My manager received an email from HR apologising for some erroneous emails:
Email Notification Error – PLEASE IGNORE
We are always looking to improve our HR processes and carry out regular routine work within our IT System to ensure we deliver the smoothest experience.
It has come to our attention that a recent tweak to our maternity process has accidentally triggered an email to be sent to some employees.
Please note, this email was sent in error.
If you received this email, please ignore it and we apologise for any confusion caused.
Many thanks,
Paul
The email they are referring to is a pregnancy email sent about male employees. I wonder what sort of change they made to their system. Were they modernising and allowing male employees to declare pregnancy?
Hello Andy,
It's now been a few months since we last contacted you, advising that Steven notified us of their pregnancy.
We'd like to remind you of a couple of things, should they be applicable:
Since completing the initial Expectant Mothers Risk Assessment, should either your or your team member feel their work circumstances have changed and would benefit from a further assessment, please complete a new assessment and upload to the "Risk Assessment screen
If the original maternity dates have changed, please remember to raise an HR ticket to ensure their payment during their maternity leave is calculated correctly.
Should you require any further support, please raise a HR ticket.
It’s a non-programming blog again, but this story is too good to share.
One of my colleagues, Andy, bought some cheese for Christmas from a specialist, and his mate pointed out that the same cheese was way cheaper at Morrisons (a popular supermarket in northern England).
So he threatened to post a bad review, and the Cheese Care & Quality Manager at the company gave him an essay about the cheese making process and schooling him how their cheese is higher quality.
So if you are interested in the process of making Stilton, then continue reading:
The Response:
Dear Andy,
Thank you so much for emailing us and giving us a chance to respond to this for you. I can certainly see why you would be both concerned and upset to see this really big price difference.
There are two answers to this question. The first is that the cheese isn’t identical. It is certainly made by the same producer but not to the same recipe. Most of the Stilton made by Cropwell Bishop is made in the main building at their dairy. It is a good cheese made by a talented producer, but the method of production involves moving large quantities of curds from the vat to the draining table using gravity.
The cheese that we buy is their hand-ladled animal rennet Stilton. This is made in a smaller room to the side of the main production area. In this room the cheese is made in much smaller vats and is made entirely by hand. A crucial step in Stilton making is the transference of the curds from the vat to the draining table. This is done by the traditional, painstaking method of ladling scoops of curds, one by one, and layering them up gently so that the fragile curds are as undamaged as possible. This method has a big impact on both the texture and flavour of the cheese.
Here is a photo of this taking place. You can see that it is a very different process to the large movement of curds that would happen in most larger scale cheesemaking.
A tiny proportion of the overall make of the dairy is made to this method, but this is the only one that we buy. We believe that you can really taste the difference and it is very interesting to do a side by side blind tasting. I hope you would agree that the cheese is not the same if you were to do this.
The second answer is that even given this difference, I am still really surprised to see their standard Stilton being sold at this price and can’t help wondering if Morrisons had some sort of promotion going on at Christmas. The Best range Stilton from Morrisons is usually made by the Long Clawson dairy rather than Cropwell Bishop. Long Clawson Stilton is much cheaper than Cropwell Bishop and is definitely considered to be of a lower quality by most in the cheese industry. I had a look at the Morrison’s site today and the “The Best” Stilton on the site is listed as being made by Long Clawson. In fact, I have never seen standard Cropwell Bishop Stilton being sold at this price. Cropwell Bishop themselves charge £20.57/kg when buying a half cheese and £23.68/kg when buying a 454g piece. They don’t sell their hand-ladled animal rennet Stilton online so I can’t make a comparison.
I have also looked at other online retailers to get a sense of what other people are charging. The Cropwell Bishop standard Stilton varies from around £29.75/kg to £34.95/kg. So, while it is certainly true that Morrison’s would have much bigger purchasing power than we do, I still find the price of £15/kg to be a really surprising one and wonder if perhaps there may have been some trouble with supply from Long Clawson that led them to replace “The Best” range with Cropwell Bishop but charge the same price. However, this is speculation, and I may be wrong. I shall go to my local Morrisons and take a look as soon as I can out of interest. Perhaps they really do usually charge this price, in which case, they are undercutting both the supplier themselves and any other retailer that I know. I can only say that it is a huge bargain at this price and we would not have a business at all if we tried to compete with it. Our cheese is always well looked after in our maturing rooms and is cut fresh to order. It is never pre-cut and wrapped, which has a really detrimental impact on quality and we have confidence that we are supplying the best cheese that we can, both by buying only the hand-ladled Stilton and ensuring it reaches our customers as fresh as possible.
I very much hope this goes some way to explaining the price difference. Thank you for ordering your Christmas cheese from us. I very much hope you enjoyed it.
Unity have announced a new fee which they call the “Unity Runtime Fee” which is going to take effect in January. It affects all Unity developers, even people that have already released their game many years ago; which has caused mass outrage among the game development community.
I think the existing model states that once you reach a threshold of revenue, you have to pay a licence fee which works out around £1500 for the year. With the new model, once you reach a similar threshold, Unity is now going to charge a fee of 20 cents every time somebody instals your game on a new device for the first time.
The threshold is $200,000, which on the face of things, 20 cents per install doesn’t sound unreasonable when they have given you a great tool to help you create your game. They need to earn money as a business and deserve some kind of cut for their service/product. According to this tweet, it looks like they are burning through money so some drastic action is probably required
There’s a fair few aspects of why this is new model is complicated, but I still feel some of the anger is misplaced.
I think the whole scenario is similar to what I have written about recently where the CEO demanded we release our software weekly instead of monthly and we told him several reasons why it is technically, and legally impossible. Then later he then demands all our changes have a well-documented rollback plan, and again, we told him loads of reasons why it wasn’t possible. He still insisted and looked like a fool when it backfired and caused a few problems he thought he was solving.
The main Problem
The core problem stems from the idea that it is based on installations and not based on Unit Sales or Revenue. For comparison, the main competitor, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine charges you five percent of your total revenues after you’ve earned at least a million dollars on your game. Now, that can work out to be a lot of money and especially in the long run if your game is successful, but the difference is that they’re taking a cut of your money that you’ve already earned. When Unity charges you for an installation you’re being charged whether or not you’ve earned any money, or at different period of time to where you earned the money. That could turn into a cash flow problem.
