 lines of code every month, if not for my personal projects, I would go insane
Such jobs certainly exist and they are not rare, you spend all the time in useless zoom meetings where people pretend to be productive and "agile", you produce 2 lines of code every month since you are hunting for a bug in a broken environment inside a project that is maybe 6 months old at max but is already a legacy codebase where you cannot change anything without breaking 10 more things
It's crazy
This reminds me of that episode of Silicon Valley with the Hooli employees hanging out on the roof that get paid to just hang out all day.
I have seen and experienced this happening in the past, not just in tech.
I landed a tech consultancy (small software house) job after college. My first 2 projects were great and I learned a lot and had good mentors. The 3rd project was just wasting everyone's time, endless meetings and no work getting delivered. I quit 6 weeks into that, but some people honestly prefer to pretend than to actually work. But don't hate the player, hate the game.
I work in a much more productive place now, because i like to work and learn and improve, but a lot of ppl I know don't. We are not the same.
The issue with this is not that they are not producing value, or that their skills atrophy - we already knew that.
The issue is that they clearly can be paid and provided for, even if they produce no value. We just collectively, as a society, agreed that people have to go into offices and pretend they work, and get 6 figure salaries for it, and we all accept that. Meanwhile millions of people busting their ass in 10+ hour shifts for minimum wage.
This is just exhibit #198681325 of how corporate feudalism works.
You're not being trolled. Unfortunately this has been my exact experience. I have been through 10 roles in 6 years searching for a competent, engaged software team. I arrive on the scene, make loads of objective improvements, commended by the team, but ultimately making enemies when it becomes clear that I reject the status quo of appearing busy without results for prolonged periods of time. In my current role I've been through 3 reorgs in 1 year because a project was so behind schedule, it is 2 years after the original deadline, and ultimately the project was scrapped and we were folded into some legacy support organization, and I haven't written a line of code in over a year, not for lack of effort, but rather lack of any kind of direction for our team or organization. Most of what I do is glorified configuration file management and extremely poor devops... my development skills have atrophied and for a while there I was beginning to lose the ability to effectively use my text editor for how little I was needing to use it.
This is an epidemic of ethics. Everyone in tech I've encountered is not here because they're passionate, but because it was an easy path to a big salary. If you paid me minimum wage, this would be my career. These are grifting, unethical, lazy, meritless hacks who ought to be culled from the industry.
I find your line of thinking to be absurd. Look at the people who are above these tech workers. They make billions doing nothing from the hard work of those under them.
Your anger has the wrong priorities.
@@BeefIngot What the fuck kind of projecting yourself onto some random person on the internet is this?
@guymontag5084 Sounds like a talentless, unethical, lazy, meritless hack who thinks soft skills are more important than real ability in an engineering profession.
@@nanthilrodriguez What are you even saying. Did you perhaps misread my comment or...
The one time I could chill most of the day was when I accidentally fell into a (fixed term) management position. I'd do some meetings, answer some emails then play FFXIV for probably about half of the day. I'd keep Outlook on my second monitor so I could see if someone important emailed me.
No work, haha, carry overs, burnt sprints, overwork, overtime, I am sure this guy was a business analyst or some fancy manager.
I saw this as a consultant, coming in to a company that was already in shambles, with an ivory tower architecture team that was absolutely belligerent and had no idea what had happened in the world outside their private little office.
Bro I have to admit this is precisely what I experienced at a bullshit saas company in 2021
I eventually got fired for pointing out several of the problems going on after an event when I was literally accosted in the team chat for doing work (just tinkering and learning the code base) while I was told to wait for the manager for like a full shift. My previous job as the lead dev and only back end dev at a startup kept me busy all day, so I expected to work. Instead I spent 5-6 weeks “training” reading shitty company ethics and ops that had nothing to do with programming, and after finishing one single minor task, made the mistake of going against the grain and actually trying to get something done.
It’s not across the board, because that’s the only time I’ve seen it, but it’s absolutely the truth and it’s rampant
It is pretty much the case that 50% of sprints should be late, if you estimate correctly based on average time expected. If all teams/devs are on time, the estimates are bloated by definition.
Yes, this! Or even more specifically: 50% of the people in the team should still be working at the end of the sprint. Because if that's not happening, everyone's finishing early then sitting around doing nothing. The idea that an entire team full of people can all finish their work exactly 5 minutes before the sprint demo is a complete fiction. So why do so many people pretend otherwise!?
One of my friends worked for a major router company. He was assigned to a project for 9 months, he finished it in 3 weeks, asked for more work, but they told him that he needed to stay on the project in case bugs showed up. Almost no bugs showed up and he spent most of his time applying to other jobs.
I know automation engineer who are daily doing more coding and problem solving than most devs. This is real.
This is a banking problem. They have way too much money so aren't subject to the same tight restrictions as most industries, hence they waste loads of resources.
When I broke into the sw engineering I quickly went trough two jobs that were like this. It's just a corporate standard.
I work in hardware engineering. A troubling trend is hardware teams being forced by senior leadership to "adopt Agile". The way this guy describes scrum is absolutely correct in my world. Since hardware development not only takes years, but prototypes take months to manufacture and ship from overseas, program management makes waterfall spreadsheets anyway. At my first job, engineers were expected to go through gantt charts and convert them from smart sheet to stories in Rally. Every quarter, we'd be given a week to do this. A week. A week of every high paid engineer doing basically nothing and management saw nothing wrong with what was effectively copy pasting redundant information between two tools. Agile is interesting, sure, but scrum collectively kills more brain cells every day than the combined efforts of alcohol and hard drugs.
