Rooms

We had a breakout room where we ate food, and took short breaks. This could also be used as an ad-hoc meeting room.

As more people joined the company, people expressed concern that the lack of space will mean the breakout room will be turned into an office. We were assured by the Head of Development that this would never happen.

Within two months, a team moved into the breakout room, meaning you just had to eat at your desk or fight for the small table near the kitchen.

When we moved office, we had a breakout room, in addition to an Innovation Room. Innovation is important and it will never be taken away from us:

you could dedicate some time to learning.
Why not take a book in to read?
You could host training sessions for your team members…

Or it could be used as a temporary office when we ran out of room for desks! That team wasn’t happy when they were in a fairly claustrophobic space, whilst everyone else was in an open-plan office. It also has glass walls, so people could just stare at them and laugh at their misfortune.

A few months later, after that team’s project was complete; the room was reassigned back to an Innovation Room. However, in reality, it was everyone’s second favourite meeting room.

Several months later, our favourite meeting room was then assigned as a permanent office, which means the Innovation Room was promoted to “everyone’s favourite meeting room”. Shortly after that, we lost our breakout room.

The lesson here is that special rooms are never safe.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we get rid of the office and everyone just works at home. It wouldn’t be efficient, but when do they really care about efficiency?

Also, what are we going to do about holding interviews, or other private meetings?

The Code Location War

There’s a repository that contains basic UI controls owned by Team A.

Team B have some specialised controls and suggested that the more complex controls in Team A’s repository are moved over to Team B’s repository instead. Both teams were happy and agreed on when to do this.

However, a Manager from Team C stated that he didn’t believe this was the right thing to do. So much so; that he has then had a meeting with some other Managers who also agree with his viewpoint.

So let’s recap here. Numerous developers in two teams have agreed who should own some code. A Manager from a completely different team, and has no reason to care where this code is located; only that it works – is unhappy. Not only that, but he has also gone out of his way to drum up support from two higher-ranking Managers who have even less reason to care.

Why is this even a thing?

So an hour long debate was arranged and the decision was that the code should be owned by the original creators; Team A. I didn’t know the outcome of the meeting at this time. However, no one actually did anything after the meeting. There again, it wasn’t even handed over properly in the first place.

I found this out when I heard one of the members of Team A talk about how they are gonna address one of the Bugs in one of these controls. If this was handed over properly, those Bugs would have transferred over to Team B. I pointed out that Team B should be doing this work, and one of the members of Team A agreed with me. However, the manager of Team A, who was on the debate and should know the outcome of the meeting – was confused why Team B had “moved” (well, duplicated) the code into their repository. (The code was moved after Team A and Team B had agreed to do so, and it was this that triggered the meeting to discuss it. The manager of Team A should have also known this).

She then had to ask the manager of Team C what the outcome of the meeting was, and he confirmed Team A should own the code, and he also seemed unaware that Team B had taken the code. He then said he is going to organise another meeting with Team B to discuss the outcome.

How many meetings do we need? Why wasn’t the outcome of the debate passed on to Team A and B? Why are two managers who were involved in the debate confused about the original situation?

Another meeting happened at the request of Team B. This meeting was hosted as a conference call on Slack, and as I always rant; there’s a 15 person limit. This shouldn’t be a problem, because why would 15 people be invited to this meeting? Well, we don’t live in a normal world. The funny thing is, the Team B member that requested the meeting couldn’t even join due to hitting the limit. Brilliant.

Frontend Violation

I overheard a Product Owner tell her colleague how much she hates another manager. She said “She has been messing with my frontend!” which I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a funny pun or not, but it sure was funny.

I was convinced I’d misheard her, but as she explained further, it sounded like it was actually an accidental pun. She explained that her ordered backlog of work had been intentionally sabotaged. She made reference to a “Frontend backlog” so I assumed she had 2 streams of work: a “Front-end” and “Back-end”, and it was the Frontend one that had been sabotaged.

I’d advise that you don’t touch people’s frontends without permission, and definitely don’t do it in work-time.

Disaster Recovery

Recently, my employer has been trying to implement a Disaster Recovery plan in case of some extreme event. The example they gave was if the building was razed to the ground by fire, and all our PC’s were gone; how could we recover?

So they ordered laptops for the entire department, and the idea is that employees take them home at night and bring them in the next day.

I agree, it does prevent the company being screwed if the whole building goes up in flames, but it increases risk of theft, because it is much easier to rob an individual on the street, or in their house.

The office has cameras, multiple doors, security guard – so to rob a computer or laptop from the building is harder than stealing from an individual outside the office.