Once you’re over the threshold, if somebody bought your game a long time ago and they’ve now installed your game on their brand new computer, it’s going to cost you 20 cents. I suppose if it is an old game, you probably won’t be selling $200k over the last 12 months, so it’s probably not actually going to apply.
If you decide to port your game to a new platform which is often fairly easy in the Unity engine, then all those new installations are also going to be hit with fees. I suppose if you are re-selling the game then it’s not a major problem, but sometimes developers make a free-to-play mobile version. Then you make money later with microtransactions. Often these games have 90% of players not paying a penny, but then you make your money on the 10% who often spend big. In this case, you could end up losing money on the average player of your game.
People also raised the point of bundles like the Humble Bundle where people buy a bunch of games for a small price but some of the money goes to charity. You end up selling high volumes but gain very low revenue. If you hit the threshold, and you are more likely to with a sale like this, then you could be hit with a lot of fees. I think the interesting thing with this point which people don’t seem to be mentioning; is that people often buy these games then never actually play them. So you actually have a sale, but no install, so don’t pay the fee.
Fairly similar to a bundle is a service like Xbox Game Pass, where people could play your game with an overall payment to the provider, in this case Microsoft. I think Microsoft often pays a flat fee to the publishers to gain their games but I suppose contracts can vary. But the theory is, you could get a flat fee, then either get low instals so you’ve gained, or get a surprisingly large amount of instals if it is popular and it eats into your profits.
Piracy
People who pirate games don’t pay but do install your game. This means that every time your game is pirated you’re going to be slapped with a 20 cent fee. There can be other malicious ways you could be charged, if someone abuses Virtual Machines. There’s programs that will spin up large numbers of them, so you could “Install Bomb” quickly with virtual machines, hitting the developer with a 20 cent fee. It’s like when people “Review Bomb” where you leave loads of negative reviews on a game you don’t like in a coordinated way, but in this case you need fewer people, and they directly sap the revenues of the developer instead of just hurting their online presence.
Target Price
Unity has always positioned itself as being pro Indie. They want to help new aspiring Indies learn to program, break into the gaming market, and get their career started. New developers are also much more likely to sell their games for cheap. There’s a lot of games like this on Steam which are sold for £10 or loads for £5 or less, and that’s before you apply discounts. Steam is renowned for its high discounts in sales, and so these games are being sold for just a couple of pounds. They’re going to be disproportionately hit by having to pay Unity 20 cents every time the game is installed.
In the extreme case, imagine you’ve made a Steam game or a mobile game that sells for one dollar and then you pay a sales tax of 10-20%, then Steam takes 30%, then you know you’re left with around 50 cents. If you use a Publisher, then they will take their cut too. Then Unity takes 20 cents of it for an install and then maybe another 20 cents for another install, then you could be left with basically nothing. You could then lose money if it isn’t sold for full price.
Meanwhile, if you sell a premium game for £40+ then 20 cents is nothing. So it actually hits the indies harder. Unity have ways of getting the price per install down, but they look more aimed at larger companies who will want to pay the upfront fees to use the premium Unity features.
Patch Quest
Lychee Game Labs’ Patch Quest released on 2 March 2023 and so far has reached 182,594 total key activations on Steam (people who bought the game on Steam along with everyone who got the game elsewhere like in a bundle or a giveaway or for review purposes). So if the game keeps selling, or people install on more devices, then he will be taken over the threshold then would start being charged. He did remark that “for the sake of argument, every single person who already owns the game decided to install it on a second PC, I’d be hit with a charge of $36,400. Now it’s obviously not likely that this would happen” but it does make you think how Unity are gonna deal with these outliers.
Unity Response
Within the day of the announcement, there’s a lot of angry people, and Unity has tried to clarify the points raised. However, it’s not clear if it’s actually possible to do what they claim. They reckon they have some sophisticated fraud detection technology which can prevent the “install bombing”. Then they say that they will have a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team. So from what I understand here it sounds like the onus will be on the developer to try and somehow keep track of how many of their instals are fraudulent and then if you have concerns, you contact the fraud compliance team, and then they will hopefully give you your money back. I think the majority of people don’t have a lot of faith in such a system when Unity have to put in some work to decide if they want less money from you.
Unity have clarified that if you’re part of a bundle like Xbox game pass or you’re in a charity bundle then you’re not going to be charged for the install, although it’s not exactly clear how they’re going to know which instals come from charity bundles or game passes. They seemed to imply that for Game Pass, they would send the bill to Microsoft but I can’t imagine Microsoft will be too happy to have sprung upon them. It would probably have to be negotiated in future Game Pass deals and it might just be the case that Microsoft just doesn’t add any Unity-based games to their service.
Unity tried to justify this whole new fee structure by pointing to the thresholds and saying “if you don’t already earn loads of money on your game then you’re not gonna pay extra”. This is where I think a lot of developers are wrongfully attacking Unity, when they would never pay them anyway. I suppose in the Patch Quest example, I’m not aware of it being a major hit, and he has pretty much reached the payment threshold. But given that it’s been many months after release, you would imagine sales will now be low and he will only be liable for minor fees which he should be happy to pay.
Conclusion
There probably is a clause somewhere deep in Unity’s terms and conditions that says something like “we retain the right to change our terms and conditions”. Companies love to have that kind of future-proofing in their legal small print, but how many actually go through with major changes? It can be logistically difficult to implement drastic changes, and evidently a PR nightmare. However, despite that, many companies are against Unity for switching the Terms and Conditions with only a few months notice. When games can take years to make, you need that predictability to adequately budget, and if Unity can charge you more on a whim, then it’s unpredictable. People also wonder if they really can change the terms built on an older Unity software version as you essentially have an agreement at the time of release; but that needs to be left to the lawyers.
Switch Engines?
I think a key statement that many are using to justify their decision to abandon Unity at this time is “Is this the last time they’re gonna change their terms?
Jumping ship to another one might be possible when you’re just starting up on a new project but the deeper into development you get, the harder this becomes. Your game gradually ends up dependent on the engine it’s built in. Switching to Unreal Engine will require programming in C++ plus instead of C# which is a massive learning curve. Godot seems to be gaining popularity but people seem to say it specialises in 2D games at the moment. I think C# doesn’t have full support so their own GDScript is more popular.
Unity Pricing Thoughts...
For context, we are a small studio (7 people) with a Steam game with 3M~ players.
