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Capital One axes 1k tech roles
- firstSpeaker 4y agowell... https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ has gone so far into the koo koo land that teams are dysfunctional because of them.
- canadianfella 4y agoIs this a parody website?
- __derek__ 4y agoThat one appears to be earnest, but Scaled Agile DevOps is definitely parody.[1] [1]: https://scaledagiledevops.com/ https://scaledagiledevops.com/
- 56friends 4y ago“All teams should assemble in the Convoy Alignment room for this multi-day celebration of detailed planning. It is important that the alignment happens in person and that everyone travels to a remote location to eliminate distractions from less important things such as family or pets.”
- firstSpeaker 4y agoWow, this is so fun to read!
- winphone1974 4y agoI wish. It's the rational people back again, this time leaning heavily on agile to sell to the c-suite. Everything good here is common sense or stolen from elsewhere; everything else is at best absolutely terriblev and at it's worse permanently damaging
- Throw10987 4y agoNo, to the point that there is this website - https://safedelusion.com/ https://safedelusion.com/
- winphone1974 4y agoWe're in our second PI planning session and beyond SAFe it's gone so far off the rails we're into week 2 of planning. So bad that I'm likely to quit over the experience
- darth_avocado 4y agoWhat is “agile” job role family?
- l0gic4l 4y agoScrum masters
- trillic 4y ago"Scrum masters" and their managers the "Agile delivery lead". Pretty sure there was somebody in charge of the AGLs under each director too. This was in addition to teams having product owners and an engineering manager as well at times. At times I had 3 people managing a team with 3-6 engineers. Very interesting tech culture.
- cjglo 4y agoAlso a former Cap1 employee here, the 3 people managing a team of 3 engineers is quite common. My last team before leaving had 3 engineers: tech lead, me, and a junior dev. It had 4 non-engineers managing us: a product owner, a head Agile Delivery Lead, a more junior agile Delivery Lead, and our manager.
- spamizbad 4y agoThis looks like they are cutting jobs like scrum masters and product managers.
- 56friends 4y agoFinally, a silver lining of the economic downturn!
- iLoveOncall 4y agoScrum master is a full time job? I thought I had heard it all with Happiness Managers but this takes the cake.
- denimnerd42 4y agoOur scrum masters are pretty useless at my company but they do work with 2 or 3 teams. They are basically secretaries/administrative assistants for JIRA and outlook which is fine.
- FireBy2024 4y agoAren't scrum masters usually individual contributors on the team as well?
- belltaco 4y agoI've never seen a scrum master code. Sometimes the daily scrum meeting is run by ICs when the scrum master is busy or not around.
- xwolfi 4y agoWe do it. Usually agile comes from above and the team only have to tick a box, say they re agile and show a shadow org around it. We even rotate the scrum master sometimes to spread the joy. End of the day, we fill the client's need, as efficiently as we can without letting them run wild in expectations and keeping cost in line with budget: it's common sense and I dont get what the agile religions bring really. Turn idiots into mediocre people, maybe ?
- jvanderbot 4y agoIt just seems to me that "agile as directed by management" is pretty much an oxymoron.
- shamiln 4y agoI have. Half of the time, I’m glad it’s not their primary responsibility in this case.
- bdavis__ 4y agoi have seen a scrum master code. ScrumMaster = NULL; there you go !
- tetraca 4y agoWe have scrum master as a rotating hat with all the other senior developers on the team. 99% of my day is code or meetings on what I'm coding. The only burden is once a week I look at jira with some managers and help them click boxes. I'm not sure what a full time scrum master would really do.
- civilized 4y ago> The consumer lending company told The Register that its plan was to eliminate its "Agile" job family and integrate staff there into "existing engineering and product manager roles." Do we dare dream?
- xwolfi 4y agoFunnily enough my company started an agile reorg last year, and it's going as well as you can imagine. Cant wait for the de-agiling next phase where we can go back to having 4 matrix managers instead of 5...
- xwdv 4y agoI can’t wait to see these scrum master charlatans eliminated from most companies.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoA scrum master was one of the most useless people I’ve ever worked with. Not a product or project manager because they didn’t know the domain. Didn’t know all that much about building software because they didn’t have any skills. Devs were still writing and moving tickets around so they basically did zero productive work.
- 56friends 4y agoMy team was forced to invite a scrum master to several planning meetings. She sat quietly, observed the process, and then a few weeks later disappeared without a trace. We didn’t get any feedback from her or the org. Still not sure what that was about.
- somehnguy 4y agoWow, I had almost the exact same experience with my team! The only reason I don’t think we work together is that ours was a he. Still no idea what that was about, and it was never brought up again.
- unity1001 4y agoDid the CEO take 'full responsibility' in this layoff too...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- janalsncm 4y agoUsed to work for C1. It was never really clear to me what scrum masters did, since our manager understood the technical and cross-team requirements of our product (I know this might not be universal) better than anyone else. The only time I saw scrum masters really do anything was “leading” standup and “leading” planning meetings every other month. I put leading in quotes because there’s only so much leading one can do if everyone else knows more about the product due to the inherent transitory nature of the scrum master role. Are you really adding value by reminding people that story points (some vague relationship to days of work) can only be Fibonacci numbers? Inside the company, the CEO loved to tout the “technical journey” they made which included things like moving to the cloud. Agile was on that list but it never really felt like it belonged. Depending on one’s tolerance of the kool-aid, some skepticism was always there.
