I like vertical monitor quite a lot for productivity. I just couldn't imagine using one as the monitor I'm working on. I think they're amazing if you've got stuff you want to reference, to look at or read through, like having docs or something open on the side. Or maybe you've got what the designer gave you open there if you're a frontend dev. But when I'm working on anything, no matter what, I'm not working in the vertical direction in any way where scrolling up or down isn't the better solution. And I can't imagine many people are.
as a pretty old developer, when Scrum first hit, i was all in. no PM, ability to iterate, developers doing their own estimates, mandatory participation by the stakeholders, the ability to fail sprints if something goes off the rails ... hell yeah ! but what it turned into was "professional" Scrum "masters" and a daily meeting asking "are you done yet", zero requirements, and zero participation and accountability from the stakeholders.
we invented as a better interface to 'the business' The Business adapted, by getting even lazier, and re-inserting all of their "I take the designs, from the customer, to the engineer" people we shouldn't have bothered inventing agile in the first place- 'The Business' doesn't want to be saved, and can't be saved, from itself.
I've been working in a good agile place for a while, but they say what they mean and mean what they say, and they trust (for a large part) the teams to do the right thing. When we estimate a project, if the estimate is past a deadline then the conversation turns to scope, as it should. We can always release version 1.1 shortly after MVP if required. Our daily meetings are under 15min and not whether something is done but whether there are blockers, outstanding reviews, rough estimate if you think you'll be done today, etc. Oh and we don't have a dedicated scrum master to find busywork to justify their pay. There is one that floats around a few teams as required, but we only interface with him once or twice a week and he's legit good at helping to refine our process. It can be done well, but you need a team lead who's willing to push back hard on managers trying to justify their existence. Luckily in my org we don't have that many of them, so it's just my head of engineering that I need to push back on sometimes.
@@morosis82 sounds like a company that didn't want to follow the trend and decide to make sure they can actually deliver first. Lucky you! Hope it stays good for you there. It's drab out there, in most cases.
lol, yeah, on paper it sounds like a dream, but in practice I've not seen it survive "customization" by the business. It always ends up being agile in name only in order to sell it as a hot commodity to customers or upper management. I lmfao when I found the DoD's document about detecting fake agile bs. You know it's a problem when they need to make a document to catch people not actually following the key tenets.
My whole team has been sandbagging for years now, overestimating everything and barely working, but we keep getting paid by the customer. thanks scrum!
My first exposure to scrum: Me: But why? We've beat deadline every time and ship without any major bugs. Boss: Its apparently the new thing. Also, my wifes sister does it for a living and we just hired her. 3 month later, we have missed deadlines and shipped major bugs. Boss: I guess this is normal as a breaking in period but it will improve. Me: Imagine how much more work we could have done if we hired another dev over a scum master. Boss: Yeaaaaahhhh
The thing that bothers me the most is that scrum is just a way to rephrase classical top down hierarchical structure with the appearance of agile workflow Scrum has single-handedly given it's bad reputation to agile Scrum seller : We are an agile framework Me : How do you implement the principle of the agile manifesto Scrum seller : crickets
@@fabienso5889 For me, and it has always been the case, scrum is just a way to write some code without thinking first so that you can show "some progress" to some people. => "to show". It allows also people knowing nothing about IT to give some estimates on dev tasks. => "non IT guys working in IT" It means treating adults like kids (poker planning). It means dividing an interesting dev task into tiny ininteresting dev tasks that will be developped by several devs that won't have a clue of the big picture. Each one of them will rush to finish its tiny task which means later big refactorisation of the code => responsabilities dilluted. Endless meetings, people supposed to be thinking and writing code. You take a bunch of them, and for many hours in a week, they sat listenning. Scrum is a ceremony.
@@barryblack8332 For me, I've only really needed a daily or weekly standup in software dev when a) We were in a crunch period b) There were other communication issues, and c) As a result, we were losing time we needed to spend developing because people weren't communicating that they had problems. I've lost dev time because I updated the master branch, sent a notification to the test team that the branch was updated, and the team missed the notification and just didn't run anything. This WAS an issue, and it DID need a daily standup to fix. Status meetings are only necessary when the status is important to project completion. "My boss wants to know what % complete we are so he can tell HIS boss what % complete we are" is just not important to project completion, period. People knowing that the progress bar moved 5 pixels to the right this week has no tangible benefit for the organization. Status meetings should only convey these three things 1 - Are we done? Yes/No 2 - Are we stuck? Yes/No 3 - If we are stuck, why? Anything followup for why the team is stuck should be handled internally by the team, and doesn't need mommy scrum master and daddy project manager to supervise every action meeting, or say who is doing what. This DOES require your lead to communicate with your project manager to explain what is happening and why, but that does not require a dedicated meeting. It can be a direct message or a 1:1 conversation.
The spinal condition is also called "tech neck". On my first Scrum job I voiced my surprise at the sheer amount and length of meetings. The response from the PM was "Let's have a huddle on the topic of whether there are too many meetings." On a more recent job my manager was like "Oh, I hate scrum, it's toxic, I never want to bring it here." Then it was "Let's just have retrospectives because I think they're useful." Then it was "Let's add story pointing to better estimate our time horizons." You guessed it -- sneaking Scrum in piecemeal through the back door and assembling it on site. By the time I heard talk of "sprints", I knew it was too late -- Sinistar had already been built.
you know the companies more worried about time estimates are the one that kill the most amount of projects, I wonder why. maybe if they were worried about producing value to their customers instead of trying to estimating work and doing useless busywork. I know you already have a burn-rate calculation, just tell me how long you can run, and I we go from that. it doesn't matter as they're already earning 10 times what the developers make either way, why does it matter much how long it'll take to build something, when its done, its done.
The bottom line is, every business has deadlines that must be met. Games have to come out before the Christmas holidays, or they will miss their sales targets. In our case, we had to have a new reporting feature ready to demo at some big big-data convention. The two eternal questions the business will ALWAYS ask are "how long is it gonna take?" and "how much is it gonna cost?" Whatever methodology you adopt, you'd better be prepared to answer them.
@@bitwize that's understandable, but you don't decide out of nowhere 2 months before christmas sales to just move buildings, and then come up with a 2 months deadline to any constructor company. But that's what they always do to software.
About the posture. Folks, I had a neurosurgery on my spine 8 month ago because of hernia explosion. It was painful and I almost lost my leg (got partial paralysis in my feet). Now I am on rehab and 80% normal, but still feeling shitty. All the problems start from bad posture and lack of activity - sports. Be careful with your body, it becomes fragile under work routine pressure and inactivity.
gonna tell you one - I was in the team when there were couple persons who were like "if we don't have daily standups online, we feel abandoned, like we don't have a team at all". Then we introduced some additional "coffee meet" - just a chit chat for teammates, and those two folks they were always silent. Once asked they simply said "Well we didn't mean to talk, we feel good in silence, but really need that atmosphere of discussion happening around"
We've never done any "sprint catchup" anywhere I've been. If we did not make the things in the sprint, they were just moved to the next sprint and that sprint was adjusted accordingly. Sprints are never planned any further than the next sprint, and they are just the highest priority tasks from the backlog. I would absolutely refuse to do any overwork sprint catchup if asked, only thing I would do overwork for, would be critical production bugs, and I'm pretty sure most of the people I've worked with would be the same.
@@handlechar568sprints are good for one thing, if you have a good idea of your capacity (velocity) and you have a specific outcome that needs to be done in a particular time, then it allows you to lay out estimated tasks specifically for that thing, compare to capacity, and say yes or no, then force the scope discussion. I've done this a few times, and often there's a version where you can see you'll run over a tad and can negotiate a day 1 MVP with a plan to follow up with the most valuable extras nice and early.