I'm seeing many non-developers tell developers that this pricing change is not a big deal, here is why the entire community is lighting a fire:
• Massively disproportionately punishes indies
• Only three months notice
• Double dipping (Licence fee/ads cut)
• Dangerous precedence for charging "runtime"; you no longer fully own that exported build. If Unity continues to struggle, pricing could become more aggressive
Here are a few examples:
• Unity's own example on their site has a hypothetical scenario:
-- $2M USD Gross in 12 Months
-- 300k Users/month (200k Standard/100k "Emerging Market"), $23.5K USD/month
-- This means $282K/Year in fees, 14% of gross revenue, 3x Epic's 5%.
• F2P Games that are NOT excessively monetised are penalised:
10M Players:$1M USD
1M Players:$10M USD
The first case, with a vastly less predatory set of MTX is now punished significantly worse than one purposefully building money-extraction machines.
Our team has been hard at work for 2 years on a massive update to our game, with a F2P mobile ver coming next year. We built this from the ground up to be ethically monetised/for whaling to be impossible, so we are particularly unhappy with the news.
This affects developers everywhere, of all sizes. I am grossly disappointed by any industry figures brushing this off as "developers complaining." that do not understand the severe damage this can cause smaller studios.
Unity's trust within the games industry has been steadily eroding for years now, this latest change is a testimony to how horrendously mismanaged the board is. Personally dumped all of my Unity stock after this announcement was made.
I'd bet heavily on the people making these decisions have never even opened the editor, let alone released a game.
From <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1702189840383832408.html>
Alright, it’s a somewhat clickbaity title, but I did cause a lot of confusion to one person with one simple feature, and she still didn’t understand when I felt I had perfectly explained it.
I had made a grid which shows a person’s name, alongside a list of items they have ordered, in alphabetical order; as per the requirements.
Later on, we would add alternating row colours to make different people’s orders more distinctive. In the example I came up with, there were only 2 orders on a page, and I had left the row selection highlight on, so it actually looked like we did have alternating colours.
The examples from the UX team only had a few items per person, so it wasn’t clear how they had aligned the text. I left it centred which looked a bit weird for large orders, which is the example I came up with.
Person
Items
Lisa
phone
CD
hat
lamp
James
phone
shorts
t-shirt
towel
I don’t see how I can accurately illustrate this with WordPress. Imagine Lisa’s row is fully highlighted
Just to show my progress on this new project, I posted a screenshot to generate a bit of hype 😉
Olivia was confused about why it wasn’t in alphabetical order – but it is in alphabetical order!
Olivia: why is “phone” at the top?
Me: Ulrika's designs or my screenshot? Mine is alphabetical. Phone is for a different Person. We still need to add the alternating colours, and maybe don't centre the name to make it clearer
Olivia: this one <sends screenshot of top row>
Me: Different Person
Olivia: I'm confused. Lisa's name is the same row as Phone
Me: There's 2 People there. Just that the second person has loads of items, and because we have centred the Person name, it's halfway down the row. We can use alternate row colours as Ulrika’s design, and we can stop centering the name to make it clear.
I message Tim:
Me: I can't believe the confusion that has arisen even though I have explained what it is.
Tim: I got your back
<Back in the main chat>
Tim: Phone is for Lisa there
Tim: Everything else is for James
Tim: Which is when the alphabetical order kicks in.
Olivia: Thank you Tim, That was seriously messing with my mind. The name needs to be at the start of the list of items.
<Back to private message with Tim>
Me: I cannot understand why my explanation wasn't good enough. Is it because I am a developer nerd and cannot communicate with people?
Tim <jestingly>: the trick is to keep your answers on one line. Colours and shapes help too.
I’m so baffled. Why couldn’t they understand what I wrote? I wrote a perfect explanation then Tim just put his explanation in short messages, and he was thanked for his explanation. It’s like I don’t exist!
I was watching a programming tutorial recently and I heard the teacher pronounce the datatype “char” like the word “car” and it made me think.
( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ) 🤔
It is a shortened form of the word “character” – as in “a single letter” – which you do pronounce “car-acter” – so it probably should be pronounced “car”.
Yet, I have been programming for years and I have never heard someone pronounce it like that.
My employer made the news recently after the deployment team applied the wrong config to several organisations which led to a heavy spike in network traffic and caused issues nationwide.
Sadly, we made the news again.
“We couldn’t print our forms for three hours. Someone had goofed and did not keep up with their subscriptions. For a company of their size; that is embarrassing.”
Customer quote
When users reported the issue, there was a call between a few managers. I was invited to the call with zero context by someone I had never spoken to before, so I thought there was a good chance they invited the wrong person.
The call was recorded so I just listened to it when I was free. They had invited me on the suggestion that I had worked on a feature in that area many years ago, and they had no other ideas. Also on the call, they called someone else and remarked how strange it was to the recipient because they had never spoken to him before. Why didn’t they learn and send some context? He didn’t join either.
Eventually, they found someone who belongs to the team that procures the licences. He explained that they purchase licence keys for this printing software, then send them to an internal support team to update the licence keys in the database. The team receives automated emails reminding them to renew the licence keys 3 months prior to expiry, and they act on it quickly to not risk them expiring.
“It takes a while to go through the purchase process, so I usually do it early, but sometimes it can “fall through”
Procurement guy
After going through some emails, they found the key had been promptly purchased, and the licence keys were sent to support, then they were not applied.
Another guy joined the call and said a total of 43 organisations have reported errors, but that’s the only ones we know about due to direct complaints we saw via Facebook.
“And then I need to understand exactly how this is happening, ‘cause this is the second time in two weeks that a licence key was sent to support and wasn’t applied.”
Angry manager
After the issue was resolved, another manager asked for a summary of the issue. One guy remarked
“just to say, the people invited to the call (16 invited in total), are not the ones that ended up being involved or resolving.”
Manager, reflecting on what a mess the meeting was
I don’t understand how all our departments are causing chaos all at once? We don’t seem to learn our lesson either, how can we make the same mistake twice in two weeks? It’s also been a problem for years – that we struggle to invite the correct people to major incident calls so issues take much longer to resolve.
We recently featured in the national newspapers due to an outage with our software, and it was surprising that our system was down for around 12 hours. Usually we respond to outages really quickly, and get the system back online after a few hours max.
I sent the article to a few of my colleagues and they were unaware of the problem, so internally we seemed to be keeping quiet about it.
We had put out a message to users, but from what I saw in the aftermath, we initially claimed it was just a specific region that was affected, before others via social media had stated it was affecting people nationwide, much to the derision from our main rivals, who posted multiple social media posts to insult us.