- abledon 4y agoscrum master is one of the greatest grifts of 2010s-2020s tech. Esp when org chart pencils them in as 'mgmt' level so they are payed more than intermediate engineers, and on par with senior engineers
- newaccount2021 4y ago[dead]
- late2part 4y agoWhy is it a great gift?
- kensan73 4y agoJust in case you missed it, he said 'grift' (a petty or small-scale swindle)
- TulliusCicero 4y ago> story points (some vague relationship to days of work) Watching people insist that story points are totally not representative of predicted time spent working on a thing is the funniest shit. The mental gymnastics are incredible.
- antihero 4y agoI’ve heard that cap one were the first people to truly do data based lending, how’s that holding up?
- syspec 4y ago> Many Reg readers will know Capital One best for the break-in in 2019, where an attacker raided Capital One's cloud storage buckets and stole personal information on 106 million credit card applicants in the US and Canada. Stolen data from people who applied for credit products included 140,000 US social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, as well as one million Canadian social insurance numbers, plus names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and reported incomes. > Former Amazon engineer Paige A Thompson, who also went by the handle "erratic," was collared by the FBI the same week of the attack, and was convicted in June last year of pilfering millions of folks' data from the "misconfigured" storage buckets. In October, Thompson was sentenced to time served and five years of probation with location and computer monitoring. So wait, he stole millions of dollars worth of data, got rich off of it and was sentenced to time served?
- bobkazamakis 4y agowhere do you see that she got rich...?
- tanaros 4y ago> So wait, he stole millions of dollars worth of data, got rich off of it and was sentenced to time served? She copied the data but there was no evidence she profited from it. Capital One paid $250+ million in fines and legal settlements as penalty for not securing the data properly.
- barbazoo 4y agoI hope it's at least the ones that are responsible for aggressively pushing that stupid shopping browser extension every time I check my credit card account online. What a nonsensical thing to build, and what an annoying way to market it, without a way to opt out. Sorry for the people though that lost their jobs, I hope they all land on their feet.
- pdntspa 4y agoInteresting, I remember hitting up their booth at AWS lovefest in Vegas in 2019, and being somewhat surprised/perplexed to see that they were getting into the cloud infra management business. They did give me a pretty cool t-shirt though.
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 4y agoI wonder how many trees are killed so that the shortsighted people at Capital One can keep blasting their spam every day.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> It says it uses "ML applications, APIs and cloud products" to prevent online credit fraud. I worked as a contractor for CapOne for 9 months, in Richmond VA, in 1996/7. I was a tech, but I worked mostly on applications to help the fraud team. In those days, I think CapOne was ahead of the curve in automating banking. The fraud team were working to a checklist, with lots of computer assistance. They were always frazzled, because they were customer-facing. They kept themselves to themselves, and they had a high turnover. In the canteen, I sometimes tried to eavesdrop on their conversations. They were always just grumbling. It must have been a shitty job.
- jabroni_salad 4y agoWhen you are working fraud cases, you talk to zero people that are happy. Either you are talking to an actual scammer, a victim, or a victim who is very unhappy that the fraud system has flagged something. And then even when things are cut and dry it can take several days for a refund to go through, so if the customer is paycheck-to-paycheck they will need to make sacrifices until it all clears. One of my earlier gigs was insurance claims and then I also did a stint in fraud. I think the only worse job could be debt collection or those guys from the military that visit you if your spouse dies. I do technology in the FI space and pretty much all of my clients have a fraud process of "the customer notices their card is declined and has to call the number to find out why". C1 on the other hand will just send me a text asking for a yes/no and it works. Still ahead of the game as far as I am concerned.
- denton-scratch 4y ago"FI"? "C1"? Sorry if I'm being dim. [Edit] Can't delete! Well, Duh. C1 is what I called CapOne. I knew that. <slaps head>
- jabroni_salad 4y agoFI: financial institution c1: capital one
- top-flight 4y ago
- Eighth 4y agoAh. So, I expect my job interview to be cancelled next week...
- fwungy 4y agoCompany I recently consulted for dropped 90% of their project management team to save money. Didn't hurt anything, except leads had to do more Jira. Pretty painless way to save money from their pov.
- bfung 4y agoVery clear in the article: The Agile role in our Tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases but as our organization matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices Varying degree of “tech” role.
- hestefisk 4y agoCapital One is described as a FinTech… it’s really “just” a good old credit card provider.
- greenyoda 4y agoIt's also a good old bank, with good old branches and ATM machines.
- moomoo11 4y agoIME the bot tier engineers who couldn’t code or think got into “scrum” and other BS to try and become engineering managers. Of course we know how that ends. Honestly hope we see engineering manager title die off this decade as we go through these layoffs and reorgs. Teams with a technical team lead should report to a director. It’s not that hard to slack someone if you’re blocked. We can even have an AI manager handle this kind of administrative crap. I’ve had over a dozen engineering managers I’ve worked with and only two were any good. I mean, I keep in contact with them even years later. Rest were a joke at best or mostly terrible to work with. Again I’m sure at some places this kind of arrangement works. But I’ve probably experienced more bot tier managers than bot tier engineers. And yea I’m mad about it so excuse my negative tone.