We recently had a sprint where almost half the items weren't completed, so we just skipped planning for next sprint and used it to complete the work. To go fast, you need to go slow. Also, people misunderstood the meaning of the agile manifesto when it says "over COMPREHENSIVE documentation". The idea was to create a better way to work than waterfall, which was all documentation up front. Architectural design up front is alright. You can spend time on it. Also, you can draw diagrams to validate your ideas. But you can also build some POC alongside with it. You can start fiddling away with some skeleton of an app that you might or might not discard. You can also document the thing while you're working, to enable everyone else to use it as well. There's nothing fun when you have a simple Lambda function that hasn't been updated on 3 years, nobody bothered to write a README, nobody bothered to write comments and it can't be redeployed because the tooling has been updated, and if you take down that lambda apprently your whole website shuts down. So now we have 20 engineers swarming to fix this problem. So document your stuff, people. Just don't write up a guidebook about your app before you write any code.
When the Agile Manifesto was written project documentation was prevalent and time consuming. THIS was the documentation they were talking about, not technical documentation. Technical documentation is as critical in an agile world and it has always been and will always be.
@@timgwallis I actually don't generally mind scrum that much. Though some people make it seem like they deal with hours of scrum rituals every day, and I haven't seen that yet. I have maybe 3 hours of meetings a week. But as someone who has had to maintain software that was written 10+ years ago where nobody remembers what the actual business requirements were, and the product management solutions changed two or three times so old discussions have been lost -- sometimes some more comprehensive product-level documentation would be nice... I don't want to write it though. :D
@@AaronPadenthe way I think about it is if I had to onboard someone, is there a set of documentation I can point them to that will help them understand what it is we're doing and why? That will be different for different products, like I've worked in financial systems where a reasonable level of documentation for the accounting parts was necessary because it's not implicitly obvious. If you're going to make any changes, you don't want to have to do a discovery piece with a bunch of accountants to understand how not to fuck up the financial ledgers. If you're doing crud methods with some validation, the required documentation threshold is much lower.
I've asked to implement a system at work whereby a project cannot be signed off as completed unless someone who hasn't worked on the project can deploy it without any help. Someone else should be able to look at your README and get shit running and deployed if they have a reasonable amount of dev knowledge
I was in a company a couple of years ago where I was embedded with 6 development teams as an infrastructure engineer. If I missed a meeting i would hear about it immediately. 6 scrum meetings per day, needless to say there was just no possible way actual work could get done.
I feel you. As the only infrastructure (well we have more but none who manage k8s besides me) guy I have to cater to 30 devs organized in 5 (now 3 after a bit of reshuffeling) teams and everyone cries a river when I miss their stupid meetings.
That's crazy! We wouldn't include an external resources in ours unless there's a good reason. We do have outsiders join us from time to time, they typically get the general 5min updates and then we can have a bit of a chat at the end if necessary but it's not normal. Typically only when it's something like a dependency resource like infra where we need a bit more of a complex discussion re work and priority. That said, most of our comms at this level happen through dedicated channels (on slack) and at the leads level if necessary for planning reasons like we need some significant dedicated time in a couple of weeks or so.
"SCRUM is based on the Agile Manifesto much like a hotdog is based on the concept of meat". It was at that moment that we knew that this guy was cooking bitter pills... I like vertical monitors, but for two specific uses only. Having my "console output" there and reading PDF's.
Been a game dev for 8 years, never had any major troubles in any friends team, a few time ago i joined some friends on a new project and he had this shitty thing going on, we had daily meetings and so on, and i was always thinking: "but we already deliver all the tasks in time, we can communicate through Discord properly, why do we need to lose our time on those meetings?", 1 week later and 2 friends had abandoned the team and i was the third one 2 weeks later 😅
Vertical monitors are fantastic. They are so much better for. websites, terminals, documents any sort of list based applications, so chat, spotify etc. I have one large monitor flanked by two vertical monitors and one smaller monitor/ drawing tablet and its ideal. When developing: Terminal on the left vertical, code on the main one in front of me, website/ application on the right and my task list on the smaller monitor then switch spaces for documentation/ the web or teams (ewww) etc.
Only being able to have 1 super long and thin "channel" instead of being able to have two to four regularly sized windows is just never worth it to me.
@@Sammysapphira Err you can divide up your screen how ever you want in any orientation. I have generally got 3-4 terminals vertically stacked on my left vertical monitor (or just using tabs if I want the full length for tail logging). When I am working on websites I have the website and then below it the dev tools for that website on my right vertical. My main screen (43 inch 4k) gets split normally into either 2 or 4 different code editing windows/tabs. The world is your oyster. To me this configuration is the optimal one. I could do with a little more resolution dpi on my main monitor. Maybe if it was a 5k it would be perfect but other than that I have no complaints about my 3 * 4k + 1 * 1080p real estate and configuration.
I agree, vertical monitors are fucking great for code. I feel more in control, if I got my vertical display on the left with main file of a project always open.
@denisblack9897 after hearing your endorsements I am now open to trying them. When I first saw them I thought they were ludicrous but now I like to try it out.
About 0.000...1% of this is from Uncle Bob. They kept a few of his words. They took Bobs molehill, shoved it aside and built a mountain in its place. There's just a few molecules left of the molehill under the mountain.
24:40 This is the honest truth being on a team with people that don't want to put in any effort to actually become great at their job makes the job miserable for those that are putting in that extra effort.
I agree about the moving of the goal posts, or anything that feels like an endless marathon. I remember when we went remote, my teammate and I had at least one daily meeting to talk about the project, and while on the one hand that really motivated me to dig into the problems we discussed, it also burned me out. I felt the same being an engineering manager - I felt like there was never a break, even when there was. It was this constant state of anxiety about what you should be or could be doing when you're not doing it.
I think the biggest problem with scrum and agile is the fact that greedy ladder-climbers could latch on to the buzzwords without actually following the process *on the business side*. I only ever saw it implemented as chunked-up waterfall without all of the up-front planning for waterfall to succeed. The main feature they actually used was sprints, and that's about it. No working builds/prototypes every sprint. No customer involvement as promised. It would have been much better if they had made some organization and license out the rights to use the terms. If they audit you and find you're not following the process? Boom, you can't say you use agile/scrum. Then we'd not have a thousand different understandings of the process with thousands of different people selling training. It's just too easy for the rest of the organization to force out any aspect of the process that doesn't fit their status quo.
We started tracking time spent in meetings into separate tasks (marked as "urgent"). Еhe number of meetings and time on meetings was significantly reduced.
I enjoy hating on Scrum as much as the next guy but I don't like sniffing my own farts. "Annoyingly efficient" is not how I would describe most teams. Software development was a mess long before Scrum was a thing.
the problem isn't software development, its the MBAs full of crap entering a field that's super young and where everything is basically handcrafted and trying to manage it like an automated chair factory that produce the same chair 20.000.000 times. the entire idea of the agile manifesto was producing visible results instead of planning everything up-front or just doing stupid administrative busywork. We really need a get shit done manifesto instead. Just do it, and its done when its done. Also, software never is done, companies have fixed rate contracts, why do they care about deadlines ? it literally doesn't matter, take the cost of the team, then multiply by 3 and push to the client, work forever, isn't that what companies want ? forever making money ? why having an end date ? do they put end dates to their business too ? of course not. deadlines, what a ludicrous concept. software is not a product, it is a service.
I also had the experience that scrum just added more work to my day. When I worked for one company, I organised my day so that all my meetings were before 2pm but I was still never finished before 7/8pm. My boss seemed to never believe that I had so much non-dev work to do and so expected that I'd be putting in 7-8 dev hours per day, despite being able to demonstrate I couldn't ad my continual bitching about being so busy - he just seemed to think I was lazy. That and covid lockdowns made me burn out really hard
bro nobody actively works 7-8 hours a day consistently on an 8 hour shift, it's just unsustainable. should be more like 4-6 productive hours a day anyway, rest is switching focus, communicating, taking breaks, etc
This must be toxic workplace stuff. Scrum is a very simple framework for self-organizing teams to work efficiently. It should not take up much time or have much bureaucracy. Biting off two weeks of work from the planned project, deciding how to get it done, and making sure to ask for help if you're stuck in the morning is quite a decent framework, honestly. Please tell me what is wrong with that.