“They deliver complaints, weekend working, major incidents, stress, insomnia, and hypertension, to name a few. Do their rivals deliver?”
Customer quote
All Hands
5 days later, the Directors arranged an “All Hands” meeting with only a few hours notice. So that caused panic amongst many colleagues because of the implied urgency. It was led by the CTO who was announcing changes to our deployment process, but I’m not sure who he consulted with. I would have thought he would have learned from the last time he announced changes to our release process – when we all ripped his idea to shreds on the same call, stating several technical and some legal reasons why we can’t possibly work that way. A much better approach would be to state the problem and let the experts discuss how we can solve the problem, but yet again, he seems to have had a meeting with other Directors and took the attitude “this is how it’s going to be from now on”. But then we all pushed back and told him how it wasn’t possible.
I love it when situations like these occur. The drama makes you want to grab the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show. Hearing all the different points of view and trying to understand the complexities of why things are the way they are – is super interesting. I think when you are told to follow a Process and you don’t know the rationale behind it, it makes it feel like a chore. But focussing on a problem and trying to solve it by forming a new/modified process is something you can get behind.
So like I said, not learning his lesson from before, he states what the new process is, and only gives a wishy-washy explanation of the problem he was trying to solve. After we all bombarded him with questions, the truth of the matter came out, and some of his ideas wouldn’t solve this particular problem that caused the outage. So it seemed he was adding unnecessary processes, slowing us down and causing more stress. We are already releasing way too slow, so then us Software Developers are just chilling because we can’t get things out that we do fix/implement.
He described this situation as a
“major incident that impacted the whole estate, attributed directly to a failed Change. We recognise that the change was not intended to have the adverse impact that it did, but sadly the consequences have been a major blow to Users and us. Therefore, we are seeking to create immediate stability across our estate, and are implementing several amendments to the way Technology Changes are approved and implemented, as follows;
1. A comprehensive change freeze for the month of June, with only changes meeting enhanced criteria being passed for implementation.
2. Pre-approved changes are suspended
3. Any changes submitted for approval will require TWO members of SLT.
4. Implementation activity must be witnessed by two or more staff members. Screen sharing technology should be used to witness the change. No additional activities are carried out that are not explicitly in the documentation.
5. All changes must have a comprehensive rollback plan, with proof of testing. The rollback plan must be executable within 50% of the approved change window.
Backout plans will be analysed by the Head Of Development to add a more technically-informed scrutiny, and assess the risk. Further budget will be allocated to DataDog, for more visibility in problems with our servers. A dedicated team will improve how we alert internal teams and customers in the event of an incident.
What does a “Failed Change” even mean? We deployed a database change that failed to apply due to a key constraint violation? That a new feature or bug completely broke a feature? It’s very vague: Then what does “We recognise that the change was not intended to have the adverse impact that it did” mean? Is that just stating the same thing? You aren’t gonna intend to have an adverse impact. It sounds like the sort of nonsense you put out to non-technical users just to blag an apology. Why is he saying this to the Development department? How are we supposed to understand the process and help come up with something better if he is being deceptive?
So as I previously stated: “After we all bombarded him with questions, the truth of the matter came out”, so I’ll try and explain by piecing together the information I did gather.
Years ago we attempted to replace a module and this was feature flagged. But it turns out it wasn’t significantly better than the thing it was replacing and has its own set of issues, so some users are using this feature (V2) and others used the old one (V1). There was an experimental feature which hoped to improve performance for both V2 and V1, but it was put as a sub-feature for V2 in the user interface of the configuration tool. So you have V2 on/off, then if it is On, it looks like there’s then an option for Experimental Fix on/off. When the Deployment team came to turn on the experimental feature, they saw that the main feature (V2) was set to Off for some of the users, so they set it to On. Since enabling V2 would then download loads of data to be in the V2 format, this caused a massive impact on the network and so actually affected everyone that wasn’t impacted directly by the configuration change.
So would the CTO’s new process stop this happening?
New Rules – My View
“There will be a comprehensive change freeze for the month of June, with only changes meeting enhanced criteria being passed for implementation.”
The size of the release wasn’t the problem, so cutting it down won’t solve anything. It might annoy the users even more if we then delay features that we announced.
“Pre-approved changes are suspended”
Not sure of the full scope what is covered by the “pre-approved changes”. But the idea of a “pre-approved” change is that it is something that is often run on the live servers to fix common issues and is low risk, hence it is pre-approved (eg the ability to restart a crashed server/service.). This is just going to annoy staff members in Deployment. The CTO also remarks:
“Preapproved changes are wonderful. They have been reviewed and tested to death. My goal is to increase the number of preapproved changes in the future. It’s just with the existing ones, we don’t know if they have been reviewed or not”.
You don’t know if they have been “reviewed” but they have been run 100’s of times, and never caused an issue. So you are temporarily banning them on the grounds that they could cause an issue?
“Any changes submitted for approval will require TWO members of SLT. ”
How many times has there been some kind of approval process and the people with authorisation are too busy or on annual leave? Why are we going from 0 approvers to 2? Would the managers understand a change to enable a feature for users belonging to company A, B and C? Would they go “hang on, C don’t have the main feature! I’m rejecting this”? It’s going to be a box-ticking exercise.
We already have a problem when changes are Code Reviewed by Developers – there’s not enough “expert” people that can review it in the required level of detail. So how would a manager understand the change and technical impact? It will be more like “does this make us money? Yes we like money”; approved.
“Implementation activity must be witnessed by two or more staff members. Screen sharing technology should be used to witness the change. No additional activities are carried out that are not explicitly in the documentation.”
This might actually help, although might be patronising for Deployment. The CTO made a comment on the call about having “Competent” people involved in the deployment process. So if a Developer has to watch a member of Deployment click a few buttons; it feels like babysitting and not respecting them as employees.
“All changes must have a comprehensive rollback plan, with proof of testing. The rollback plan must be executable within 50% of the approved change window.”
The rollback idea is one of these ideas that sounds logical and great in theory but this is the biggest concern for the technical people in Development as we will discuss below.
My opinion
The Developer Feedback
On our current change approval form, there is already a section for rollback plan, but this isn’t properly filled in and is often just “revert change”. So one developer said all the change needs to be is:
“people should be ensuring they have a documented their tested process for rollback”. Then also added “In the case of feature-toggling. What happens when you do that? Do the users have a cache? How do we clear the cached data for all users? Can you force everybody to turn that feature off by forcing them to log out? If the change causes a performance impact, we need to be sure that turning something off actually turns it off and stops any performance impact right there and then”.