Another negative is that the laptop can be damaged in transit. All it takes is for me to slam a multipack of drinks directly on it; bang.

I wasn’t happy about packing/unpacking a laptop into my bag each day and transporting it to/from work. However, we actually implemented it just in time, because as you know; the Coronavirus outbreak meant that everyone was sent home. If everyone has a laptop, everyone has a means of working; no excuses (well, apart from Beavis).

In terms of my blog, I anticipate there will be fewer new stories since I’m mainly sat in solitude and don’t have great visibility of what everyone is doing, and don’t overhear the banter.

The blog won’t see a slowdown for a while though, because I was churning out the stories in February, so I have them queued to be published over the next month or so. So if you read some story of mine about being in an office or physical location, there’s no need to doubt its authenticity – it just happened weeks ago, before the outbreak. There could be many stories about working from home published during May, but I really hope we return to the office by then.

Slack Police

I’ve said in previous blogs there’s a team that are extreme Slack fanboys, and will try and drum up support for Slack, and hate for Microsoft Teams.

One of their team members questioned if anyone else was having network issues because his Slack conference call was horrendous. People started replying saying that they have long since abandoned Slack for conference calls because:

A) Sometimes members of your team cannot be heard

B) The audio quality is often poor

C) There’s a limit of 15 participants.

D) Calls cannot be recorded

It’s a simple fact that Microsoft Teams is vastly superior for conference calls. You can debate all you want about the text messaging features, emoji support and layout. Arguing for Slack conference calls is just ridiculous fanboy talk.

Quickly, the chief Slack Fanboy then posts something along the lines of:

“Please don’t post any Slack vs Teams debates. I don’t want to respond to these conversations”
Slack Fanboy

But yet, this is coming from the guy that made an emoji which is “Anti-teams” and will use it against anyone that mentions Teams. He also doesn’t have to respond to conversations on Slack; he can just ignore them. He often fuels the fire, but then complains when he loses the debate.

The Line Manager Handover

I’ve stated in a previous blog that when management changes hands, I believe the current manager should be the one that announces it. I felt annoyed when my team’s management changed hands and it was announced by the incoming manager.

It’s happened again, but this time on a personal level. I get a meeting request for a “Line Manager Handover” from my future line manager (Alan). Surely, my current line manager (Louise) should have told me this was happening, rather than me finding out via a meeting invite?

What does the meeting even entail? I thought it would be a pointless meeting and it was. I reckon a lot of things should be discussed between Alan and Louise, and not with me present in the meeting.

In the meeting, my future manager, Alan turned to Louise and asked “is there any problems with attendance or illness I should know about?”.

Ridiculously rude.

Obviously, it’s a good question, but not one to ask my manager as if I wasn’t in the room. How can she answer that truthfully anyway? She wasn’t gonna say:

“yeah, there’s a few times where he rings up sick but I have a large suspicion he is faking it. I was actually gonna flag it up with HR if it happens again.”
Fictional quote

I find it bizarre that managers often show a lack of “people skills”. Not a great start.

The Sad, Dejected Presentation

We had a meeting that involved multiple teams. At one point we went back to our desks and talked about the plan for the next Quarter. We looked at the main features, put them in order of how we wanted to tackle them. We considered the length of time they would take, and which ones could be done in parallel. The Product Owner (PO) drew up a nice Gantt chart with rectangles showing the size, and the rows showing the parallel approach.

We had an hour, but took 45 minutes, then rejoined the meeting. The PO did our presentation describing all the work items and the justification to the order. The host then asks the next team’s presenter to come up.

The main developer shakes his head, another developer looks down and plays with his phone. Their manager, who is normally really confident, speaks in a dejected tone.

“We don’t Story Point our work, so we didn’t know the size of the work. We simply didn’t have enough time to plan, so we just wrote down a few bits of work that was coming up.”

Pretty much the end of their presentation.

Here are my comments:

We knew about this meeting a week in advance. How come they didn’t think about their work in that time?
1 hour was more than enough time to fill in the form for the presentation.
We hadn’t Story Pointed our work either, and we don’t have clear requirements, but we still came up with a respectable plan.
Despite our PO explaining what each feature on our plan was, this team made no attempt to explain what any of their work was. Surely if someone does a presentation before you, you need to make some attempt at matching the quality.

In their section of potential risks, they mention they don’t have a PO, so struggle to prioritise their work.

