Remote Standup Meetings

We have a daily “standup” meeting where each person in the team says what they did yesterday and what they are going to do today. You can also highlight any “blockers” that will prevent you from completing your work.

Since we are all working remotely, we just do them using Microsoft Teams. At first we just nominated someone to speak next, but since we have around 10 people in the team, and people don’t really listen or pay attention, then we ended up with people asking: “has everyone been?” – when only half of the team has been.

When Microsoft Teams introduced the “Raise Hand” feature, we used it as a flag to show who still needs to talk. Still, Colin says “who is next? Matt have you been?”. Yes he has been, why don’t you choose one of the 6 people with their hands raised?

Another point which illustrates that people don’t listen, is when I say something like “I’ve sent a Pull Request for my work but no one has reviewed it yet, can someone review it?”. Then three hours later, no one has reviewed it.

I think the problem is often that people are so focussed on what they have to say, then they don’t listen. I was watching a video about it and the guy reckoned the “walking the board” method gains more attention. This method is where you look at your “Kanban board” which shows you all the work your team is doing. Then you can go through each item in turn, and the relevant people can then speak up. I still think you’ll have the same problem since you know that you will have to speak when it gets to your work.

There are a couple of people that seemed to nominate people without even looking at the attendees, so then they end up in embarrassing situations where they say “Rob can go next”, but Rob isn’t actually on the call. Sometimes it was well-known that they don’t actually work that day because they are part time.

We also have someone in our team that just deals with Test Environments so isn’t directly involved in our work. We did raise the point that it is stupid for him to attend the stand-up meetings but our manager said he wants it to continue so he feels part of the team and also gets to hear the team talk. I guess that is a good point – since we are at home, we don’t get to hear our colleagues speak much.

His updates are so boring, and he delivers them in a really bored tone. I often think he doesn’t have much work to do, so just says words to blag it:

had to restart some servers, and upgrade some RAM.
signed off some policies, and am looking at patching some security vulnerabilities.
I sat down with Dan for a bit and went through some tickets. Got some other tickets. Need to review some policies. Still need to complete some security vulnerability patches.
Busy doing environment stuff, mainly security updates which I’ve almost finished. Just need to do some Virtual Machines today. There’s about 40-50 clients so that’s going to take the full day, maybe tomorrow as well.
Catching up on comms, am currently resetting a password, and then gonna look at some more environment tickets.

How long does resetting a password take? Is any of that actually useful to the team anyway? He may as well just say “Environments stuff” then choose the next person.

Another thing that always happens is when you pick someone to go next and you are met with silence. So you say “you are on mute!”, then a few seconds later “oh yeah, sorry I was on mute”. Here are some classic “mute” scenarios that I wrote down:

Becky: “Good morning Colin”
*few seconds of silence*
Colin: *bland tone* “good morning”
Becky: “You sound down, Colin”
Colin: “I said ‘good morning’ but I was on mute, so that's my second attempt.”

James: "Can everyone see my screen ok?"
*silence*
Becky: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"
Colin: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"
Matt: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"

Matt: "Colin, have you been?"
*silence*
Matt: "You still have your hand up"
*silence*
Matt: "you are also on mute"
*silence*
Colin: "I'm on mute? how did that happen?

And a bonus scenario:

Becky: "this meeting has started early!"
Colin: "who started it?"
Matt: "it was you Colin"

Monitor Request

The work laptop I have has a really poor quality screen. You would think when you work 7.5 hours on a computer, then you should get the best equipment possible. Anything you can do to increase staff happiness and productivity should be an obvious investment.

I put up with it for months, but I felt it was destroying my eyesight, so I had to do something about it.

My manager told me I can request a monitor from our IT department, to be delivered to my house. “Perfect”, I thought. I logged the ticket.

Two weeks later, I get fed up, and hook up the laptop to my living room TV. I sit on the sofa now. It’s actually comfortable. I go to the IT Portal to close my ticket, but it’s already closed. Must be rejected, even though it would have been nice for them to write a comment.

Another four weeks go by. I get an email saying my monitor will be delivered. I don’t want it but it’s too late now.

I wondered if they would finally get some decent equipment so I was still quite excited to accept it.

Nah, it’s just a standard 20 inch monitor.

£24 a month Expenses

In the UK, it seems that if you are working at home, you can reclaim around £24 expenses from the government.

Due to Coronavirus, we are working at home, when we would otherwise be working in an office.

A couple of my colleagues were discussing how they are going to claim this money. I reckon, these people are on £35k+ salary, and I reckon they probably save money by being at home. They don’t have to pay for fuel, and save 30-60 mins travel time per day.

You may be thinking: if they are entitled to it and their costs really have gone up, then fair enough.

However, think of the current situation we live in.

There’s all those people that have lost their jobs and are struggling to find new ones, self employed people that have had to close their business, all those people unable to work due to being ill, or isolating as a precaution. I was listening to the news on LBC Radio, and they reckoned “1 in 10 are expected to be unemployed”.

Then these guys are there in their privileged jobs, on high salary (compared to many), and can happily work at home, then demanding an extra £24 from the government which doesn’t mean much to them, but means quite a bit to someone else.

No doubt they are the same people that say “the NHS needs more money”, but are then claiming money they don’t need from the government. If your costs have gone up, and you want to claim, see the advice by Martin Lewis

King Of All Excuses: Part 2

Beavis was the first to start working at home due to the Coronavirus outbreak, but when he should have been ready to return to work, the CEO made the call to send the entire company to work from home until further notice.