It’s a matter of who’s doing what whom. If developers decide to adopt scrum, it will meet the needs of devs. If management decides to adopt scrum, it will serve the needs of management. It’s easy to pervert a process. To make a process work, you need people to agree on what’s valuable and use the process to achieve that. What people are upset about are asymmetric power dynamics that create toxic workplace cultures.
I always push on the scrum master to keep all the meetings minimal and when people came out with personal stuff I told the SM to cut that out in the stand up we should organize a team build up meeting on fridays in the last hour so we can play, talk or something.
In my experience Scrum ceremonies start pretty easily regressing into repeating the same meeting all over again with a different title. Planning: let's go through the unfinished tickets we have and tickets we are hoping to work on. Dailies: let's go through the tickets we worked yesterday and that we are hoping to work on today. Grooming: let's pour over the tickets. Retro: let's go through how we are happy we managed to finish the tickets we finished and again how there where these tickets we failed to finish. Although there is a variant of this process where dailies are used for a different purpose: discussing which meetings we had yesterday and which we are expecting to have today.
Though you are mostly correct and I do agree, you did not describe a retro. The only useful thing of Scrum to me is the retrospective. What you described is the review. Retrospective is bringing up any issues there have been during development, or discussing things that can progress the development further. Could be that there has been a lack of clear communication between the team, which need addressing for obvious reason. If there has been no issues, the meeting is done.
Retro means a lot of different things to a lot of people. For me it should mainly be about process improvement, figuring out if we did something suboptimally and if we should take lessons from the period at stake. But instead of that I have quite often seen retros degrade into just talking about the tickets. When that happens the completed ones get mentioned into the "what went well pile", and the ones that were not completed go to the "to improve pile or did not go well pile".@@TheMathias95
@@TheMathias95 Yeah retro for us lives in a vacuum. You're free to say things critical of choices that was taken, complain of stakeholders and stupid shit the company is doing to ruin our daily work. The key is to not bring that outside of the meeting of course. And also use the retro to change your working process. Think dailies take too long? Suggest reducing it. Reviews boring? Say so.
I found vertical monitor setup good for frontend work, where you have a browser in full screen on it and have the devtools open in the bottom half. This gives you a roughly normal aspect ratio for the actual viewport.
As someone who has been a professional software engineer for 15 years and has to go to physical therapy and OT for all kinds of pain, watching you ban someone for saying posture doesn't matter made my damn day
Three minutes in and I got more use out of this video than I expected Looked up Silicon Valley Syndrome and realized that I have shown symptoms of it for over a year from improper posture Found a neck and back specialist near me Thanks!
12:00 In psychology, there is a well-known bias-though I can't recall its specific name-where presenting the positive aspects first and then the negative ones tends to make the person feel unhappy. Conversely, if you present the negative aspects first and then the positive ones, the person will generally feel happier, and think you are more sencire. On a related note, I find planning poker to be quite frustrating.
Portrait-orientation monitors made a ton of sense in a particular point in time, until about 5 years ago when giant 2160x1440 and 4k monitors became affordable. A 21" IPS monitor turned on its side is just fantastic for looking at code in your primary screen. But once the top of the monitor gets outside of your vertical peripheral vision the ergonomics stop making sense. Nowadays you get almost the same amount of usable screen real estate on a 27" 4k monitor with two code panes side by side.
Neck story: Remote for about 10 years. Previous apartments I had no good desk setup, hunched over with laptop; sucked balls. Moved to house, good desk setup, but still had keyboard and monitor stupidly setup. Started doing jiu jitsu, 6 months in, neck got cranked and bam: 4 herniated discs. 2 months of horrible pain, radial shooting pain down the arm, physical therapy, massages, etc. Before the incident, a physical therapist was working on my posture; we suspected that years of bad posture is really what caused the neck injury in BJJ. So.. You may not know you have a posture problem, but a car accident or sport injury, whatever, down the road could make an incident far worse. More specific details: Something like being hunched over, for example, overworks your chest muscles, but weakens back muscles. Weakened back muscles means traps have to be overworked for support, and increase strain on chest muscle means front of neck is stronger than the rear. All of this sets up for putting pressure on the discs in the spine from one side to the other, causing bulging discs. In an extreme event, a bulging disc can then become herniated or ruptured. Tip: I also found that getting a 32" 4k monitor, but increasing the zoom size to 125% or 150% still gives you tons of screen real estate, but really helped me with subtly lurching forward trying to focus on the screen
4:00 I'm not really sure why a definition of done is bad. In fact, I'd argue that you're a fool if you don't have a solid definition of “done” and are working towards an imaginary moving goalpost.
Point is that a good SWE should know what it takes to build proper software with tests and CI/CD. Definition of Done are like training wheels for those needing a checklist, and thus it becomes a rule rather than a guideline and stops giving value and instead brewing conflict. "Hey you did not do that unit test that's in the DoD!" "It's cool it didnt make sense in this context" "Sorry brah, do it or I'll tell". Scrum Master vs SWE.
@@JohanFrenning I'm not thinking in terms of a scrum master or anything like that. I think of definitions of “done” in the sense of larger software components that must be included in the end product in the sense of a more granular service level agreement. In this sense, I think DoDs are essential. However, the more frequently practiced DoDs of “muh unit test”, in this respect I agree they are worthless.
@@Manker00 Yeah in scrum DoD is the actual check-list to allow a developer to move a ticket from In Progress to Done. That's why it's portrayed as bad in the video.
You should watch some Allen Holub stuff. He outlines nicely how scrum and agile were ruined. But it's basically how you say. Scrum and agile should've been a way to fine-tune XP and interfacing with management to the needs, abilities and preferences of each team individually, not a one-size-fits-all unchangeable process.
You’re spot on with having to do more work. I spend my time in meetings and then end up trying to code late on in the evening after a day filled with nonsense.
I am so glad we have scrum to make it so people who don’t know a thing about writing software can make all of the important decisions about how companies write software
25:10 100%. When you're relying on somebody that lets you down because they couldn't be bothered to do their job, it makes everything worse. Either you're delayed from hitting your tagets, or you have to do their job as well as your own.
According the question from Prime in minute 6:43. Exactly every sprint at my old job was that way. We had so much meetings, that there were not a single chance to even believe to achive every task we hat committed to. But every single Manager was coping that next time we would get the target and we would plan again as if we could work normal hours coping to our selfs that this might happen this sprint. Btw. there is an even worse form of Scrum out there it is called SAFE. SAFE can be boiled down to Scrum * 2. You have the the normal scrum meetings + the occasional SAFE backlog refinement but every x weeks you are effectively rendered useless because then you have Scum meetings with and for all the Scum teams which are working on the Project.
planning poker can actually be fun if you bet the estimations are wrong or that the requirements will change before the sprint is over (and that bet is gonna win most of times)
I very strongly believe that promising / talented juniors should be thrown at hard and isolated problems and given lots of time to solve them. It may not be as nicely designed as a senior's nor will it be done as quickly however that junior will learn vastly more than he would by smashing out a bunch of tiny features.
I like this idea. Hard doesn’t have to mean technically difficult, either. I changed from banking data software to GIS, so even in the same tech stack I was completely new to the business domain, and certainly the 30 year old codebase and workflows. I’ve learned a lot by being given large tasks and allowed to take my time and immerse myself in them to learn about all those aspects. A lot of companies seem to have a ton of red tape even to add simple things.
One thing that I have heard in defence about planning poker is that it's more about the conversations that it causes instead of the result. Basically, if someone rates it out of how everyone else rated it, then they might have noticed something different and that may be important.
Interesting 11:00 I'm remote right now, and my team has a dedicated session in the week for just chatting and getting along... we only see each other once a year. I think it works because we don't waste time in the daily (or other scrum meeting)
Dude speaking of monitors i spent 4 months at an intership and had a bad setup now im getting back surgeries like it didnt cause the main issue but it quickly made it way way worse like doc said it wouldnt did the surgery if i didnt sit like that for 8 hours a day for 4 months plus the chair i had was bad bad
I had Arnold's Neuralgia because a shifty company decided to send me a microsoft surface to work on it and i didn't realize I was having a bad position on that tiny laptop. The back of the neck got swollen and was really painful I though I had cancer. It was just bad position.
