Managers visiting India

In recent times, our HR Director reiterated that for UK workers, there are no plans to return to the office and we will continue to work at home. However, our Indian workforce will be. It sounded like it was some government-mandated thing.

I suppose it is great news for managers and directors because they love making any excuse to go over there for a week for “work” then post about the sights and local cuisine.

Days after the HR Director had spoken about how “home-working was the way forward for the company”:

“Caroline and I had a long chat when we were back at the hotel and talked about what we had learnt so far this week. We both concluded we need to have more fun at work, see people face-to-face more often and continue to have new experiences as that helps with personal growth.”
HR Director

How does she not realise the hypocrisy of her statement? It wouldn’t surprise me if she u-turned and told us to go back to the office.

Meanwhile the CTO finally realises developers are actually important (whilst sampling the local cuisine, of course):

“One of the highlights of my trip was getting to know the team on a more personal level, through lunches, dinners, and working sessions. I have come away from the trip with a newfound appreciation for the vital role that our developers play in our company’s success, and for the amazing work that they do every day.”
CTO

How can you be one of the leads for the Development department and not realise that software developers are the key part of a company that sells software?

I’m sure they mean well, but the more you think about it, the worse it seems. It also seems like he appreciates the Indian workforce more than the English ones.

Colin: How was their visit?
Jeeva: "They are very busy, we got 6 minutes of their time”.

Why so specific? I wonder if that is a cultural thing. Indian’s seem to do it with job experience. Us English just round up or down to the nearest half-year, but they like saying they have “2.2 years of C# experience”.

Case Study: Stag Sports, and playing sports again

The disadvantages of working at home is that I don’t socialise or exercise as much as I used to. So I thought I’d rejoin a local sports team. These days, you are supposed to buy your own kit, so I had to purchase from the supplier https://stag-sports.com/

After selecting what I wanted to buy, I read the following on the confirmation page:

Please review your choices below before finalizing your purchase. Please note that we only accept payments through PayPal, where you can make payments via your own PayPal account, or accepted Debit/Credit cards.

I thought this was saying they accept PayPal only. To use PayPal, you have to have a linked card, so the bit at the end just seemed to be saying that.

You then have to fill in your address and agree to their terms. You’d expect the terms just to be privacy and/or returns policy, but it takes you to their page on hoodies!

After clicking the Submit Payment button, when you haven’t specified any payment details at all, it takes you to a page which says:

Thank you for choosing to pay £54.95 to Stag Sports by card, please add your card details below and click ‘submit payment’ to complete your order.

Which suprised me because A) I thought they only accepted PayPal, and B) I never specified how I wanted to pay.

The form was for filling in a credit card, but then there was a PayPal logo image lower down; which then launched the usual PayPal pages.

Conclusion/Judgement of Stag Sports

If I was purchasing a product and had the choice of using a competitor, each of these aspects would just encourage me to look elsewhere. For me to complete my purchase from an unknown seller, they have to raise my trust by having a good user experience, have the correct information I wanted to find, and have no mistakes or bugs. The website is what really drives sales, so it’s important to get right.

How the exercise is going

When I used to go to work, it involved a 20 minute walk each direction, and I went there 5 days a week. After we started working at home, I’d probably get 30 mins walk a week on average, and I hadn’t actually tried running in 2 years.

In my first session back, I fell over a few times. Second session – I somehow manage to pull a muscle in both my thighs simultaneously. Third session – my legs generally ached and I felt a small tweak in my right thigh. Fourth – I got knocked to the ground and had scratches up my right leg from the astro-turf. Fifth, I ended up hurting my left knee on the way there!

I think what I am concluding is – that exercise is actually bad for you, and I am probably old now.

Laptop Heat

We recently had a heatwave in the UK, and I think this was even experienced throughout the world. Even before that, one of my team member’s laptop battery bulged up due to excessive heat, which he noticed due to the raised keyboard. He ended up getting a brand new company laptop.

During the heatwave, another team member went into the office where it would be nice and cool, but I guess there’s a good chance it happened in transit (in his hot car) – he also noticed the raised keyboard, and so quickly disconnected the battery before it had a chance to explode.