Here are my comments:

Although we have a PO, I think a lot of our prioritisation is actually driven by the development team. The PO adds the overall idea, but we tell him how feasible it is and what order it needs to be completed in.
Out of all the teams in the business, I think you can argue they are the team that has the lowest need for a PO, hence they haven’t hired one for them. Their requirements are driven by other internal team’s requests. They can easily decide on the priority by what they are asking for.
In our appraisals, we are encouraged to provide evidence of times where we have stepped up, and this situation is a prime example where you can show how organised/responsible you are. Making little attempt during a meeting, and being disorganised during your project when you have a backlog of 100 bugs/feature requests from other teams is a bit irresponsible. Surely you can judge how serious the bugs are, and how important the features are for the business. It’s not like they have no work on their board; they really do have 100+ items on there.

TLDR

Someone asked for the documentation that will be sent alongside our software releases. Some clients require specific documentation. A Manager responds, attaching a couple of documents. I have a look at them to see what the deal is.

One of them began like this:

Summary
TLDR The software is tested using the following ...

“Too Long Didn’t Read”? In a formal document sent out to customers!? Really? I really hope we actually haven’t sent that yet, and this was just in draft stage.

TLDR is the extremely informal way of saying “Summary” so why is it included in a Summary section? It’s a redundant phrase and definitely not appropriate for the context.

King Of All Excuses

Beavis seems the king of working from home. I don’t think I’ve known anyone work from home as much as he does. His excuses often seem strangely worded. Most people will just say “My daughter is poorly” or “I’m getting work done on the house”, you know; simple, straight to the point, and not disclosing personal details.

Last week, at 10am Beavis wrote something like “I have a poorly pip. She was meant to get up at 7 but got up at 9, so I have to work at home”. I had to read it a couple of times to realise that “pip” was presumably his daughter. But then I wondered how he didn’t get her up at 7. If he really couldn’t get her up because she was ill, then surely he would know by 8 that she ain’t going to school, and he ain’t going to work. At 10am, why is Beavis declaring he isn’t coming in, when he knew that long ago that he wasn’t coming in?

His excuse this week was that it was “Pip’s first day at School so I’m taking my parents down. Once they are sorted, then I’ll be back to work as normal”. Again, I had to re-read it a few times to make sense of it. He meant he was taking his daughter and parents to the School. His daughter will stay there, and he will drive his parents back. Now they know where the School is located, they will handle the child-care from now on. The “taking my parents down” phrasing sounded funny, like he is gonna kill them.

However the next day, he is working at home again because he “needs to take care of the bloody parents”. Dammit Beavis, you have really gone and killed them and now you have to bury the bodies.

Also, if Pip hadn’t started going to School, where does she normally go that her illness prevented her from going to? If his parents were free to take her to School, why couldn’t they have looked after her when she was ill? Presumably they did look after her prior to her starting School.

Too many unanswered questions. I think he is lying his way out of his murder spree.

Recently, the Coronavirus has been becoming more prominent. Now there is strong advice that if you show any symptoms, then you need to self-isolate, which means you have to work from home for at least a week. So it was no surprise to me when Beavis declares himself as self-isolating.

I don’t know how he gets away with it. There is no way someone can have such bad luck that he gets impacted by all these personal and family afflictions.

Jenkins

There’s a developer that is a massive fan of Jenkins. I’ve never used Jenkins, but he wrote a large post about why he insisted his team migrate to it, and I didn’t understand any of it.

I found it interesting that at first he mentions moving away from AWS CodeBuild because it wasn’t clear if builds were passing or not. I don’t know how this was a problem. The builds are linked to Pull Requests and GitHub displays this clearly.

What I found more interesting is that later on, he then says that GitHub Actions is in its infancy so isn’t as powerful as Jenkins. Sure, but why were you using both CodeBuild and GitHub Actions?

Further to this, one of his advantages of using Jenkins was “Don’t have to pay for GitHub Actions”. Hang on, but you have to pay for a build sever to run Jenkins. How does that even make sense? He was running it on AWS, so was paying Amazon for a dedicated server anyway. I’m pretty sure CodeBuild and GitHub Actions are cheaper to run than a server.

He further justifies using Jenkins with the “everyone else is doing it” line. I’m not even sure if he can verify this claim, but he said “if you look at the big ,key players in the market you will ALWAYS find they have a Jenkins instance”.

He also mentions another team used to use it. Yes that is right “used to use”. Which team was it? The one he used to be in. It was his implementation, and as soon as he switched teams, his old team had binned Jenkins.

I do wish people would use facts in their proposals rather than chatting nonsense to suit their own agenda.