I just left a startup that I’m convinced was some sort of money laundering scheme, we did NOTHING for two years. Not a single one of us produced anything worthwhile in that time. And yes, it hurt my career
The problem here isn't Agile the problem is trying to make Agile the only process of record between the developers and the business unit. It just doesn't work for software/hardware devs to making business deliverables on a two week cycle. The agile process the developers use needs to be synchronized to some regiment of business milestones and deliverables it just can't be done on a two week sprint where developers barely have time to build+test+document+test something worthwhile let alone any flexibility for something going wrong.
Agile works great if you're using to build a momentum and establish a regiment of planning and communications. But the main feature should be that you leave developers alone to do their work for a couple weeks.
I have a contract dev working for me that takes 6 weeks to do a days work. I was so frustrated after a year of this I was actively campaigning to can them.. instead they were converted to FT. Smh
I worked in app dev at the Ontario government, basically there were months where they assigned no work to my team. Pretending to work was horrible. I used the time to learn.
Either or both of: really smart people will think that their colleagues bloat their tasks, but the colleagues might simply want to milk the cash cow as much as they can. Just set insane estimates that are always completed to keep managers happy. For them that might be way better than trying to optimize everything but get it wrong all the time?
thats called being a spineless bitch
This is true. I have seen people in real life in companies like TCS and Infosys where people are not working and studying for entrance exams of higher Degrees.
In exp it’s a mix bag and it depends on management which happens in all fields. The root of the problem is that even tho management get paid very well it’s not some thing easy because it’s not working with its working with people and humans are complicated.
The overemployed movement is looking much more realistic given this info, gotdeng
That description of the Agile workflow sounds exactly like what we are supposed to do where I work. Except the team I'm on generally just does the work as it comes in, regardless of where we are in a sprint. If there's a production issue we can't just wait two weeks for the next sprint to start working on it. We move tasks around or split them to make the numbers look nice.
If you are in Agile team you suppose not do the support job. Core of agile is that you are assigned to agile team. Unless your agile team is the one that does support items. This is the problem with enterprise. Enhancement team is one and support team is another.
It’s funny they mention a bank, I’m in a similar position (minus the pay), where we are frequently on the cusp of running out of things to do and this is even with us trying to be proactive most of the time.
He not wrong. Also Facebook now Meta followed the Metaverse trend and devs were bloated and not happy about which lend to nothing because Zuck the Suck never thought about the needs of the users etc. Many companies hired people for NFTs and blockchain even though there are not viable use cases, they just chased the trend and hype of crypto, nfts and blockchain.
I mean, I work in cybersecurity for the world's third biggest bank. I'm not saying I don't work, but I have seen entire teams of people who don't do...anything. It seems their job is to push back on everyone wanting them to do things.
You have worked 10+ years in the same company, no surprise you have not seen this.
Task bloating is a fact across all industries. You work construction: you can do it in 2 days ,you say 7, your manager says 12 and client pays for it.
I loathe scrum ceremonies
I loath the wording. Rituals. Ceremonies. It's not a wedding. We got together for ten minutes and said I wrote a test that doesn't work.
It's also been a mixed bag when WFH. Because sometimes people drag out meetings like stand-up because you're not standing any more. However, you're less likely to be randomly bothered which is great too.
SCRUMs existence is the admittance to the fact that they have a problem with productivity and thinking they solved it by tracking how far over a blind estimate anything is.
Meanwhile the blank truth is that you never needed Scrum or agile anything. You need clear definitions of what team needs to complete what task for the next team to start and engineers with good grasp and experience of how the project works. That way you have people in charge who know when someone is hiding and a clear overview of where bottlenecks are. Scrum is a ritual to appease managers who only ever learned to be a manager.
> Be me, work in a 50 hour weekly job at minimum.
> Be an engineer, work in firmware and hardware (electronics) development and support test lab and Junior engineers.
> Well rounded overall skillset, speak more than 2 languages.
> Often work 60 to 70 hours.
> Earn less than 12,000 USD per year.
> Still can't afford a damn car due to rent and other expenses.
> People be making 200,000 pounds for ppts per week.
Why the actual hell did I become an Engineer? Shouldn't have been born in the third world, I'm an idiot.
I worked at a large Telecom company for about a year. This summed up my time pretty accurately. I did more in 1 month at my new job than the 1 year at my old one. I literally had nothing assigned to me other than update enum values for upwards of 2 months.
I'm a 10 year experienced software engineer.
During the first four years of my career, I didn't work at all.
I wanted to, I was trying to.
The first project I got in was on fire and got shut down just a month after my joining.
The almost year without work because during that month, I got trained on some niche oracle technology and the company didn't want me to work anything else till then.
Then I did work briefly for a few months but mostly learning instead of working because the experienced people didn't let me work as I was a fresher but just let me observe and learn.
Then I broke my knee in a crash, got surgery and couldn't work for a few months.
Then I got back, the company wanted me to travel, I couldn't so I quit and got a new job.
Same shit in the new company.
I had a niche skill, they wanted to hold on to me for headcount and didn't let me enter other projects.
This went on for two years.
I was getting paid in full.
I stated two business, got married, learnt machine learning and got a new job 😂
Thank god my third job had plenty of interesting work to do and I haven't left that job still.
Crazy stuff.
It's true, especially after Covid. I get assigned "stories" marked for 5 days and it just takes me a few hours.
A few months ago I got a assigned a piece of an entire feature, somehow I got confused and ended up doing the whole feature myself in two daysitbhad been planned to take a few weeks.
Who estimates the tasks? You're not involved in that? No talk of adjusting them after they are off by that much - or is compensated by other tasks being under estimated?