“My new laptop is flipping awesome. I’m so happy we had this heatwave”
Colleague

I assume our IT department must have got many requests for new laptops, and then they sent out this very debatable advice.

"Your laptop may be struggling because it has to work harder to keep itself cool. Here are some tips to help get the best performance from the laptop until things cool down.

Move to the coolest part of your home, or work in one of our air-conditioned offices.
Run updates and give your computer a reboot
Limit the apps running to those you need
In Microsoft Teams, turn off incoming video (this allows you to share your camera but reduce the impact on your laptop’s display)”

So for point number 1, my first team member works in his conservatory. I normally associate conservatories with being cold but we often compare temperatures and his room is usually 6-8 degrees celsius warmer than my living room where I work. We are in those rooms because it’s the only space we have available for a desk and monitors. It’s not exactly easy to just “Move to the coolest part of your home”. I suppose you could try working on your laptop with no external monitors, but the advice should be just “to take the day off”. They also say to come into the office, but then the second colleague’s laptop battery presumably broke on the way there.

Point number 2: other than the rare circumstance that software is causing extra work for the processor (and they have fixed the issue in a new software update), running software updates probably isn’t going to make a difference. Maybe the update process will cause your laptop to run hotter whilst download/installing. Or what if the new update has a bug that causes extra processor issues?

Point number 3: That’s just good advice in general isn’t it? Don’t load up loads of programs when you don’t want them.

Point number 4: I found this a bit weird. If everyone turned off incoming feeds, then no one is watching the video feeds. Why not just say “do not use your webcams”?

Even Valve and Nintendo were putting out advice for their Steam Deck, and Switch. Those small devices just aren’t good in the heat.

Employee Forum

An “Employee Forum” was created recently. Each month, a group of representatives from different departments talk about suggestions and complaints – to try and improve life at work. These are then proposed to Senior Management or Human Resources to hopefully implement.

Personally, I can’t imagine this lasting because many suggestions are illogical or have just descended into madness – and there’s only been two meetings over the 2 months.

I think no matter how good things are, people will always suggest more time off, higher pay, or both. Many of these suggestions do involve more time off, and it seems we have tried every angle already.

Some of these suggestions have company responses already.

Offices are not being used. Are managers encouraging the use of them?

Response: Will re-communicate about the offices to encourage colleagues to use them.

My take: Since we now are all home-working, the office is barely used. It’s optional for people to work so some people work there permanently if their home isn’t suitable, or they come in when their team does. Now it ain’t an “office”; it is a “collaboration hub”. I think it’s important to include this one in the blog to set the scene. The office improvement suggestions are funnier given that the office is under-utilised; it’s like they want more perks than we had before when the office was 100% full capacity – which doesn’t make financial sense.

What is the official business position on dogs in the office?

Response: Dogs are not permitted in the office. Multiple reasons are behind this, such as colleagues with allergies, or aversion to dogs. A dedicated area for dogs within each office is also not permitted.

My take: Did people ever want dogs in the office before? This isn’t the strangest suggestion, but this is what I mean by descending into madness. How was this one of the first suggestions? Surely we should prioritise bigger issues.

Would we consider offering everyone an extra day holiday for life events?

Notes: Representatives discussed and came to the conclusion it’s fairest for it to be a birthday specific holiday because other life events, such as wedding day, may not apply to all. Will take this to HR.

My take: I like how the representatives consider a wedding day might not apply to all, but later they soon forget this and start demanding more maternity leave/pay; even though that is for child-bearing women specifically. You can never really be consistently inclusive anyway.

The general sentiment of a birthday holiday is nice, but then there will be people that will say they are too busy at work to take it off, so then will want the day off later. May as well just increase everyone’s holiday allowance by 1 rather than dictating a specific day.

Could we move to a 4-day working week approach that other businesses are adopting?

Notes: This means working 4 days of standard hours with the same 5 day salary.
Representatives discussed how this would work in supporting our main customers who operate 24/7. Will take this to HR.

My take: Imagine the conversation that person has with HR:
Representative: “what do you think of an extra day holiday?”
HR: “Rejected. Not gonna happen”
Representative: “Ok, next question, how about we only work 4 days?”
HR: “what? no!”
Representative (as we will see later): “How about loads more holiday?”
HR: “get out of here!”

