We were reminded of the Social Media Policy. I think this is a standard policy these days. We aren’t allowed to defame/criticise my employer online. If we do talk about work online, then we need a statement along the lines of:
“The views I express here are mine alone, and do not represent the views of my employer”
I’ll compromise and update my About page.
The Situation: We normally all work in an office, unless someone is working from home, in which case they will remotely connect to meetings. Due to Coronavirus, we are all at home.
One of the high ranking development managers makes an announcement:
I have had feedback from my teams that they are now finding they are at their desks for large parts of the day due to back-to-back meetings.
I recommend starting meetings 5 minutes later, finishing 5 minutes earlier; ensuring a 10 minute break between all meetings.
Additionally, do not book meetings during lunch time. This is more important than ever.
Development Manager
Alright, let’s analyse this statement.
For him and his management team in the usual office scenario: they would be at their desks, then move into a physical meeting room for meetings which happen frequently throughout the day. That means they aren’t just staring at their screens, and also get a walk and change of location.
Due to the lack of meeting rooms (which have been slowly removed from us over time), and due to the fact that the Managers had them booked for all their meetings, Developers would then have to stay at their desk and hold a remote meeting instead. This meant that they are at their desks all day. They are at their desks programming, then stay at their desks for meetings. So this was a problem for most people in the office.
With the Coronovirus, everyone is now at home, and therefore everyone has to have remote meetings. We are all equal now. All the managers are all crying about being sat at their desks all day.
The reason why we (developers only) booked meetings during lunchtime – is when we needed a physical room, and it was the only time managers didn’t book their meetings. If anything, now we are at home due to Coronavirus, I think I don’t care as much about lunchtime meetings because I don’t eat consistently at home.
Do you think things will change when we get back to the office?
Or do you think – since the managers will be fine, they will forget about how the developers have to work at their expense?
In our office, we technically have 2 companies but we are part of the same parent company. We have separate Slack accounts so cannot contact them through there, but we can contact them via email groups. Big announcements go on the Intranet for everyone in the group to read.
For some reason, occasionally, people decide to send communication in a “Pass it down on a ‘need to know’ basis”.
There were some big changes to the computer network and this was sent from IT to the Head of Development. He then sent it to the manager below him. He then sends it to several managers below him. They then send it to the people they manage. I finally get the email.
How long did that message take to be forwarded on that many times? Also, it only seemed like it was sent to people in my company. What about the other guys who work in our office?
I ask them if they have heard the news. They hadn’t, but would be massively impacted by the changes. If I hadn’t told them, there could have been big consequences.
Why wasn’t it sent to the mailing list for the entire office? Or put on the Intranet as an important message? It affects everyone. Sending the information to a small subset of people is just dumb.
It’s hard to believe how each member in the chain read the email and doesn’t question it. They just forward it on like expected. Then when it finally gets to me, I end up in a rage. It’s just an absurd way to communicate, I don’t get why people cannot see it.
What is the process when one of the managers is on annual leave? Does the sender then check who they manage and send it to them directly? Or do they just not get the message?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
In their section of potential risks, they mention they don’t have a PO, so struggle to prioritise their work.
Here are my comments:
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.
Stranger Coding Tings 