One person pointed out that the majority of developers are in India now, and due to the time zone differences, they aren’t around for the current Change Approval Board meetings, or available during when we deploy.
Like many companies, we love deploying Friday nights because that is considered downtime for most of our users. The problem is, staff that would be useful to have around – don’t work weekends unless they are paid to be on-call. Getting people to deploy late probably increases the chance of mistakes. Maybe we should deploy earlier in the week if possible. At least don’t deploy on a bank holiday weekend because that is even worse for staff to fix any issues.
Deployment staff member
Our test databases have probably less than 5% of the data that our live databases have, so testing SQL is always a problem for us. What runs in 1 second could easily run for a minute with the scale of data. So if we come up with a rollback plan, our timings won’t be accurate at all.
Databas Expert
With our C# code, you can easily rollback the version by redeploying it. The problem is the corresponding database changes. Our database patches are designed for sequential application, e.g. one script can create a table, a later version may add a new column. You can’t just re-deploy the old version to get back to a state where the column doesn’t exist. You have to write code to do the reverse – delete the column. What if data has been added after it was deployed and before you realised the feature doesn’t work (and you need to rollback)? Do you just lose the data and tell the users that it is “tough luck”, or do you archive the data, apply the revert patch? Then later fix the issue, reapply the original patch, then run another script to apply the archived data? It’s much more feasible just to disable the feature, apply a fix then turn it back on. [We recently employed a new guy with the job title “Technical Director” and he was adamant a rollback had to go back to the original state at all cost “Fix forward is not a valid risk mitigation strategy.”. He doesn’t understand how we work and is making these technical decisions.]
Another developer reiterates that point to tell the new Technical Director that he is talking nonsense:
When a change is implemented Out of Hours for the user, any problem may only emerge when users log on in the morning. If we roll back at that point, any overnight transactions potentially will be lost. This includes transactions on inbound interfaces from 3rd party systems. Rolling back at that point may be even more disruptive than hot-fixing the problem. How are we to handle this, in terms of process management and policies?
We have many products, especially with all the mergers/acquisitions we have had over the years. Each with their own processes.
[The CTO and Technical Director were talking as if we were all using the same process and tools which wasn’t the case.]
One concern was that when it comes to our Mobile apps, the likes of Apple and Google have strict update procedures, where you often have to submit the update which is approved in their own time. I don’t know how rollbacks work in this process. I think the implication was that feature flags are often used so they stay on the same version, but remote configuration switches a new version on.
Mobile developer
The rollback idea seems to be that if the change took 20 minutes, then it should be able to rollback within 10 minutes. Why? I am not sure. Maybe it is just a rough guide to be “fast”. But doesn’t this assume that any failure has been identified within the change window of 20 minutes? It might take a while for the users to run into the scenario that causes such failure. If we patch out during the early hours (1AM-3AM) then the user works 9-5PM, then there is a time delay. Our main patching process takes a long time (possibly 1 hour, large file downloads over a slow network), so I’d expect a rollback process to also take a long time. If users are actively using the system and it’s only a specific feature that is a problem, then you don’t want to take the entire system down to patch. You want a Zero-downtime fix.
We need to be specific of what indicates a “failure”. They were talking about using Dashboards to look for evidence of failures but there can be cases where a feature doesn’t work but it doesn’t log an error. Successful server calls might work. Also, if there is a problem, which rollback plan do you execute? If you have several features/bug fixes in the release, do you rollback it all, or do you spend time investigating which feature it is, then roll that back only.
We have a tendency to release with features switched off and then enable them later. Many times, the implementation of new features causes you to change existing code, which then may contain bugs. So even when the feature is off, it can still cause bugs. So in this case I think we need to go through the Change Approval Board for the initial release, then again to actually switch it on.
As part of the rollback process, have teams considered the overall impact that this will have on estimates of deliverables, overall development time and testing time, and how we are going to manage customers expectations. Depending on the project/feature this could add an additional 50% development time to create the rollback and to complete the testing of the roll back.
Tester
After we made all these points the Technical Director just dismissed all our concerns.
“I think I’ve been clear on what a rollback plan is and what the expectation is of it. The onus is on the change proposer to demonstrate they have a Rollback plan”
Technical Director
Well, you’ve been clear of your expectations. We have all been clear that it simply isn’t possible to implement.
Architect
I think we need to change our architecture to support such plans. They want instant process change. But this needs to be planned in.
I asked a Software Architect what he thought:
“I don’t like how we’ve had a bunch of clowns that know how nothing works come up with a plan which makes little sense and is impractical, and opposed to much of industry direction. Patch forwards is the way with databases, supporting rollback of code changes with tech like containers is the way to go with that”
Architect
The Next Release
Since this process affects the next release, the team that is involved in the biggest feature raised their concern. Their change is super risky and therefore they will need to start spending weeks coming up with a back-out plan and therefore will probably miss the release. The Technical Director said that it is:
“going ahead – but with the additional scrutiny and bolstered processes we’ve detailed. This isn’t about stopping – it’s about wrapping our change activity in more certainty. I’d personally like to understand “high risk” here though.”
Technical Director
I think this illustrates my initial points. He will be one of the people involved in signing off on changes, and here is a proposed change without a rollback plan, and he is already stating he is willing to sign off on it. Then the Lead Developer has to convince him it is actually one of the riskiest changes we have made this year.
“I’m not sure how it isn’t a high risk change. It’s massive, wide-ranging, and there are so many things that can go wrong. We are working hard to mitigate the risks but the risks are still there.”
Lead Developer
Since we had a project going into the next release, we arranged a meeting with the Head of Development (in regards to the statement “Backout plans will be analysed by the Head Of Development to add a more technically-informed scrutiny, and assess the risk”).
When we explained the difficulty of coming up with a Rollback plan, he then says “why don’t you just add a feature flag“. So we told him we had but it was unacceptable. The Tech Director and CTO had made that clear. He said he was fine with it, because it doesn’t make sense otherwise. So the Head of Development that is supposed to be scrutinising these plans even thinks this rollback plan doesn’t make sense. Brilliant.
Feedback
On our next meeting with the CTO, he asked how we had been adapting to the new process.