I have heard some claims that working 4 days is more effective. I can actually see it both ways. When it is Friday, people often take longer breaks or work slower because “it’s Friday”/”it’s nearly the weekend”. If you remove the Friday, some people may work faster to get the same amount of work done, or they could just adapt the “it’s Friday” thought to “it’s Thursday”.

The Return to Work Program needs to be rethought.

Notes: An example of this is an employee who came back to work in December from maternity leave and was told from HR that the ‘Return to Work’ program starts in April (apparently runs every quarter) so she would have to wait a good 3 months to get the return to work support.

Response: We need to address this.

My take: Well, this just sounds like a dumb thing we do. How has the return to work program failed that much? What does this Return To Work program even involve? Are people introduced to any new employees and told about new/changed processes? Surely you would be aware after 3 months back at work anyway.

Offices used to have refreshment options available on site: vending machines, fresh fruit, and hot drinks machines, and a canteen serving hot food. The only facilities now are tea/coffee.

My take: What do you expect here? We had a canteen, fruit, and vending machines because the office was full. It currently operates on less than 10% capacity. It doesn’t seem feasible to supply fresh fruit. Vending machines are a possibility since the products will have a longer shelf life (but I bet those are pricey to rent anyway). Canteen was nearly shut down on a few occasions because it wasn’t profitable enough. A different office also requested they want a Canteen and even suggested people would pay a monthly fee to run it. It used to cost £3.75 per hot meal and I used it most days so I was spending ~£75 a month if there’s 20 work days. The fee would be significantly higher than this to make that profitable with fewer numbers of staff using it. No way are they going to pay that. Can’t people just buy some food on the way to the office? I think we still have microwaves if you want to warm food up. If not, ask for the microwaves back!

The UK Parental Leave policy is not very competitive

My take: Not sure how we compare to other companies but I’ve found that women can take something like 9 months maternity, get 1 month full pay, then can take 2 months unpaid leave, then return to work on reduced hours. What more do they want? Maybe it’s controversial and a minority view, but I don’t think people need to be encouraged to start families or be paid at their employers expense. We are paid to work, not chill out, but you wouldn’t think it with the requests for more holiday, reduced working hours, more social events etc.

Compared to many other companies, our Maternity policy and pay is very basic. This could be a deterrent to people wanting to start families. The return bonus is a good feature, however doesn’t assist with the cost of living whilst on Maternity leave.

My take: It is such an outrage; it’s on here twice! Seems the current policy is a “deterrent”, so I was wrong and people need to be encouraged to start families, then receive a “Return to work” bonus to get them back in. Insane. Also, what do they mean with “cost of living”? We mostly work at home now, so the costs of chilling at home shouldn’t increase.

Can we build a few bug hotels and bird tables in the gardens?

My take: “What? We can’t bring dogs in? What about bugs?” WTF. I hadn’t even heard of a “bug hotel” until now. Who is suggesting this nonsense? It’s making me angry reading this. Might make some sense if the offices were full, but they aren’t.

People who currently have an entitlement of 28 days annual leave should still be allowed to purchase 5 days, otherwise it is a scheme that doesn’t apply to many (it’s really 2 days purchase available).

My take: I think new employees have 25 days plus the usual bank holidays, then over years of service, it can go up to 28. But then you can purchase days up to 30. So the ask is that we should be able to buy 5 regardless of current allowance.

Recently, I was saying to some of my colleagues that 28 days is a fantastic annual leave and those in the USA barely get any leave at all which surely would make them go insane. But look at us chillers, we want more than 28 days!

Can we review holiday entitlement for length of service and/or senior roles? After 14 years, I have 28 days per year, whereas rival companies are on 35 to 38.

My take: They wanted to buy 5 days on top of 28 for a total of 33. Now they have increased their demands. “Can’t we just have 38 instead?” What’s the next demand? “Buy 5 days on top of 38”?
Do we still want our birthday off as well? These demands are just escalating.

Can we get a fleet of ‘Boris’ bikes to allow people to get off-site and obtain lunches from local businesses without the need to get in their cars or walk across muddy fields?