Since he doesn’t have to make excuses to work at home, you would think the excuses would stop. But no, they continue:

Day 1: His daughter is ill

Day 2: The schools are closing so he is going to have to arrange some childcare. He didn’t mention why her grandparents couldn’t look after her, but he said ideally he would have gone to his brother…but he has Coronavirus. I wish I would have checked reported cases of Coronavirus at that point to see how likely that was.

Day 3: Apparently he was still looking after his daughter, but could spare the time for the 1 hour meeting. The manager asks to repeat the meeting tomorrow. Everyone in the team can make it; apart from Beavis.

On subsequent days, he ran through a variety of excuses why he couldn’t work at all, or why he could only work limited hours.

Couldn’t work at all:

He was ill
Daughter was ill

Reduced hours:

Windows update took 3 hours, so he had to wait for it to finish. It’s weird that the whole team has Windows and no one else had updates that lasted more than 10 minutes.
Was available to work, but needed to spend time freeing up hard disk space
Was available to work, but his daughter kept climbing on him so was unable to concentrate.

I accept that he has a young daughter, and between him and his wife – they need to look after her. But if his wife has chosen to work, then he needs to take annual leave, or accept unpaid leave. Maybe they should both reduce their hours and alternate the childcare. They need to do something. It affects the team when he is assigned work, he says he can do it, then the next day – he says he couldn’t because his daughter needed attention. It’s not a one-off; it is an excuse 90% of the days.

One of his tasks was to install 2 software programs, and he ended up logging 20 hours against it on the time-sheet. People did encounter issues logging into these programs, but we just told the guy who was in charge of this initiative and left it with him. It’s not like we actually had to spend time diagnosing issues. It should be 2 hours max.

Meetings At Your Desk Are A Problem

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?

Disaster Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King Of All Excuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indian English

I always knew there was English (UK) and English (USA) which has minor differences in spelling e.g. localize instead of localise, and words/phrases like “sidewalk” instead of “pavement”. UK folk can understand it fine, although we often joke about it not being “proper English”. In recent years, I’ve sometimes worked with Indian staff and quickly came across some strange words and phrases.

So it turns out there should be a English (India) too. Here are some classics:

“Today morning” instead of “this morning”
“Have some doubts” instead of “have a query/question”
“Prepone the meeting” instead of “bring the meeting forward”. Prepone is the opposite of postpone. I actually really like that one. It’s incredibly logical and is easier to say.
“to do the needful”. This one often throws me off. I think it’s like “please action this”, or “do whatever is required”.
“Kindly revert”. Indians love prefixing sentences with kindly. Apparently “revert” means “respond” which is just weird. This causes confusion when they leave this as a code comment on a Pull Request/Code Review. You think they are telling you to roll back your changes, but they just want you to respond with a reply.
“The same”. They use this instead of “it”, sometimes it sounds fine, other times it is really jarring. “Can you fix the bug and update the documentation for the same”.

Bonus one: Some people pronounce GitHub as “JitHub”. This probably is in the same category as the pronunciation of the Gif image format.

Joined up working

I think it’s best if you have teams that are in the same location since meetings are easier to arrange and have fluid communication.

If you are in the same office, you can have ad-hoc face-to-face communication. You can all go into a meeting room and don’t need any conference-call equipment which can have all kinds of problems; disconnecting, low audio quality. Same time-zones means there are more hour slots available to arrange meetings in.

I’ve heard people imply that teams end up being distributed just so that the other offices feel like they “feel part of it”/feel integrated into the company. Yet giving them a dedicated project they are responsible for would probably achieve that better; they will have more responsibility/autonomy. Adding members from the main development office makes it feel like they are been supervised.

Many times, you rely on a third party of some kind (by third party, this could be another team within the company or a different company). Maybe the third party collects the data and you just retrieve it via an API. You don’t really care about how the data got there, just that you can use it and it works accurately. Your team that wrote the user interface feel like they have achieved something. The team that collated the data and provided the API feel like they have achieved something. The teams may only need to communicate for a minor part of it. The teams need to know the overall aim, and what parameters they need for the API. My point here is that you can have two different teams with some minor collaboration, but both feel like they have contributed massively to the overall goal of the project.

I think adding a remote worker for the hell of it is just inefficient. Unless they are exceptional and can’t be replaced by the talent you have locally, then its just adding in unnecessary inefficiencies and causing unnecessary bottlenecks (have to delay meetings due to time-zones), have to wait until the next working day to get a response, different countries having different National Holidays.

Doing Admin

Beavis, a software developer, was supposed to be helping out running manual tests since the Testers were behind on their work. That day, he was working at home and posts on Slack that he has “network issues” so was unable to test. He could have picked up some development work instead, but he didn’t bother.

So for his stand-up update, he says he was just doing “general admin” which I reckon meant he was chilling out at home.

A Tester explained to him that when they work at home, they remote onto their work PC, then connect to the test system from there. It’s a bit of a workaround but it’s what everyone does.

Unhappy with this workaround, Beavis decides to log a ticket with our IT Helpdesk.

A few days later, Beavis is supposed to be helping out the Testers, but is working from home again. Yet again, he posts on Slack that there are still “network issues”. A Manager challenges him on it, and he says he has logged a ticket, but it hasn’t been addressed – so he can’t help. The Manager tells him to remote onto his work PC, which is a known workaround.

The next day, for his stand-up update, he said he ended up doing “general admin” again like tidying up his C drive, and he was also doing “personal development”. So completely defying the Manager and other Tester’s advice.

He isn’t the first person to use the “doing admin” excuse. It’s hilarious when you think about it. How can you claim you spent 7.5 hours creating new folders, or sending files to the recycle bin? Even more ridiculous when you have already made that claim in the days prior.