Pulling weeds was an epic comment and comparasont. First, you reach certan age when you find find weeding even enjojable and do it voluntary. I myself wonder about this phenomenon: maybe with age we want to get used to the soil, where will we end up? Second, agree that progress along the shortest rather than the longest line or along individual areas is more visible and motivating.
The guy who talks about his dog is probably one who doesn't give a f about the standup and about everyone else's tasks, because they are unrelated to his task and he doesn't give a f about how complicated Jerry's task was
I love my vertical monitor, but the editor generally goes on my primary (horizontal) monitor, the vertical monitor is for terminals and debuggers and documentation.
I definitely think there is a version of Scrum that works, because I've been on a team that judiciously followed the process and it did work. But I've also been on projects where Scrum really became an anchor dragging us down. It's really easy to get Scrum wrong. One of the big problems is that a lot of people selling Scrum act like you can tailor the process or pick and choose bits to adopt. That's not really true, it it should be done as a last resort. Stand-ups should be 5 minutes. Sprint planning should be no more than an hour. Sprint retrospective 30 minutes. There should be actually be design meetings and requirements gathering before you start your first sprint. Breaking down user stories into achievable tasks during sprint planning is also important. Also, committing to the amount of work you agreed to get done is a big part of it and you should be empowered to argue your case and downsize the deliverables of a sprint so your team is on board and committed.
7:49 And someone is walking behind you dropping weed seeds. That person is a product manager. 8:42 inb4 "BDUF, LOL. Do you use punch cards or paper tape or do they go mushy in the waterfall, ROFLhundredeleventyoneoneone." 13:59 I've never seen a not-side tangent.
Have the misfortune of having been put into Scrum for the past 4 weeks. I already hate the constant meeting massacre. And since I am part of multiple projects... I will have even more meetings.
I never use multi monitor when I code. I use one screen and always full screen. And normally one VS project at one time. That way I am more focused on the code, and if I need 2 editors open at the same time then something is wrong in my code. The code you see in one screen should explain everything by itself. Sometimes you need to jump into that code, but when you go back the code should be clear. If it is not clear then modify the code so it becomes clear. That way 10 years from now you get your code back, it is still easy to understand just old syntax.
We are mostly remote. So we have "makabre" which means mandatory coffee break. Where we just talk about personal stuff. So we get to know the colleagues. Then we don't block stand-ups with it. 30 min a week.
(Non-industrialized) Scrum is a fairly great framework when the team is overall more junior or inexperienced, sometimes even as a starting point for more senior teams. In all other cases it’s just 20%+ overhead and / or a requirement which cannot be negotiated
I was working in real scrum once. It took us half year to jump in but after this time we delivered everything and much faster than teams working without scrum. But it was only one time when scrum worked, mostly because it was implemented correctly
vertical monitors are good for code only, but things get wonky when you try to use that monitor for other stuff. usually you only have room for random small windows stacked up to the top
Re: vertical monitors and posture: vertical monitors are best positioned lower, so that the extra space goes off the bottom instead of the top. You don't have to look up if the tops of your monitors are aligned. This also means that vertical monitors should be smaller than your main horizontal monitor(s), considering similar aspect ratios. Looking up is definitely bad for your neck but that alone shouldn't be the cause for bashing vertical monitors.
i have realized that all the pain i have in my whole body is because i have used my body wrong from top to toe, and now i have wasted 10 years off my life which i could have done something with a long time ago. listen to the man.
The biggest scam is thinking people separate out libraries from the application instead of just making an unholy amalgamation that is impossible to parse by someone not there for five years.
If your company has those big catchup efforts because theyre falling behind, then theyre not using velocity to plan appropriately. if you guys commit 60 but only get 40 done then the next sprint youre not supposed to go above 40. Part of the problem is that management will say they want scrum, but only introduce like half of the pieces. In scrum, the dev team is supposed to communicate a deadline to management based on how quickly they can accomplish tasks. If management is giving the team a deadline then its not scrum. A quote that stuck with me in scrum training was "Scrum is a lot like chess. If you play chess with half the pieces and ignore some of the rules, then you're not actually playing chess and you're not going to enjoy the experience."
The point about firing is really underrated. Sometimes you just gotta let people go. This is not an american thing, it's a do-you-want-the-project-to-actually-work thing.
I am a project manager, and here is the real issue: 90% of the project managers want to micromanage the team. I am usually among the 10%, but the most common situation is that some manager above is pushing to micromanage the team, because they and to "know how is the progress" And this sucks for good PMs that know how to give the team the space they need to do their work
Just a comment about: "You have no product" This is actually good, you don't need something to make money or even to solve a real problem, most of the problems in the world can be solved using an excel file, and that's not bad. But that nothing usually grow into something, and then is where the "product" start to exist, and there is where Unit testing, documentation, etc etc is worthy.
Me "I think that will take an hour" What I say " that is going to take me 2 weeks." Me at the end of the sprint, Ops says it take 3 months to open a port.
at my job at [big tech adjacent] thats commonly hated because of scrum (in my mind), we don't do scrum, standups are 8 minutes if not in slack text 3 times a week, and we do virtually no scrummy rituals. even we know it's shit and slows you down, and software is used to enable it daily.
I wish all unit test libraries that are included with the language should include mutation testing, because this would improve the tests and might actually give better meaning to coverage. There have been many solutions to better testing, but then you to create twice the code for tests.
Scrum is just an abbrevation for Scrotum. The letters o and t are in a meeting, so they couldn't show up.
I found them: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Thetan
Do one for agile
Agile DEEZ NUTS
Yes, because what's better than a Scrum meeting? A hairy scrum meeting.
Somebody just made a typo when they where to write "scum"
Vertical monitors have their very productive uses, like virtual pinball and spaceship shooters.
Also almost all text based content is alligned vertically
I'm thinking documentation, code, documents in general, messages, emails, CSV files.
Imagine playing galaga or tetris like this
dont forget java call stacks
It's all use case based. I read lots of journal articles and write code, and a vertical monitor is perfect for me
I like vertical monitor quite a lot for productivity. I just couldn't imagine using one as the monitor I'm working on. I think they're amazing if you've got stuff you want to reference, to look at or read through, like having docs or something open on the side. Or maybe you've got what the designer gave you open there if you're a frontend dev. But when I'm working on anything, no matter what, I'm not working in the vertical direction in any way where scrolling up or down isn't the better solution. And I can't imagine many people are.
as a pretty old developer, when Scrum first hit, i was all in. no PM, ability to iterate, developers doing their own estimates, mandatory participation by the stakeholders, the ability to fail sprints if something goes off the rails ... hell yeah ! but what it turned into was "professional" Scrum "masters" and a daily meeting asking "are you done yet", zero requirements, and zero participation and accountability from the stakeholders.
we invented as a better interface to 'the business'
The Business adapted, by getting even lazier, and re-inserting all of their "I take the designs, from the customer, to the engineer" people
we shouldn't have bothered inventing agile in the first place- 'The Business' doesn't want to be saved, and can't be saved, from itself.
I've been working in a good agile place for a while, but they say what they mean and mean what they say, and they trust (for a large part) the teams to do the right thing.
When we estimate a project, if the estimate is past a deadline then the conversation turns to scope, as it should. We can always release version 1.1 shortly after MVP if required.
Our daily meetings are under 15min and not whether something is done but whether there are blockers, outstanding reviews, rough estimate if you think you'll be done today, etc.
Oh and we don't have a dedicated scrum master to find busywork to justify their pay. There is one that floats around a few teams as required, but we only interface with him once or twice a week and he's legit good at helping to refine our process.
It can be done well, but you need a team lead who's willing to push back hard on managers trying to justify their existence. Luckily in my org we don't have that many of them, so it's just my head of engineering that I need to push back on sometimes.
@@morosis82 sounds like a company that didn't want to follow the trend and decide to make sure they can actually deliver first. Lucky you! Hope it stays good for you there. It's drab out there, in most cases.
lol, yeah, on paper it sounds like a dream, but in practice I've not seen it survive "customization" by the business. It always ends up being agile in name only in order to sell it as a hot commodity to customers or upper management.