My take: Boris bikes refers to what they have in London where you can rent bikes to cycle around London. Here is a bonus fact: even though Boris Johnson was the London Major when the bikes were introduced, it was actually the former mayor Ken Livingstone that started working on the plan.

So we want to hire bikes to cycle to get food. The nearest supermarket is literally 10 minutes if you walk slowly and there’s only fields if you leap over the wall onto private land, so no idea where that false claim has come from. If you walk the other direction, there’s a few shops where you can buy food within 5 minutes walk (and can take a scenic detour through a park; no muddy fields this direction either), and a few pubs that serve lunch also within a 10 minute walk.

They want bikes because they are too lazy to walk, but would they cycle? isn’t that more effort? Locking/unlocking the bike at your start and end destination. Probably have to put a helmet on for health and safety. The extra hassle if the bike gets stolen… ain’t nobody got time for that.

Subsidised Pet Insurance – Wellness Allowance, £360 per annum to cover anything health related, Gym, massages peloton etc

My take: why not just ask for an extra £500 wage increase?

Anyway, I’ve got tired of critiquing these demands. I vote to stop the Employee Forum. It has clearly got out of hand already, and there is no way the majority of these are even going to be considered. I think all that will happen is that we will be encouraged to use the current offices more (and they may reinstate a vending machine if we do), and I could see maternity benefits being increased slightly. Everything else will be laughed at.

Working On The Wrong Project

This post, How do I tell my boss I’ve accidentally been working halftime on the wrong project for the past year?, appeared on Stack Exchanges Hot Network Questions, and it is an interesting story. Is it true though? It’s definitely hard to believe.

Even though the process and management where I work is a bit slack sometimes, I just can’t imagine this scenario could possibly happen. There’s too many failures that have to happen for it to get to that stage.

A tester starts a new remote-based job and is assigned to 2 projects. 11 months later, he realises that he was only supposed to be assigned to 1 project, and was wrongly invited to the initial meeting because he shares the same name as another staff member.

When he has one-to-one meetings with his manager, he has somehow talked about work in a way that the manager didn’t realise he was working on the wrong project.

He eventually meets his team in person, and it seems some people knew the other staff member with the same name, but not enough to realise this person wasn’t the same.

I have no idea how this can actually happen.

There’s definitely going to be situations when you realise two people have the same name in your company, and especially if it is you that shares the same name. Someone emailing you by mistake; receiving an email from the other person; seeing a post on whatever chat app they use eg Slack/Teams.

Surely you have daily stand-up meetings where you talk to your team. Someone would surely realise you aren’t the person they expect, unless they all accepted it was a different person, but then they wouldn’t act like you were the other person when you physically met up.

If they really did believe it was their original colleague on the project, and there were no meetings, surely one of the team members would have communicated to the other person to ask them how they are getting on.

If the organisation only assigned a Tester to 1 project, surely there would be a point where you say you were too busy with “the other project” and would be challenged. They must be assigned to a couple of projects as standard, but then that means this person should have been assigned to a third project. It makes me wonder what the other guy was doing. The original poster says they were “focusing on other work”. Probably chilling for a year then 😀

If you have to log your time, surely a manager would realise something isn’t right when they look at the overall figures, or just your own..

If this Tester was comfortable doing both these projects, doesn’t that indicate Testers are actually underutilised and are only working at 50% capacity? I do think Testers could easily get assigned more work but they always seem to claim they are really busy.

It’s a mystery.

Skeletons In The Attic

I was on a call and one guy turned his webcam on. He has a full-sized skeleton behind him. He leans back in his chair and stretches. I was wondering if he was trying to “stealthily” cover it up. Shortly, he turned his webcam off. Later in the call, he turns it back on, and the skeleton was nowhere to be seen. So maybe he was trying to cover it up afterall.

Work Hours #2: Working From Home

When we worked in the office, I found that if I had finished my assigned work and it was towards the end of the day – I was reluctant to start something new, but I wouldn’t have the guts to go home (I thought my manager or colleagues would question why I was walking out 30-60 minutes earlier than you should). So instead, I’d stay at my desk and talk to a colleague or browse some programming websites, casually look through recent bug reports, or bug fixes. But either way, I wouldn’t be working.

