The Major Pointing Session

It has come to the Senior Management’s attention that the project is going to overrun. No surprise to anyone…well, except the managers. So they want a new estimate of how long it is going to take.

The best way to get an estimate is to ask each of the teams, then add the totals together, right?

Well, not in their minds, no. What they did is take a selection of staff, and book 2 all-day meetings to go through all the teams work!

When I have doing pointing sessions in the past, we usually do them for 2 hours max, and by that point, everyone gets tired and switches off. Some discussions really drag on as you debate how complicated features are, but that’s only if you know the requirements well.

If you are dragged into a meeting to discuss work you have never considered before, this is going to take longer, or people are just going to give wild estimates because they are estimating with incomplete knowledge.

So is it a good idea to bring people in who have incomplete knowledge, and also force them to estimate work they don’t care about for several hours straight? Well, no, obviously.

From what I witnessed, half the estimation team was present for both days, with the other half having different members; which probably made it even more inefficient and inconsistent.

The breakdown was roughly as follows:

3 Product Owners

2 Software Architects

2 Lead Developer

2 from Product Team

and my favourite selection… 1 Apprentice Developer.

Welcome to the world of Software Development! Here’s an all-day meeting to estimate work you don’t understand, and will be embarrassed in front of the experienced developers when your estimates are way off the mark.

The Great Slack Cull

Hundreds of people were removed from our Slack account for inactivity. This led to a massive backlash of complaints, so many got their accounts reinstated.

The manager that arranged the cull, stated that the analytics showed they didn’t use it, and so he requested to know if they have a reason for wanting an account.

When I checked, some of these people had only posted 20 messages prior. Not sure when they signed up, but it seems like they really weren’t using it, or getting their money’s worth out of it. It costs around £5 per user per month, so that is a waste.

When one person was challenged, he said he was informed it was mandatory to have Slack, yet his office didn’t use it and they preferred to use Microsoft Teams.

What I’d like to know is, why is their office using our department’s budget? They don’t work with us at all; they work on completely different software.

I think Slack is a waste anyway. a) The fact that there was a cull implies they are conscious of the budget and want to cut down, and b) it isn’t necessary for the department to function. We could just use Microsoft Teams which we already pay for.

Deliberately Deferring Work

The team was looking like it had failed to fix the bugs they had promised to do. With only a couple of days before the planned release, the managers need to make a decision. They talk about Seth, a Senior Developer who is regarded as one of the best in the company.

“Shall Seth jump in and fix loads of bugs?”

“No, because that will give a false impression of what the team can handle, then we will get too much work in the coming months.”
Team Manager

It’s like when it gets to the end of the tax year, and departments blow their money so that next year, they will get the same amount of budget allocation. If they underspend, then the finance department will likely reduce their budget since it seems they overestimated before.

In this case, we are reducing our commitment so we can keep our commitment low in future months. It might make it easier for everyone to manage, but is terrible for the end-user who has to wait longer for their bug fixes. It’s a really bad attitude to have. We should put quality first. If there are staff available, then use them to improve the quality.

How Many People Does It Take To Design A Webpage?

We have a requirement for a 404 error page.

I asked the Product Owner if we have a design for it. Should be simple shouldn’t it? Probably has a heading, a company logo, maybe some other text.

He posts on Slack that he has had a word with the User Experience team and they are going to design it. Fair enough, although why hasn’t this been designed already? We are several months into a Web-based project.

A Software Architect then replies saying that he has put together some “findings” and will arrange a meeting with other Architects to discuss it.

Hang on! how many people are involved in a simple page design? Why does it need Architects?

The world has gone mad.

Hiring Juniors

The company I work for sometimes has problems with recruitment, because they don’t often offer wages comparable with the rest of the industry. Also, there are companies offering more money with better transport links. Instead of increasing wages, they often have the idea of acquiring unskilled workers and training them up; hoping enough of them will be long-term employees.

The thing is, although that has worked in the past, we were in a situation where we had experienced C# developers teaching Juniors C# to work on C#. Now we have the case that C# developers are expected to teach Juniors Web-related technologies like Javascript and AWS.

We have hired a batch of these Juniors from Bootcamp companies that do “crash courses”, where they learn various skills within 3 months, then they find them a proper job. Some of them I’ve asked questions, expecting them to be more knowledgable than me, and then they say something along the lines of “this is new to me, I didn’t study it”. So what are they doing their crash course on? We are hiring them for Javascript and AWS and they come here and tell us they haven’t seen it before.

The other day, one of these Juniors asked me a question, but added: “I expect you won’t know because this is new to you as well, but I don’t know who I can ask”. This is exactly the problem. How can we train them if we are trying to learn ourselves. The whole point of hiring Juniors is that you have enough Seniors to turn them into good developers and this just can’t happen with our structure. The fact that a Junior has joined, all excited to learn and start an exciting career; only to find he has little support and is set to struggle; it’s disheartening, and he knows this already.

Managers are proper proud of all this recruitment though, and even HR/Marketing have placed sponsored articles about it in a local newspaper. One article was about how one guy had all these dead end jobs and now he is employed to produce “solutions and codes”. Such strange phrasing.

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.