I lmfao when I found the DoD's document about detecting fake agile bs. You know it's a problem when they need to make a document to catch people not actually following the key tenets.
Yes!
My whole team has been sandbagging for years now, overestimating everything and barely working, but we keep getting paid by the customer. thanks scrum!
Exactly
"our velocity is great!"
ah yeah, scrum, the perfect process to punish ambitious people while rewarding the lazy cunning ones
Exactly 😂 seen it inevitably happen on every team. 5 min task becomes a 5 point task worth 2-3 days
My first exposure to scrum:
Me: But why? We've beat deadline every time and ship without any major bugs.
Boss: Its apparently the new thing. Also, my wifes sister does it for a living and we just hired her.
3 month later, we have missed deadlines and shipped major bugs.
Boss: I guess this is normal as a breaking in period but it will improve.
Me: Imagine how much more work we could have done if we hired another dev over a scum master.
Boss: Yeaaaaahhhh
So what do you propose? I would really like to know
The thing that bothers me the most is that scrum is just a way to rephrase classical top down hierarchical structure with the appearance of agile workflow
Scrum has single-handedly given it's bad reputation to agile
Scrum seller : We are an agile framework
Me : How do you implement the principle of the agile manifesto
Scrum seller : crickets
@@fabienso5889 For me, and it has always been the case, scrum is just a way to write some code without thinking first so that you can show "some progress" to some people. => "to show".
It allows also people knowing nothing about IT to give some estimates on dev tasks. => "non IT guys working in IT"
It means treating adults like kids (poker planning).
It means dividing an interesting dev task into tiny ininteresting dev tasks that will be developped by several devs that won't have a clue of the big picture. Each one of them will rush to finish its tiny task which means later big refactorisation of the code => responsabilities dilluted.
Endless meetings, people supposed to be thinking and writing code. You take a bunch of them, and for many hours in a week, they sat listenning.
Scrum is a ceremony.
there are 2 different things here: doing scrum, and needing a dedicated hire to run it. The former is reasonable, the latter isn't imo.
@@barryblack8332 For me, I've only really needed a daily or weekly standup in software dev when
a) We were in a crunch period
b) There were other communication issues, and
c) As a result, we were losing time we needed to spend developing because people weren't communicating that they had problems.
I've lost dev time because I updated the master branch, sent a notification to the test team that the branch was updated, and the team missed the notification and just didn't run anything. This WAS an issue, and it DID need a daily standup to fix.
Status meetings are only necessary when the status is important to project completion. "My boss wants to know what % complete we are so he can tell HIS boss what % complete we are" is just not important to project completion, period. People knowing that the progress bar moved 5 pixels to the right this week has no tangible benefit for the organization. Status meetings should only convey these three things
1 - Are we done? Yes/No
2 - Are we stuck? Yes/No
3 - If we are stuck, why?
Anything followup for why the team is stuck should be handled internally by the team, and doesn't need mommy scrum master and daddy project manager to supervise every action meeting, or say who is doing what. This DOES require your lead to communicate with your project manager to explain what is happening and why, but that does not require a dedicated meeting. It can be a direct message or a 1:1 conversation.
The spinal condition is also called "tech neck".
On my first Scrum job I voiced my surprise at the sheer amount and length of meetings. The response from the PM was "Let's have a huddle on the topic of whether there are too many meetings."
On a more recent job my manager was like "Oh, I hate scrum, it's toxic, I never want to bring it here." Then it was "Let's just have retrospectives because I think they're useful." Then it was "Let's add story pointing to better estimate our time horizons." You guessed it -- sneaking Scrum in piecemeal through the back door and assembling it on site. By the time I heard talk of "sprints", I knew it was too late -- Sinistar had already been built.
"better estimate our time horizons" I want to know why are companies so worried with estimatives, they're going to kill the project anyway.
you know the companies more worried about time estimates are the one that kill the most amount of projects, I wonder why.
maybe if they were worried about producing value to their customers instead of trying to estimating work and doing useless busywork. I know you already have a burn-rate calculation, just tell me how long you can run, and I we go from that.
it doesn't matter as they're already earning 10 times what the developers make either way, why does it matter much how long it'll take to build something, when its done, its done.
The bottom line is, every business has deadlines that must be met. Games have to come out before the Christmas holidays, or they will miss their sales targets. In our case, we had to have a new reporting feature ready to demo at some big big-data convention. The two eternal questions the business will ALWAYS ask are "how long is it gonna take?" and "how much is it gonna cost?" Whatever methodology you adopt, you'd better be prepared to answer them.
@@bitwize that's understandable, but you don't decide out of nowhere 2 months before christmas sales to just move buildings, and then come up with a 2 months deadline to any constructor company.
But that's what they always do to software.
About the posture. Folks, I had a neurosurgery on my spine 8 month ago because of hernia explosion. It was painful and I almost lost my leg (got partial paralysis in my feet). Now I am on rehab and 80% normal, but still feeling shitty. All the problems start from bad posture and lack of activity - sports. Be careful with your body, it becomes fragile under work routine pressure and inactivity.
gonna tell you one - I was in the team when there were couple persons who were like "if we don't have daily standups online, we feel abandoned, like we don't have a team at all". Then we introduced some additional "coffee meet" - just a chit chat for teammates, and those two folks they were always silent. Once asked they simply said "Well we didn't mean to talk, we feel good in silence, but really need that atmosphere of discussion happening around"
Haha bunch of clowns
Women in the workplace...
@@anthonylancer had many men like this as well. big wtf
@@anthonylancerlol wtf dudes tend to be way more antisocial in the workplace than women... wtf are u on about
@@anthonylancerincel spotted btw
We've never done any "sprint catchup" anywhere I've been. If we did not make the things in the sprint, they were just moved to the next sprint and that sprint was adjusted accordingly.
Sprints are never planned any further than the next sprint, and they are just the highest priority tasks from the backlog.
I would absolutely refuse to do any overwork sprint catchup if asked, only thing I would do overwork for, would be critical production bugs, and I'm pretty sure most of the people I've worked with would be the same.
Yep, and I would expect that overtime to turn into time off the next week.
So, basically Kanban? :P
sprints are so dumb. just plan enough ahead so as to not run out of tickets, that's it.
We don’t have sprints where I work. My manager decides what the next set of tasks is for each of us and we give him regular updates on our progress.
@@handlechar568sprints are good for one thing, if you have a good idea of your capacity (velocity) and you have a specific outcome that needs to be done in a particular time, then it allows you to lay out estimated tasks specifically for that thing, compare to capacity, and say yes or no, then force the scope discussion.
I've done this a few times, and often there's a version where you can see you'll run over a tad and can negotiate a day 1 MVP with a plan to follow up with the most valuable extras nice and early.
When you're 20 ergonomics is 'bullshit'. When coming up on 50 it's the first thing you consider after where the bathroom is.
We recently had a sprint where almost half the items weren't completed, so we just skipped planning for next sprint and used it to complete the work. To go fast, you need to go slow.
Also, people misunderstood the meaning of the agile manifesto when it says "over COMPREHENSIVE documentation". The idea was to create a better way to work than waterfall, which was all documentation up front. Architectural design up front is alright. You can spend time on it. Also, you can draw diagrams to validate your ideas. But you can also build some POC alongside with it. You can start fiddling away with some skeleton of an app that you might or might not discard. You can also document the thing while you're working, to enable everyone else to use it as well.
There's nothing fun when you have a simple Lambda function that hasn't been updated on 3 years, nobody bothered to write a README, nobody bothered to write comments and it can't be redeployed because the tooling has been updated, and if you take down that lambda apprently your whole website shuts down. So now we have 20 engineers swarming to fix this problem.
So document your stuff, people. Just don't write up a guidebook about your app before you write any code.
When the Agile Manifesto was written project documentation was prevalent and time consuming. THIS was the documentation they were talking about, not technical documentation. Technical documentation is as critical in an agile world and it has always been and will always be.
