4 ms·

No, I mean using story points for evaluating the complexity of a task (a lot of companies/teams use them this way at least).

TameAntelope 5y ago
I think spending too much time in a large company is damaging, possibly permanently, to a developer's ability to connect value to work. On a basic level, Story Points are there because if you can't tell me how long something will take, I don't want to give you money to go do it. Everyone has to deal with this, at every level. CEOs think about this, janitors think about this, literally everyone is constantly calculating estimated time to complete a task as a key metric about whether or not they should do the task. All a Story Point should do is make that a conversation, not an isolated person's random guess. That's it. I don't see what's harmful about that.
- axegon_ 5y ago
  I spent around 11 years in large companies(anywhere between 300 and 6000 employees). It highly depend on what you work on and what's your work ethic. In all honesty beyond circumstances which were outside my control, I ended up in a small company and just now I realize how much the idiotic bureaucracy truly bothered me. And I'm acknowledging that precisely agile facilitated this hell. I think you are looking at it from an r&d (still evangelistic) prospective, but now picture rewriting a truly ancient system still operating on mainframes(and the original developers and maintainers are no longer among the living) in a modern language where it's not a question if something is worth doing or who will do it-it has to be done. Figuring out how the old system works is a combination of reverse engineering and brute forcing. I've been there and trust me, in those circumstances story point is a synonym for a random number. This is a real life example and in those conditions agile doesn't only crack, it collapses and it mentally crushes on top of you cause you are still forced to stick to everything agile. What I'm saying is that agile and by implications sorry points work in some extremely specific circumstances but in the vast majority of cases it only adds multiple layers of complexity which does nothing but waste valuable time.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    There are nearly zero "must spend, at any cost" situations in business, so no I don't agree with you assertion that "it's not a question if something is worth doing". It's always a question if something is worth doing. I've seen your argument many, many times before, and it comes from people who have divorced their understanding of value from their understanding of work. You don't get paid to work, you get paid to provide value, and I'm not saying that's right or how it should be, but that's how it currently is. If, through your labor, you can't provide value above your cost to a company, the work you're doing is not worth the cost. One way to get an idea of how much what you're doing will cost is to ask you and your peers what you think it'll cost, and one way of measuring that cost is a Story Point.
    - axegon_ 5y ago
      This means you were lucky and got to work in those isolated environments where you never had to migrate such an ancient system without compromise and 100.00% identical operation or dealing with "we must have/support x, no matter what, cost is off the table". I've been through that countless times. Migrating ancient systems, writing drivers for hardware with close to 0 documentation or specification, "ads absolutely immune to ad blockers in our apps", just 3 personal examples where any value for a story point is an arbitrary number and a wild guess at best and where the only thing I got from agile was countless sleepless nights, no weekends or holidays and still barely making it in time. Not because I was locked to a desk but because of my personal working ethic.
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        Even when a company is facing an existential crisis, your estimation is important to help decide if they need to provide additional resources or even replace you if you're not able to do the job (among many other things). They're not going to throw money at you forever, and demanding blind trust is completely unreasonable, especially so in an existential crisis. There is simply never a situation where not having a sense of when work will be completed is acceptable. You cannot concoct a scenario where that's okay, and the fact that you're trying to kind of reinforces my point about work vs. value. There is no "infinite value" scenario, that doesn't exist.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I think spending too much time in a large company is damaging, possibly permanently, to a developer's ability to connect value to work. On a basic level, Story Points are there because if you can't tell me how long something will take, I don't want to give you money to go do it. Everyone has to deal with this, at every level. CEOs think about this, janitors think about this, literally everyone is constantly calculating estimated time to complete a task as a key metric about whether or not they should do the task. All a Story Point should do is make that a conversation, not an isolated person's random guess. That's it. I don't see what's harmful about that.

axegon_ 5y ago
I spent around 11 years in large companies(anywhere between 300 and 6000 employees). It highly depend on what you work on and what's your work ethic. In all honesty beyond circumstances which were outside my control, I ended up in a small company and just now I realize how much the idiotic bureaucracy truly bothered me. And I'm acknowledging that precisely agile facilitated this hell. I think you are looking at it from an r&d (still evangelistic) prospective, but now picture rewriting a truly ancient system still operating on mainframes(and the original developers and maintainers are no longer among the living) in a modern language where it's not a question if something is worth doing or who will do it-it has to be done. Figuring out how the old system works is a combination of reverse engineering and brute forcing. I've been there and trust me, in those circumstances story point is a synonym for a random number. This is a real life example and in those conditions agile doesn't only crack, it collapses and it mentally crushes on top of you cause you are still forced to stick to everything agile. What I'm saying is that agile and by implications sorry points work in some extremely specific circumstances but in the vast majority of cases it only adds multiple layers of complexity which does nothing but waste valuable time.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  There are nearly zero "must spend, at any cost" situations in business, so no I don't agree with you assertion that "it's not a question if something is worth doing". It's always a question if something is worth doing. I've seen your argument many, many times before, and it comes from people who have divorced their understanding of value from their understanding of work. You don't get paid to work, you get paid to provide value, and I'm not saying that's right or how it should be, but that's how it currently is. If, through your labor, you can't provide value above your cost to a company, the work you're doing is not worth the cost. One way to get an idea of how much what you're doing will cost is to ask you and your peers what you think it'll cost, and one way of measuring that cost is a Story Point.
  - axegon_ 5y ago
    This means you were lucky and got to work in those isolated environments where you never had to migrate such an ancient system without compromise and 100.00% identical operation or dealing with "we must have/support x, no matter what, cost is off the table". I've been through that countless times. Migrating ancient systems, writing drivers for hardware with close to 0 documentation or specification, "ads absolutely immune to ad blockers in our apps", just 3 personal examples where any value for a story point is an arbitrary number and a wild guess at best and where the only thing I got from agile was countless sleepless nights, no weekends or holidays and still barely making it in time. Not because I was locked to a desk but because of my personal working ethic.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      Even when a company is facing an existential crisis, your estimation is important to help decide if they need to provide additional resources or even replace you if you're not able to do the job (among many other things). They're not going to throw money at you forever, and demanding blind trust is completely unreasonable, especially so in an existential crisis. There is simply never a situation where not having a sense of when work will be completed is acceptable. You cannot concoct a scenario where that's okay, and the fact that you're trying to kind of reinforces my point about work vs. value. There is no "infinite value" scenario, that doesn't exist.