One guy said that there was a server that was down for 3 hours and all it needed was the service to be turned back on. Due to the fact that they took away the Pre-Approved changes, they weren’t allowed to turn it on until they got 2 Senior Managers to approve. They only could contact 1, and after asking him if they could go ahead and turn it on anyway, he refused because they had strict instructions that they couldn’t deviate from this new process. The CTO was outraged. He came out with this amazing hypocritical speech.
It is essential that people “engage brain” before following process. The idea that we can deliberately leave customers without service because some process says so - It's crazy. And if anyone disagrees, come and argue with me. This is incredibly frustrating for us as an organisation where people follow processes to the detriment of providing good service to our customers. Now I understand that there's no malice or deliberate reason to break something by following that process, but as you explain it, I can't imagine anyone on this call saying “Oh yeah, that was the right thing to do”. If we have to write a process that means people don't have to think, then we've lost the battle already, and people need to be able to think. The challenge I have in front of me is our customers, and their customers are not able to be helped. I can press this button and it will fix things, or I can wait until some process completes and then I'll press the button. At the very least an emergency phone call should be made to someone senior enough to make the decision and that should have proceeded straight away. We have heard of other examples of this. I want you to see how serious I am about how upsetting that is. You know, we employ intelligent people with a brain. We can't get away with automatons that just follow process. If we do that, we'll just automate everything. We need people that are intelligent enough to make good decisions, and when they can see that what is happening is not right, they escalate it until they get an answer.
I thought he said it would be a sackable offence if we even slightly deviated? Even his Senior Management was strictly following the CTO’s process and refused to authorise it when escalated. We told him in advance it was a bad idea to get rid of Pre-Approved changes. We told him it was a bad idea to require 2 approvals from the Senior Managers. Didn’t listen. Refused to “engage brain”. Caused another outage. The fact that the CTO admits it’s actually happened a few times as well is hilarious.
Another team said they weren’t invited to the first meeting when the change got announced, then trying to follow the process delayed them 6 hours. The CTO admitted that one was an oversight on his part.
Another team said they were trying to do a demo to a customer but they needed a configuration change applied. Even though it was a “Test System”, it had some dependency on the live infrastructure and so had to go through this new change approval process. They delayed their demo and looked a bit incompetent in front of the customer.
A Technical Manager reiterated the point about not being able to rollback the database changes and his team had wasted hours in meetings discussing how it could even be remotely possible. The CTO then said we were being “hung up on terminology” and we know that the ultimate aim is to get into the previous state, so it doesn’t matter if we call it “rollback” or “fix forward”, it just needs to work. But we were telling him there is massive difference. A rollback literally puts you back into the previous state. Fix-forward means you add extra fixes on top of the thing that was broken so they are left with the new feature. Rollback has the concern about losing data that was added since you upgraded the version, then rolled back. It’s a completely different approach. Then the CTO and the Technical Director said that we can “do what we want as long as it gets us in a working state”.
So we can fix forward then? And we can deviate from the rollback plan?
Another person asked if we “will we go back to normal mode after July”. I think they miss the point. Surely the process is there to try and prevent major incidents like this from happening again. You don’t just do it for a few months then stop.
Refinement to the process
After a few weeks, they realised that having a limited number of staff that can approve changes was a bad idea, especially when most of them had a trip to India booked for the week. So they increased the pool of people that can approve.
Another week went by and they realised they had way too many approvals to go through, so knocked the number of approvers down to 1.
Another week went by and they realised most of the approvals were formally the Pre-approved changes, so they got reinstated.
We are almost back to our old process!
Conclusion
I think I have lost all confidence in the CTO, and I think the new Technical Director is just as dumb. How can you make decisions not involving the people actually involved in the process, and then reject their concerns when they tell you how stupid it is!? Then when you then get evidence how stupid it was, you then blame your staff and tell them they need to “engage brain” and to not follow your process if it wasn’t going to solve the problem of getting our systems up and running. We have been in the industry years, and haven’t had many instances of long term major incidents. I think under the new CTO’s leadership, the number of major incidents has increased dramatically. I don’t think it’s necessarily down to decisions he has made, but some of the ideas he has come up with can’t help.
For my home internet and mobile sim, I have Virgin Media and a Virgin Mobile sim. They contacted me saying they were switching me over to o2, so in future, I would be billed by o2 instead, but I also qualify for a few extra benefits for the same price.
Once that was activated, they then said – because I have Virgin Media and an o2 mobile Sim, I now qualify for a bonus speed to my Virgin Media home broadband. Not sure how that makes any sense and why I didn’t qualify before, but cool – free stuff.
However, my current router cannot handle the new speeds or something, so now I have to have their latest “Hub 3.0”.
When I received the package, I had a quick look through the instructions and it seemed as simple as plugging it in. The only thing of note was that when you think you are ready to connect your devices, you need to look at the lights on the Hub:
“When the Wi-fi light is on and the base light is solid white, you are ready to move on. The arrows may still be flashing green”
Instructions
I assumed the flashing arrows meant it was updating (but couldn’t see anything in the instruction manual), and when they stopped flashing after 1 hour (why does it take 1 hour to update!?), I had a stable green Wi-Fi light, stable green update arrows, and a stable yellow main light. So what does that mean? it doesn’t match their description.
After a minute, the green update arrows and green wi-fi light went out, and I was left with a stable yellow main light and no internet connection. So I turned it off and on again. Same sequence of events happened.
So I reconnected my old router to check the internet was still working. It was.
The next day, I asked one of my colleagues (who I knew had Virgin Media broadband). He said he had a Hub 3.0 and his just has a stable yellow main light and had no idea what I was on about when I told him about the white light that the booklet mentioned. It was years ago when he had set his up, but he thought it was as simple as plugging it in, and away you go.
So after I logged off work, I plugged the “Hub 3.0” in again and got the same sequence of events. This time I went to the router’s IP page http://192.168.0.1/. Is it updating? Why so many updates?
I waited over an hour, but I was still stuck on the update screen. I turned it off-and-on again. Still says it is updating. But there’s no green arrows on the router itself. Can we trust the arrows?
I check Twitter and find a few people from various years with the same problem but some say that Virgin call centre staff resolved it – but didn’t say what the resolution was. Then there were some unresolved cases of people Tweeting into the void.