Somehow, in 10 years, nobody will even guess what you mean by "lambda"
@@timgwallis I actually don't generally mind scrum that much. Though some people make it seem like they deal with hours of scrum rituals every day, and I haven't seen that yet. I have maybe 3 hours of meetings a week. But as someone who has had to maintain software that was written 10+ years ago where nobody remembers what the actual business requirements were, and the product management solutions changed two or three times so old discussions have been lost -- sometimes some more comprehensive product-level documentation would be nice...
I don't want to write it though. :D
@@AaronPadenthe way I think about it is if I had to onboard someone, is there a set of documentation I can point them to that will help them understand what it is we're doing and why?
That will be different for different products, like I've worked in financial systems where a reasonable level of documentation for the accounting parts was necessary because it's not implicitly obvious. If you're going to make any changes, you don't want to have to do a discovery piece with a bunch of accountants to understand how not to fuck up the financial ledgers.
If you're doing crud methods with some validation, the required documentation threshold is much lower.
I've asked to implement a system at work whereby a project cannot be signed off as completed unless someone who hasn't worked on the project can deploy it without any help. Someone else should be able to look at your README and get shit running and deployed if they have a reasonable amount of dev knowledge
I was in a company a couple of years ago where I was embedded with 6 development teams as an infrastructure engineer. If I missed a meeting i would hear about it immediately. 6 scrum meetings per day, needless to say there was just no possible way actual work could get done.
I feel you. As the only infrastructure (well we have more but none who manage k8s besides me) guy I have to cater to 30 devs organized in 5 (now 3 after a bit of reshuffeling) teams and everyone cries a river when I miss their stupid meetings.
That's crazy! We wouldn't include an external resources in ours unless there's a good reason. We do have outsiders join us from time to time, they typically get the general 5min updates and then we can have a bit of a chat at the end if necessary but it's not normal. Typically only when it's something like a dependency resource like infra where we need a bit more of a complex discussion re work and priority.
That said, most of our comms at this level happen through dedicated channels (on slack) and at the leads level if necessary for planning reasons like we need some significant dedicated time in a couple of weeks or so.
@@xAtNighti feel you! The same for me, as the only Platform Engineer with experience in k8s
Man, making half an hour reaction from 5 min vid is pure talent. Love you prime
"SCRUM is based on the Agile Manifesto much like a hotdog is based on the concept of meat". It was at that moment that we knew that this guy was cooking bitter pills...
I like vertical monitors, but for two specific uses only. Having my "console output" there and reading PDF's.
Been a game dev for 8 years, never had any major troubles in any friends team, a few time ago i joined some friends on a new project and he had this shitty thing going on, we had daily meetings and so on, and i was always thinking: "but we already deliver all the tasks in time, we can communicate through Discord properly, why do we need to lose our time on those meetings?", 1 week later and 2 friends had abandoned the team and i was the third one 2 weeks later 😅
Now having SCRUM with remote teams, now thats another dimension of horror.
And of course the execs end up blaming remote and not scrum.
Once had a team of 25 people with 3 or 4 remote in wildly different timezones. Those were fun standups.
i have done daily standups 100% remote with 20 people on a call that lasted for 45 + mins, made me want to smash the screen with my head
@@josevargas686 we had a team of 4 and they took 45+ minutes plus every single day. It was hell
Vertical monitors are fantastic. They are so much better for. websites, terminals, documents any sort of list based applications, so chat, spotify etc.
I have one large monitor flanked by two vertical monitors and one smaller monitor/ drawing tablet and its ideal.
When developing: Terminal on the left vertical, code on the main one in front of me, website/ application on the right and my task list on the smaller monitor then switch spaces for documentation/ the web or teams (ewww) etc.
But yeah poor posture is a killer.
Only being able to have 1 super long and thin "channel" instead of being able to have two to four regularly sized windows is just never worth it to me.
@@Sammysapphira Err you can divide up your screen how ever you want in any orientation.
I have generally got 3-4 terminals vertically stacked on my left vertical monitor (or just using tabs if I want the full length for tail logging).
When I am working on websites I have the website and then below it the dev tools for that website on my right vertical.
My main screen (43 inch 4k) gets split normally into either 2 or 4 different code editing windows/tabs.
The world is your oyster.
To me this configuration is the optimal one. I could do with a little more resolution dpi on my main monitor. Maybe if it was a 5k it would be perfect but other than that I have no complaints about my 3 * 4k + 1 * 1080p real estate and configuration.
I agree, vertical monitors are fucking great for code. I feel more in control, if I got my vertical display on the left with main file of a project always open.
@denisblack9897 after hearing your endorsements I am now open to trying them. When I first saw them I thought they were ludicrous but now I like to try it out.
About 0.000...1% of this is from Uncle Bob. They kept a few of his words. They took Bobs molehill, shoved it aside and built a mountain in its place. There's just a few molecules left of the molehill under the mountain.
24:40 This is the honest truth being on a team with people that don't want to put in any effort to actually become great at their job makes the job miserable for those that are putting in that extra effort.
I agree about the moving of the goal posts, or anything that feels like an endless marathon. I remember when we went remote, my teammate and I had at least one daily meeting to talk about the project, and while on the one hand that really motivated me to dig into the problems we discussed, it also burned me out. I felt the same being an engineering manager - I felt like there was never a break, even when there was. It was this constant state of anxiety about what you should be or could be doing when you're not doing it.
I think the biggest problem with scrum and agile is the fact that greedy ladder-climbers could latch on to the buzzwords without actually following the process *on the business side*. I only ever saw it implemented as chunked-up waterfall without all of the up-front planning for waterfall to succeed. The main feature they actually used was sprints, and that's about it. No working builds/prototypes every sprint. No customer involvement as promised.
It would have been much better if they had made some organization and license out the rights to use the terms. If they audit you and find you're not following the process? Boom, you can't say you use agile/scrum. Then we'd not have a thousand different understandings of the process with thousands of different people selling training.
It's just too easy for the rest of the organization to force out any aspect of the process that doesn't fit their status quo.
We started tracking time spent in meetings into separate tasks (marked as "urgent").
Еhe number of meetings and time on meetings was significantly reduced.
He has a superpower that allows him to turn video that's 4 minutes into 27 minutes
Each squeak of his chair(?) made me think he was gonna start playing the sad violin from spongebob as a sound effect.
I enjoy hating on Scrum as much as the next guy but I don't like sniffing my own farts.
"Annoyingly efficient" is not how I would describe most teams. Software development was a mess long before Scrum was a thing.
the problem isn't software development, its the MBAs full of crap entering a field that's super young and where everything is basically handcrafted and trying to manage it like an automated chair factory that produce the same chair 20.000.000 times.
the entire idea of the agile manifesto was producing visible results instead of planning everything up-front or just doing stupid administrative busywork.
We really need a get shit done manifesto instead. Just do it, and its done when its done.
Also, software never is done, companies have fixed rate contracts, why do they care about deadlines ? it literally doesn't matter, take the cost of the team, then multiply by 3 and push to the client, work forever, isn't that what companies want ? forever making money ? why having an end date ? do they put end dates to their business too ? of course not.
deadlines, what a ludicrous concept. software is not a product, it is a service.
Replace Scrum with JEDI, Just Effin Do It.
I also had the experience that scrum just added more work to my day. When I worked for one company, I organised my day so that all my meetings were before 2pm but I was still never finished before 7/8pm. My boss seemed to never believe that I had so much non-dev work to do and so expected that I'd be putting in 7-8 dev hours per day, despite being able to demonstrate I couldn't ad my continual bitching about being so busy - he just seemed to think I was lazy. That and covid lockdowns made me burn out really hard
bro nobody actively works 7-8 hours a day consistently on an 8 hour shift, it's just unsustainable.
should be more like 4-6 productive hours a day anyway, rest is switching focus, communicating, taking breaks, etc
@@caminhaodelixo2 yeah, he also didn't believe that focus switching required time
@@CaptainToadUK we gotta just point blank call these people retards at this point. if it loses my job so be it. far too much stupidity going around
Scrum - Some Comically Ridiculous Useless Meetings
Here to solve problems you didn’t know you had. Tag line for a ton of enterprise software
Scrum was the beginning of the exit from the agile manifesto and back to old school code waterfall dogmatic process.