The thing is, I would rarely walk away from my desk during the day. Yet there were other people that would go for a break for 10-20 minutes on a regular basis. Then there was Derek that took so many breaks – he would only work for about 4 hours instead of his contracted 7.5 hours per day! I explained this in my previous blog on Work Hours.

When I thought about it, if it was acceptable for Derek to work like that, there shouldn’t be anything stopping me walking off after 4 productive hours at my desk.

When we moved to permanently working from home, I had my usual office mindset where I would rarely leave my desk and wouldn’t shut my laptop off until it got to 5pm. Then a few months in, I started taking a few more breaks, but still wouldn’t leave until 5pm. Sometimes if my colleagues asked for help around 5pm, I’d happily help them out for 30 minutes or so.

If you think about it, I was probably working more at home. There’s no one distracting you by walking past your desk, no temptation to look at what other people are doing, no office banter to distract you, no one coming to your desk unannounced.

A few weeks ago, it got to 4pm, and I started wasting time – having a nosey at bug reports and recent code changes. Then I thought “what am I doing? Why am I wasting time until it gets to 5pm. No one is going to see me leave”. So I walked over to my PC and started playing games. I left my laptop on, and if people messaged me, I would rush over and respond. Sometimes they wanted help and I would call them. Other times they were sending me unimportant stuff, so back to games.

Over the last month or so, we have cut down the amount of bug fixes we are putting in the releases. I have quite a few fixes waiting to be checked in, but I’m not allowed to commit it because of the restricted releases. So I’m on target for the work I’ve been assigned. I’ve sent a message to my manager, requesting more work. While waiting for a reply – I go play some games. He could take up to an hour to respond, because he could be in a meeting. No point wasting time and waiting around.

I have a high standard of ethics, or like to think so. I don’t see a problem with this new way of working. I’m getting the assigned work done, and I’m having fun. It’s not like I am actually slacking off. Also, I did say I always have my laptop on during work hours and will promptly respond. There’s times where there will be something important and I’ll work past my contracted hours, so it kind of cancels out anyway. I don’t complain if I work 2 extra hours some days to investigate/fix some important issue, because I know I’ve taken the time up front.

Additionally, sometimes you have those meetings where you don’t really need to participate so you end up casually listening. So sometimes I have whipped out the 3DS or Kindle and played some casual games whilst listening to the meeting. Multitasking.

Some days I’ve kept a book at my desk. When there’s something that blocks me for 5 mins or more, like I have to rebuild our software, or I need to wait for someone to finish their meeting – then I can read.

Managers are always going on about how important it is to have a good work-life balance, and how we need to be aware of our mental health. You may as well take advantage of the new way of working. It has its disadvantages but it also has advantages like this.

Slack Analytics #2: September 2020

In Slack Analytics, I stated:

I have sent 1,700 messages for the entire year.

I was interested to see my output this month. I have been sending a lot of messages to my Apprentice, I’ve been engaging in conversations with managers and testers to discuss many of my bug fixes. Some new Apprentices joined and I have also been helping them. Also, since I don’t get to physically talk much, my Slack usage has gone up.

1,803 messages over 26 days.

In Slack Analytics, I also mentioned the highest number of messages sent by someone was “3,500 across the 18 days she was in the office”.

Again, she still leads the monthly charts, but this time has 3,709 over 21 days, so it’s basically stayed the same.

Now this is interesting. How can you make everyone work at home, yet her message count hasn’t increased that much? I was expecting to see several people have counts that eclipse this figure.

Slack only allows you to see Last 30 Days, or All Time, so I don’t think I can get access to see the change pre and post lockdown. You would imagine taking away face-to-face communication will increase everyone’s usage.

I guess there are two ways to actually slack-off work. Using Slack to send banter messages to your colleagues, or just not working. So message counts could go up because more people can get away with not actually working, or it can go down because they really are slacking-off work.

The new Apprentices have been pretty quiet so far, and I would have thought they would be constantly messaging people since they wouldn’t have a clue that was going on. There’s a developer that is really quiet when we were in the office and he never seems to publicly post anything on Slack. I tend to forget he exists.