So since it was late, and I assumed Virgin’s call centre wouldn’t be available, I waited till the morning. I then plug it all back in, and call the number in the booklet:
“Connection issues? if you’re still having trouble connecting after following all the steps, waiting 30 minutes for your Hub to set up and making sure the connections are secure – call us on 0800 953 9500”
Instructions
I was greeted with an automated line asking me for my account number. I hung up and went looking for the letter. I call back, type in the account number, then it asks me if I would like to link my phone number to my account for faster calling in future.
That sounds great because I hate having to read out an account number, and go through the “security” checks. If I can bypass one or both of those, then it would be amazing. They always ask you for part of your memorable word and it always trips me up because I have only needed to call them 3 times in 9 years or something – so it is easy to forget. I was convinced I knew it, and this would test out my thoughts, so I went through the process of trying to link it.
The automated voice instructed “press the key that corresponds to the first letter”, so the 2 key would represent A, B, or C. Maybe not so secure when there’s ambiguous answers. I typed the 3 numbers in, and apparently it was wrong. So I hung up.
I went to the website, account details, “change memorable word”. You have to choose a word between 8 and 10 characters long, but it’s not quite a word because it needs 1 number. With that level of specific criteria, it probably makes it less memorable too. So I type in 9 characters and a number to get 10 characters in length. Apparently it didn’t match the rule “8-10 characters long”!? So “8-10” actually means 8 or 9?
Eventually I managed to set it to something slightly memorable, so call back. Enter the “Account number”, “memorable word”. Right, as long as I call using this mobile number, it should get me straight through in future.
Right, can I speak to a human now? no.
The automated voice says they know I have been sent a new Hub and if I press “1”, they can send a signal to activate it.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?
Me, raging
The instructions never said that. It said to wait 30 mins for a solid white light and wi-fi light, then only call if there’s connection issues. Yet this number is an automated line that is VITAL to call.
So I press “1”. The voice says it “may take 1 hour for the connection to activate”.
What!?
Super fast broadband, like 264 mbps and you are saying it takes 1 hour to transfer 1 signal to tell the router it is valid? What the hell. I was supposed to be working and thought I would be offline for 15 mins.
After waiting 1 hour, there’s still no connection. I waited another 15 mins. I checked the router settings page; “Update in progress”. It’s either lying, or completely broken.
So I called the number again to see what would happen. The automated voice tells me my account number is linked to my phone, so I press “1” to accept. Now I have to enter 3 letters from my memorable word. At least not entering the account number is convenient. I put my letters containing the account number in the drawer; I won’t be needing those again.
The automated voice tells me that the “signal” had failed to activate my router, so I have to be passed onto a human. I connect straight away, and first I need to state my name. Now I need my account number. WHAT!? I can’t have gotten this far without my account number which I had linked to my phone. So I scramble to get the papers out of my drawer so I can read off the account number. Now I need to specify 3 characters from my memorable word. (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
If it is a challenge to make a calm guy like me turn aggressive, then this is certainly the way to go about it.
So I explain that I have this new Hub and it doesn’t work. She asks me what lights I see, and she says it should be working. I then get put on hold for a minute, then she says
“We haven’t registered this Hub at our end”.
Virgin call centre staff member
Brilliant. Why is that even a thing? The connection is coming through to the inside of my house (my old router works perfectly fine). Why do they need to authorise a device inside my house? They sent it to me too, so why wasn’t it automatically registered? You would think they would have the process perfected after all these years.
So after holding a bit longer, she said she would then send the signal but it may take an hour. She then asks if “I am happy with the resolution?”.
“Eeeer. Dunno. If it works, then yes. If it doesn’t then no.”
Me, uncertain
“It will work, sir. We will send you a text message when it is activated.”
Virgin call centre staff member
The connection actually came on after 1 minute.
1 hour 45 later: Virgin via text: “We’ve activated the new Virgin Media kit“
Here’s a list of things that are dumb:
If you send someone some new hardware, make sure it is registered on your system
If it requires the customer to make a phone call, make sure it is clear in the instructions
The phone number should also state when the line is open, and if it is automated or not.
If there’s lights on the hardware device with different meanings – put them in the instruction booklet
Don’t tell the user they are looking for a white light, when it is actually yellow.
Don’t make a page stating “Update in progress” when the status is “Unregistered device”
If there is an Update process, explain to the user what this means and how often it should occur, and how long it should take. What if I turn off the device whilst it is updating? Does it become “bricked”?
Don’t send a text 1 hour 45 minutes late.
Don’t tell the user they can register the account number to their phone, then ask them to read out the account number.
Don’t say you can create a memorable word of 10 characters, then tell them they cannot.
As a human, don’t ask for 3 letters of a memorable word, and when the customer gets it wrong, ask for 3 different letters. There’s a good chance you could piece what the full word is by putting together the answers. I assume the call-centre staff cannot see the full word, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they could.
There must be a better way of activating a router than via signal that takes up to 1 hour. I assume there’s some serious leeway here, but it’s not good to keep a customer waiting that long before calling support again.
Recently, Microsoft made a change to their OneDrive terms. I’m sure it was a bug, but if your OneDrive becomes full, they then stop your Outlook emails from being received. I was receiving the warning when my OneDrive was 99% full but my email allowance was 3% full.
My Mum had set up OneDrive to sync her Photos and Desktop, and had dumped several GB of videos there when she only had a 5GB OneDrive limit.
I had told her to sort her files out. However, she isn’t even confident dragging and dropping files into different folders.
It’s always tough to explain problems to her, or for her to explain problems to me. She says she normally checks emails on her phone these days, rather than on her laptop, and she doesn’t use OneDrive on her phone – so she couldn’t make sense of my explanation. Her thought process was: “How could Onedrive on her laptop prevent Outlook from receiving emails on her phone?”
Then, when she kept on showing me the Gmail app, I told her that I couldn’t fix it in Gmail. Then she kept on saying I’d got it wrong, because it was Outlook and not Gmail that she was using.
She uses an Outlook email account, but the Gmail app on her phone. She couldn’t seem to differentiate between the concept of an account and app with the same names.
It’s easy to take aspects like this for granted. What’s easy for me to understand is simply impossible for the non-technical person. In the age where pretty much everything is pushing for digital, it’s a big ask for the older generation to come on board without every step of the process being intuitive.
When I got to her house, she seemed adamant in clearing out old emails, and I kept on telling her that emails are small and it’s not the problem.
She also complained about a “train noise” which I said I would need to hear from myself because it’s an extremely weird statement.