"Poker is supposed to be filled with cigars, and old fashions, and betting and all the fun things" --prime, 2024
This must be toxic workplace stuff. Scrum is a very simple framework for self-organizing teams to work efficiently. It should not take up much time or have much bureaucracy. Biting off two weeks of work from the planned project, deciding how to get it done, and making sure to ask for help if you're stuck in the morning is quite a decent framework, honestly. Please tell me what is wrong with that.
It’s a matter of who’s doing what whom. If developers decide to adopt scrum, it will meet the needs of devs. If management decides to adopt scrum, it will serve the needs of management. It’s easy to pervert a process. To make a process work, you need people to agree on what’s valuable and use the process to achieve that. What people are upset about are asymmetric power dynamics that create toxic workplace cultures.
I always push on the scrum master to keep all the meetings minimal and when people came out with personal stuff I told the SM to cut that out in the stand up we should organize a team build up meeting on fridays in the last hour so we can play, talk or something.
That’s a pretty nice 15-minute standup you got there, could we turn it into a 1-hour status meeting?
-Management
In my experience Scrum ceremonies start pretty easily regressing into repeating the same meeting all over again with a different title.
Planning: let's go through the unfinished tickets we have and tickets we are hoping to work on.
Dailies: let's go through the tickets we worked yesterday and that we are hoping to work on today.
Grooming: let's pour over the tickets.
Retro: let's go through how we are happy we managed to finish the tickets we finished and again how there where these tickets we failed to finish.
Although there is a variant of this process where dailies are used for a different purpose: discussing which meetings we had yesterday and which we are expecting to have today.
Though you are mostly correct and I do agree, you did not describe a retro. The only useful thing of Scrum to me is the retrospective. What you described is the review.
Retrospective is bringing up any issues there have been during development, or discussing things that can progress the development further. Could be that there has been a lack of clear communication between the team, which need addressing for obvious reason.
If there has been no issues, the meeting is done.
Retro means a lot of different things to a lot of people. For me it should mainly be about process improvement, figuring out if we did something suboptimally and if we should take lessons from the period at stake. But instead of that I have quite often seen retros degrade into just talking about the tickets. When that happens the completed ones get mentioned into the "what went well pile", and the ones that were not completed go to the "to improve pile or did not go well pile".@@TheMathias95
@@TheMathias95 Yeah retro for us lives in a vacuum. You're free to say things critical of choices that was taken, complain of stakeholders and stupid shit the company is doing to ruin our daily work. The key is to not bring that outside of the meeting of course. And also use the retro to change your working process. Think dailies take too long? Suggest reducing it. Reviews boring? Say so.
I found vertical monitor setup good for frontend work, where you have a browser in full screen on it and have the devtools open in the bottom half. This gives you a roughly normal aspect ratio for the actual viewport.
My man's such a high level Rustacean he has to weed his garden sideways
"Silicon Valley spine" - I haven't heard that one.
Otherwise known as plain old "bad ergonomics".
But I do 100% agree.
Backlog and Time Boxing are actually useful things.
"Everyone has fun with the PP, nobody has fun with pee" - ThePrimeTime
As someone who has been a professional software engineer for 15 years and has to go to physical therapy and OT for all kinds of pain, watching you ban someone for saying posture doesn't matter made my damn day
Three minutes in and I got more use out of this video than I expected
Looked up Silicon Valley Syndrome and realized that I have shown symptoms of it for over a year from improper posture
Found a neck and back specialist near me
Thanks!
12:00 In psychology, there is a well-known bias-though I can't recall its specific name-where presenting the positive aspects first and then the negative ones tends to make the person feel unhappy. Conversely, if you present the negative aspects first and then the positive ones, the person will generally feel happier, and think you are more sencire. On a related note, I find planning poker to be quite frustrating.
Portrait-orientation monitors made a ton of sense in a particular point in time, until about 5 years ago when giant 2160x1440 and 4k monitors became affordable. A 21" IPS monitor turned on its side is just fantastic for looking at code in your primary screen. But once the top of the monitor gets outside of your vertical peripheral vision the ergonomics stop making sense. Nowadays you get almost the same amount of usable screen real estate on a 27" 4k monitor with two code panes side by side.
Neck story:
Remote for about 10 years. Previous apartments I had no good desk setup, hunched over with laptop; sucked balls. Moved to house, good desk setup, but still had keyboard and monitor stupidly setup.
Started doing jiu jitsu, 6 months in, neck got cranked and bam: 4 herniated discs. 2 months of horrible pain, radial shooting pain down the arm, physical therapy, massages, etc. Before the incident, a physical therapist was working on my posture; we suspected that years of bad posture is really what caused the neck injury in BJJ.
So.. You may not know you have a posture problem, but a car accident or sport injury, whatever, down the road could make an incident far worse.
More specific details: Something like being hunched over, for example, overworks your chest muscles, but weakens back muscles. Weakened back muscles means traps have to be overworked for support, and increase strain on chest muscle means front of neck is stronger than the rear. All of this sets up for putting pressure on the discs in the spine from one side to the other, causing bulging discs. In an extreme event, a bulging disc can then become herniated or ruptured.
Tip: I also found that getting a 32" 4k monitor, but increasing the zoom size to 125% or 150% still gives you tons of screen real estate, but really helped me with subtly lurching forward trying to focus on the screen
4:00 I'm not really sure why a definition of done is bad. In fact, I'd argue that you're a fool if you don't have a solid definition of “done” and are working towards an imaginary moving goalpost.
Point is that a good SWE should know what it takes to build proper software with tests and CI/CD. Definition of Done are like training wheels for those needing a checklist, and thus it becomes a rule rather than a guideline and stops giving value and instead brewing conflict. "Hey you did not do that unit test that's in the DoD!" "It's cool it didnt make sense in this context" "Sorry brah, do it or I'll tell". Scrum Master vs SWE.
@@JohanFrenning I'm not thinking in terms of a scrum master or anything like that. I think of definitions of “done” in the sense of larger software components that must be included in the end product in the sense of a more granular service level agreement. In this sense, I think DoDs are essential. However, the more frequently practiced DoDs of “muh unit test”, in this respect I agree they are worthless.
@@Manker00 Yeah in scrum DoD is the actual check-list to allow a developer to move a ticket from In Progress to Done. That's why it's portrayed as bad in the video.
Jeera ticket one Laugh in a crowd, the rest are silent, then the whole crowd laughs as the man shakes his head
You should watch some Allen Holub stuff. He outlines nicely how scrum and agile were ruined. But it's basically how you say. Scrum and agile should've been a way to fine-tune XP and interfacing with management to the needs, abilities and preferences of each team individually, not a one-size-fits-all unchangeable process.
You’re spot on with having to do more work. I spend my time in meetings and then end up trying to code late on in the evening after a day filled with nonsense.
I am so glad we have scrum to make it so people who don’t know a thing about writing software can make all of the important decisions about how companies write software
25:10 100%. When you're relying on somebody that lets you down because they couldn't be bothered to do their job, it makes everything worse. Either you're delayed from hitting your tagets, or you have to do their job as well as your own.
According the question from Prime in minute 6:43.
Exactly every sprint at my old job was that way. We had so much meetings, that there were not a single chance to even believe to achive every task we hat committed to. But every single Manager was coping that next time we would get the target and we would plan again as if we could work normal hours coping to our selfs that this might happen this sprint.
Btw. there is an even worse form of Scrum out there it is called SAFE. SAFE can be boiled down to Scrum * 2. You have the the normal scrum meetings + the occasional SAFE backlog refinement but every x weeks you are effectively rendered useless because then you have Scum meetings with and for all the Scum teams which are working on the Project.
planning poker can actually be fun if you bet the estimations are wrong or that the requirements will change before the sprint is over (and that bet is gonna win most of times)
I very strongly believe that promising / talented juniors should be thrown at hard and isolated problems and given lots of time to solve them. It may not be as nicely designed as a senior's nor will it be done as quickly however that junior will learn vastly more than he would by smashing out a bunch of tiny features.