Developer	Days active	Message Count
Apprentice A	22	286
Apprentice B	21	525
Quiet Developer	23	429

Slack Analytics

August Retrospective

As part of “Agile Development”, you have a meeting called a Retrospective where you look back on things that have happened over a certain time period (like two weeks), and say what happened, what went well, and what didn’t go well.

When we worked in an office, we booked out a meeting room and wrote on Post-It notes and placed them on a whiteboard. Since we are working from home now, we needed an online solution. We used the Retrospective board on Microsoft’s Azure Devops; which worked well.

There were a few interesting points I wanted to note down. One point I strongly agreed with, and the other two points I think either: I am deluded, or the rest of the team are.

“Part time Product Owner”. When our team was formed, we were told our product is really important. If it was important, we would have the correct staff in place, with a Product Owner in charge of providing us with requirements, or making decisions on well-defined requirements. At first, we didn’t have a Product Owner. Then later, we got one, but she was split between two products and we were always low priority. Due to this, some of my work ended up being shelved because I had implemented the requirements I knew about, but I knew there was much more to it, so raised questions that were never answered.

“Need to stop working at pace, otherwise we will all burn out.” This is absolute nonsense; we are so slow. This is basically a reference to what the Head Of Development said in Team Summary, but other managers have used the phrasing “working at pace”, so now people in the team are regurgitating it.

“Code Analysis work going fast” First of all, the people responsible for analysing the data were dragging it out as long as possible, see The Code Analysis Meetings (It’s a great read [if I’m allowed to promote my own blog]). Also, Colin has been leading a small team to actually fix these “problems”.
A) they are making changes manually and progress is slow. The changes are simple, and they can get Visual Studio to fix them without extra input.

B) Colin was taking days to review them, so I ended up stepping in and reviewing the code for him.

Bonus Chuckle

We get to the end of the retro, having gone through the full board. The final stage is to vote on the items that are suggestions on what to “do”/”stop doing” in future.

“I can’t see my items on here”
Becky

It turns out she has added her items to another team’s board. 🤦

I don’t get how we can go through the ENTIRE board and only then does she realise that we haven’t talked about the four items that she added.

Team Summary

The team is showing unwavering commitment, innovation, resilience, and drive to deliver continuously. I’ve never seen anything like it in the years I’ve been here.
Head of Development

I always say that managers often show a massive disconnect from reality. They seem to praise when the team has performed poorly, and I think this is another case of that. I went through our team’s changes in the last month. Merges are trivial and I don’t really count them as real work, but I’ve included them in the table anyway.

Here is the analysis:

Name	Merges	Fixes	My View
Me	1	4	I’ve been disappointed in my productivity. However, I haven’t done that bad when compared to everyone else. Additionally, I have got loads of changes in a branch, on hold; awaiting confirmation of actual requirements.
Senior Dev	1	11 (mainly small items)	Decent work, but really only cherry picking “quick wins”
Colin	4 (made a massive mess of one of these, made a bit of a mess with another. I think the other two were primarily to teach people how to merge [ironically].)	5 (I believe 2 of these fixes were issues he created in the other 3)	Colin wasted a lot of time by making a mess of a merge which introduced at least one bug, and he made a mess of one of his other changes. He claims he has been more productive whilst working at home.
Colin 2	0	3 (1 of which was removing an unused using statement)	With only 2 real changes, one of which was small and it didn’t work properly; this is terrible performance.
Rob	0	2	Rob has been real quiet. I think he had a bit of time off work, but still, this is poor
Beavis	0	1	Beavis was primarily just making excuses why he can’t work. To be fair, there was one week where he was doing some other work for another team.
Total	6	26

Our “drive to deliver“

So in a month, we haven’t done much work. I’d be interested to calculate what the average amount of fixes developers do each month. It’s a bit meaningless because a fix could take an hour, and another fix could take a week. However, you would think it would average out over a period of time.

I’ve never seen anything like it. I might use that as a recurring phrase from now on.
My manager actually said to me that my efforts “haven’t gone unnoticed”. I didn’t bother to correct him. I think I need to play up the delusion to try and get a promotion. Honesty never got me anywhere before.