Once I had sorted out the files on her laptop, and stopped OneDrive syncing files on her Desktop, I told her that the emails should come through. She claimed that it still wasn’t working, and was showing me by refreshing the emails by sliding her finger down.
“I get double emails”
Mum
“I thought you said you weren’t getting emails?”
Me
“no, that was before when I was getting the train noise”
Mum
I sent her an email, and it came through along with a notification sound.
“There it is! the train noise!”.
Mum
She was adamant it was never her notification sound, and to be fair, there was a different tone for text messages, so I don’t know if it was a Gmail-specific tone, but I couldn’t see an option in the settings.
Even when emails were coming through she still claimed they weren’t coming through. She said that she often gets around 20 emails a day but had only 4 come through; so “it wasn’t fixed”. I didn’t know how to prove how many she should have.
But what about the “double email” problem? I still needed to solve that before I left. So I asked if she knew how we could recreate it. She refreshed Gmail and pointed to the loading wheel. After a few seconds, another loading wheel appeared lower down and she said: “there! double emails“. So there wasn’t double emails – just double the loading wheels.
I asked why this was a problem to her, and she said she
“didn’t get double emails or the train noise until the Microsoft thing popped up”.
Mum
Who knows if it’s true or not, but it’s so hard to help her when she describes somewhat fictional problems using the wrong terminology.
Last year, we felt slightly aggrieved that our employer made out they would match inflation with our pay rises, but then disguised it with: a one-off profit share, pension payments, and optional benefits. Our wage only increased by 2% but inflation was currently around 7% and predicted to rise further. Better than nothing though, so can’t really complain.
With inflation being 10%, we wondered what we would get this year. Then came the communication that stated that they understand inflation, and remarked that we are still highly profitable so can cover the costs:
“Further to our communication at the end of 2022, I can now update you on our remuneration approach for 2023. We know and understand that employees are continuing to experience cost pressures and we remain committed to ensuring that the overall pay budget for this year reflects the continued external inflationary environment we are in. Whilst this has been possible due to the ongoing success of the business, it will require us to again manage our costs in 2023 carefully.”
HR Director
However, then they reminded us that they gave us:
an extra £200 one-off payment
Increased leave for parents
the option to work bank holidays and take a different day off instead.
they will give us a one-off profit share just like last year
So with them clutching at straws for things they have done, you know that means they weren’t giving us 10%. Maybe we could get 5% as a compromise then?
“The exact amount of any increase to an individual’s salary and timing will be agreed locally, as normal, and will be dependent on a number of factors including performance. I believe these measures reflect our responsibility to be aware of the external inflationary environment, our immense gratitude for your efforts over the past year and our desire to become an employer of choice.”
HR Director
What did I get?
0%
“immense gratitude for your efforts over the past year” 🤨
I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that judging performance is very subjective and often bent to fit a narrative, and I got completely screwed. So let’s get into it:
The Review
“You had an average year in 2022, working on only a couple of projects, one where you worked as an individual contributor then moved onto a pair project”
Well, that seems to imply just being on 2 projects in a year was a bad thing, but that’s not really my fault is it? Since I single-handedly delivered one project, then was in a team of 2, surely that should show I can handle responsibility and pressure?
“You were good in many technical aspects but were not able to step up to the plate as a leader in the team.”
I was in a team of 2 as a Senior Developer, and I got really good feedback from that team member. What more do you want?
“You were given an opportunity to lead on defining our interview process. I expected you to lead on this but have not shown much interest in it. Ultimately someone else led it, creating the interview pack, redefining interview questions and leading live interviews, which I think is a missed opportunity to shine.”
I blogged about this process. It was a mess, but at least I tried my best to direct it. We created an interview process for Graduate Developers from Indian universities who were using Python, but set them C# and Object-oriented questions…then asked questions on Software Testing which they also don’t do. I was pretty clear we needed to focus on the people we were targeting (Python and Web programming) and not on what the job was (C# Developer); (or even better, change the people we were targeting – but that was already decided upon). I got outvoted by the other Seniors. I felt I couldn’t lead in the interviews because I didn’t believe in the questions.
“I can see that you might not see Unit testing as a productive way forward, and the target set might not be accurate”
In recent times, managers have been demanding we achieve 80% test coverage and I have highlighted how poor many tests are that people write, and the 80% is a random target. It’s not improving the quality of code at all. Due to the fact I wrote little (but high-quality tests) I got criticised and talked about between senior management. I raised in my review that I believe managers now see my output as low quality, so I will need to repair my reputation.
I also raised that I was annoyed at the frequency of team member changes. My projects had Testers switched in and out, we changed Product Owners, Software Architect, and there was talk of more changes that didn’t happen. Colin then stated “I never raised my concerns at the time”, but I definitely did.
Some of the comments received from your colleagues:
“I think that he has been a good technical lead. His knowledge is excellent, and this has been shown in how he has been able to help me with any technical problems. He has constantly been available, has a great attendance record, and will defer annual leave for the good of the project. His code review comments are always clear, concise, and helpful. He is always available to help with Testing as well.”
“He has a good insight into what he thought was and was not possible”
“He needs to make sure that just because an issue is raised he doesn’t jump on it right away as there is a priority order for things”
“He’s reliable and just gets on with the work”
“Can be a bit quiet on calls at times but whenever I specifically call him out in calls, he would answer questions”
“At weekly meetings there wasn’t enough substance in his updates. He doesn’t come across as a leader to me or perhaps he just did not want to be at those meetings.”
I definitely got good feedback from people but then the positive ones were ignored in the discussion. I had good arguments against some of the negative points as well. I think I only picked up non-prioritised work when I had finished the work that was. What do you want me to do? Just sit there idle? I often knew it was issues related to recent work so it was obviously gonna be the highest priority, and as Team Lead, I think I can make that call myself.
I’m always annoyed when people criticise me for being quiet on calls. If enough people are saying the things I am thinking, then I don’t need to speak. If no one has raised the issue I am thinking of, then I will provide it. Then, if people specifically ask what I think, then I will say, even if I am repeating what others have said. That final feedback was about a meeting similar to a Scrum of Scrums where many teams get together. But the meeting was mainly for Colin and he rarely attended. So I had the attitude of quickly going through my points then moving on. I thought the wording was harsh – they have no idea what it is like to work with me directly.
I have no idea how they can justify giving me nothing. That’s like a 10% pay-cut with today’s economy.
Colin isn’t my manager anymore, so let’s hope my new manager will actually put things right.
Stranger Coding Tings 