I like this idea. Hard doesn’t have to mean technically difficult, either. I changed from banking data software to GIS, so even in the same tech stack I was completely new to the business domain, and certainly the 30 year old codebase and workflows. I’ve learned a lot by being given large tasks and allowed to take my time and immerse myself in them to learn about all those aspects. A lot of companies seem to have a ton of red tape even to add simple things.
What distro is he using? can see he has screen tearing
windows
Prime knows about the screen tearing. He used to use popOS, not sure if he's still using it
@@cyanlight7 If that is so, he can fix it by setting: "ForceFullCompositionPipeline" "true" in his conf file. On arch picom fixes it.
One thing that I have heard in defence about planning poker is that it's more about the conversations that it causes instead of the result. Basically, if someone rates it out of how everyone else rated it, then they might have noticed something different and that may be important.
unit test in SQL?
what is the correct position for monitors? 🤔
Projected into your retina. Neuralink.
They should face you, not the wall. The rest are implementation details.
So, are you arranging the Helio pad schedule for tomorrow? Afternoon works!
Interesting 11:00
I'm remote right now, and my team has a dedicated session in the week for just chatting and getting along... we only see each other once a year.
I think it works because we don't waste time in the daily (or other scrum meeting)
Dude speaking of monitors i spent 4 months at an intership and had a bad setup now im getting back surgeries like it didnt cause the main issue but it quickly made it way way worse like doc said it wouldnt did the surgery if i didnt sit like that for 8 hours a day for 4 months plus the chair i had was bad bad
I had Arnold's Neuralgia because a shifty company decided to send me a microsoft surface to work on it and i didn't realize I was having a bad position on that tiny laptop. The back of the neck got swollen and was really painful I though I had cancer. It was just bad position.
You were tilting your head forward when you said you don't like her tilting her head forward, btw.
Pulling weeds was an epic comment and comparasont. First, you reach certan age when you find find weeding even enjojable and do it voluntary. I myself wonder about this phenomenon: maybe with age we want to get used to the soil, where will we end up?
Second, agree that progress along the shortest rather than the longest line or along individual areas is more visible and motivating.
The guy who talks about his dog is probably one who doesn't give a f about the standup and about everyone else's tasks, because they are unrelated to his task and he doesn't give a f about how complicated Jerry's task was
I work with 3 or 4 people that use vertical monitors. I have no idea how they do it.
I love my vertical monitor. How dare you.
Single horizontal monitor gang
@@ficolas2 LOL!
I love my vertical monitor, but the editor generally goes on my primary (horizontal) monitor, the vertical monitor is for terminals and debuggers and documentation.
What alternative approach would you guys recommend? I hate SCRUM, so I want to find something better for my team
I definitely think there is a version of Scrum that works, because I've been on a team that judiciously followed the process and it did work.
But I've also been on projects where Scrum really became an anchor dragging us down.
It's really easy to get Scrum wrong. One of the big problems is that a lot of people selling Scrum act like you can tailor the process or pick and choose bits to adopt. That's not really true, it it should be done as a last resort. Stand-ups should be 5 minutes. Sprint planning should be no more than an hour. Sprint retrospective 30 minutes. There should be actually be design meetings and requirements gathering before you start your first sprint. Breaking down user stories into achievable tasks during sprint planning is also important. Also, committing to the amount of work you agreed to get done is a big part of it and you should be empowered to argue your case and downsize the deliverables of a sprint so your team is on board and committed.
7:49 And someone is walking behind you dropping weed seeds. That person is a product manager.
8:42 inb4 "BDUF, LOL. Do you use punch cards or paper tape or do they go mushy in the waterfall, ROFLhundredeleventyoneoneone."
13:59 I've never seen a not-side tangent.
Have the misfortune of having been put into Scrum for the past 4 weeks. I already hate the constant meeting massacre. And since I am part of multiple projects... I will have even more meetings.
I never use multi monitor when I code. I use one screen and always full screen.
And normally one VS project at one time.
That way I am more focused on the code, and if I need 2 editors open at the same time then something is wrong in my code.
The code you see in one screen should explain everything by itself. Sometimes you need to jump into that code, but when you go back the code should be clear.
If it is not clear then modify the code so it becomes clear. That way 10 years from now you get your code back, it is still easy to understand just old syntax.
We are mostly remote. So we have "makabre" which means mandatory coffee break. Where we just talk about personal stuff. So we get to know the colleagues. Then we don't block stand-ups with it. 30 min a week.
now that twitch content creation is "the 40 hours" what do you do for the 20?
The part about the 17:30 where every bit you do has to be documented for HR XD
This is what happens when I get beers with dev homies. Things get... passionate.
SCRUM MENTIONED
(Non-industrialized) Scrum is a fairly great framework when the team is overall more junior or inexperienced, sometimes even as a starting point for more senior teams. In all other cases it’s just 20%+ overhead and / or a requirement which cannot be negotiated
17:00 - its "veet" 😅
Whats a monitor O.O
I was working in real scrum once. It took us half year to jump in but after this time we delivered everything and much faster than teams working without scrum. But it was only one time when scrum worked, mostly because it was implemented correctly
The only reason I have a vertical monitor is because my desk is to small and I am to lazy to fix it. It provides no use to me.
vertical monitors are good for code only, but things get wonky when you try to use that monitor for other stuff. usually you only have room for random small windows stacked up to the top
Scrum is AWESOME.
Re: vertical monitors and posture: vertical monitors are best positioned lower, so that the extra space goes off the bottom instead of the top. You don't have to look up if the tops of your monitors are aligned. This also means that vertical monitors should be smaller than your main horizontal monitor(s), considering similar aspect ratios. Looking up is definitely bad for your neck but that alone shouldn't be the cause for bashing vertical monitors.
i have realized that all the pain i have in my whole body is because i have used my body wrong from top to toe, and now i have wasted 10 years off my life which i could have done something with a long time ago. listen to the man.
The biggest scam is thinking people separate out libraries from the application instead of just making an unholy amalgamation that is impossible to parse by someone not there for five years.
If your company has those big catchup efforts because theyre falling behind, then theyre not using velocity to plan appropriately.
if you guys commit 60 but only get 40 done then the next sprint youre not supposed to go above 40.
Part of the problem is that management will say they want scrum, but only introduce like half of the pieces. In scrum, the dev team is supposed to communicate a deadline to management based on how quickly they can accomplish tasks. If management is giving the team a deadline then its not scrum.
A quote that stuck with me in scrum training was "Scrum is a lot like chess. If you play chess with half the pieces and ignore some of the rules, then you're not actually playing chess and you're not going to enjoy the experience."
"back log grooming" fantasti-moco!
The point about firing is really underrated. Sometimes you just gotta let people go. This is not an american thing, it's a do-you-want-the-project-to-actually-work thing.
I am a project manager, and here is the real issue: 90% of the project managers want to micromanage the team.
I am usually among the 10%, but the most common situation is that some manager above is pushing to micromanage the team, because they and to "know how is the progress"
And this sucks for good PMs that know how to give the team the space they need to do their work
Briscola not mentioned. :(
Just a comment about: "You have no product" This is actually good, you don't need something to make money or even to solve a real problem, most of the problems in the world can be solved using an excel file, and that's not bad. But that nothing usually grow into something, and then is where the "product" start to exist, and there is where Unit testing, documentation, etc etc is worthy.
Me "I think that will take an hour" What I say " that is going to take me 2 weeks." Me at the end of the sprint, Ops says it take 3 months to open a port.
at my job at [big tech adjacent] thats commonly hated because of scrum (in my mind), we don't do scrum, standups are 8 minutes if not in slack text 3 times a week, and we do virtually no scrummy rituals. even we know it's shit and slows you down, and software is used to enable it daily.
Scrum has some good parts. Those are the first to be removed when implementing it in the office.
I wish all unit test libraries that are included with the language should include mutation testing, because this would improve the tests and might actually give better meaning to coverage. There have been many solutions to better testing, but then you to create twice the code for tests.
You've sold me on the vertical monitor 👍
So wholesome to see the kids at the end hehe!