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My team has an operational excellence day per sprint where we have to work on tech debt. Except that day is not counted in sprint planning so we don't have poi

My team has an operational excellence day per sprint where we have to work on tech debt. Except that day is not counted in sprint planning so we don't have points allocated to it, we have meetings during that day and are also expected to perform our normal duty such as helping customers onboard, and 95% of our tech debt tasks would take more than a day to fix anyway. The result is that we have 10% of our time supposedly assigned to tech debt, but in 11 months in that team I have only worked on tech debt once during those days.

voakbasda 4y ago
I took a job where I was told engineers could work periodically on improving open source projects relevant to our work. In the two years I was there, I was given exactly zero time to work on such things. I think these kinds of arrangements are dangled as a carrot in front of engineers, while the person doing the dangling knows full well that they are selling a lie. Now, such an offer is a red flag in my eyes, unless I hear a credible story firsthand from every engineer that interviews me. Next time I am offered such a carrot, I basically will need to see it put into writing before I believe a word of it. I suspect you have learned a similar lesson from your own experience.
piva00 4y ago
And it's not like a day every now and then is enough to tackle the hairy issues that have been festering for years and are a pain point in your everyday work. Past bad architectural decisions embedded in the codebase for years won't be solved by taking a day to clean up every week, it requires focused work to pull strings around, experiment and start a solution that will be rolled out over months. I hate the view that allocating a fixed percentage of time every X week(s) instead of allocating proper time as a project to fix issues affecting the productivity of the whole team/engineering org is doing something. It's just another source of frustration.

voakbasda 4y ago

I took a job where I was told engineers could work periodically on improving open source projects relevant to our work. In the two years I was there, I was given exactly zero time to work on such things. I think these kinds of arrangements are dangled as a carrot in front of engineers, while the person doing the dangling knows full well that they are selling a lie. Now, such an offer is a red flag in my eyes, unless I hear a credible story firsthand from every engineer that interviews me. Next time I am offered such a carrot, I basically will need to see it put into writing before I believe a word of it. I suspect you have learned a similar lesson from your own experience.

piva00 4y ago

And it's not like a day every now and then is enough to tackle the hairy issues that have been festering for years and are a pain point in your everyday work. Past bad architectural decisions embedded in the codebase for years won't be solved by taking a day to clean up every week, it requires focused work to pull strings around, experiment and start a solution that will be rolled out over months. I hate the view that allocating a fixed percentage of time every X week(s) instead of allocating proper time as a project to fix issues affecting the productivity of the whole team/engineering org is doing something. It's just another source of frustration.