3 ms·

Another factor here is in a meeting-heavy agile environment, many engineers can't even give a good forward estimate of the number of "in the zone" hours they wi

Another factor here is in a meeting-heavy agile environment, many engineers can't even give a good forward estimate of the number of "in the zone" hours they will have in the coming week. Will I be on 0 outage calls or 5? Doesn't matter if I am on pager duty rotation or not.. Will I get pulled into 3 calls this afternoon or 0? Is my boss gonna come bother me with some urgent non-ticket task tomorrow morning? Etc. I'm currently in a no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment and I find myself getting tremendous amounts of work done for the first time in nearly a decade. I would not have estimated my ability to get 1/4 of what I have gotten done, done. My last 2 jobs were basically the opposite. Everything took 4x as long as it should..

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
intelVISA 3y ago
> no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment Best env, but sadly a bit rare? I used to select for shops like that, no wonder lay-offs are scary if you've been trapped in meetings instead of shipping.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I seem to manage getting into these types of roles 30% of the time, which is pretty nice. Granted I am working a zillion hours right now, but I'm less stressed than when I was working 9-6 but in 5 hours/day of zoom. Just feels like I am exercising my mastery vs fighting against inertia.
  - pydry 3y ago
    Something similar happened to me too. I switched from working 4 hours a day to 9 in a new job and my burnout healed. 4 hours of bullshitting, meetings, an unclear vision, constantly being blocked, anxiety over a lack of productivity was swapped with 9 hours of clear aims, clear goals and hard work. It was still not sustainable but it felt way better.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Yeah especially if in-office, or if theres any operational aspects of the role. It's not like having 4 hours of BS job gives you 4-6 hours/day of free time to go to the movies, gym, spend time with family, cook for yourself etc. Instead you are tied to a PC bored out of your mind. The worst thing in life is a lack of purpose and feeling lack of control.
      - pydry 3y ago
        It did mean more free time, but it also meant that the free time was infected with worries and so was much lower quality. It was easier to put work out of my head in the latter job. Anxiety didn't overwhelm my evenings and weekends. Sunday evenings were restful instead of steeped in anxiety. It felt more like they belonged to me. When I came home each evening I felt tired in a good way.
renegade-otter 3y ago
I think we went from one extreme to the other. While being an "island in the zone" is super productive, some communication and team work needs to be there to avoid the high bus factor. It's nice when a team member leaves and no one is freaking out because there is a level of redundancy in the knowledge. That said, the modern communication culture is out of control. We spend way more time talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing something. "Let's break the whole thing into 40 microservices" does not help. Unlike the neat theory of "everyone maintains their own set of microservices", every change and new feature needs to be over-analyzed for side effects. You are stuck in analysis paralysis. Not only do you not know what you should talk to other teams about, you may not even know who you should be talking to.
mpweiher 3y ago
> in a meeting-heavy agile environment Everytime I see that, I cringe. But sadly, you're not wrong. Agile is anti-meeting, anti-heavy and definitely anti-meeting-heavy. I really don't know what to call this weird thing that was created. Just as an example: why are there standups? Because in XP, meetings are frowned upon. So the idea is not to have meetings whenever humanly possible (better to pair up, talk to individuals etc.). And if there's a meeting you really really can't avoid or eliminate, let's at the very least incentivise everyone to keep it as short and meaningful as possible. By having everyone stand and thus be slightly uncomfortable. How that fun, focused, no-nonsense, get-things-done approach got turned into ... whatever that "meeting-heavy" thing is ... is in some senses fascinating. And terrifying. > I'm currently in a no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment AKA, an agile environment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- orra 3y ago
  Don't get me started. The agile manifesto says “individuals and interactions over processes”. So, of course a whole industry popped up of managers (and agile consultants) prescribing scrum. In practice, it's not unlike waterfall, because requirements and timetables are prescribed from above. But hey, the team has a sprint kickoff meeting every two weeks, so we call it agile.
  - JamesBarney 3y ago
    It's so much worse than waterfall. Every "agile" shop I've worked at still had deadlines 6 months out, they just didn't give you any time to design and estimate our the work because it was "agile". They were all twice as process heavy and had twice as many meetings as the shops that didn't call themselves "agile".
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Yeah instead of defining where we need to be in 6 months and the steps needed to get there, we micro-focus on the next 1 week of work. It's almost like Manhattan projecting your own team, except theres no one who actually knows the full picture. Amounts to short term "wins" and constantly missing the actual target.
taneq 3y ago
This doesn't really sound like an Agile problem specifically, more like a broader problem of "your on-call technical support roles shouldn't be shouldered by your core development team." I've worked in an Agile team on a pre-launch product and after the 10min morning scrum (which served more to cement personal accountability and discover blockers than as the showboating and bikeshedding venue that some people here seem to have encountered) the rest of the day was more or less uninterrupted dev time with a few impromptu soccer games thrown in (for research purposes). It worked pretty well. I'm currently in a 100% Agile-free environment, experiencing the delightful after-effects of good product-market fit, which means even if I have a clear schedule I never know if I'm going to spend half the day trying to help troubleshoot issues or helping end users integrate our product. I don't mind doing this, I want our customers to have the best experience possible and so far it seems to be working pretty well. It does, however, wreak havoc on my ability to 'get in the zone' because subconsciously I know I'll probably just be interrupted anyway.
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
Another factor here is in a meeting-heavy agile environment, many engineers can't even give a good forward estimate of the number of "in the zone" hours they will have in the coming week. As a developer my highest level of productivity was on a 2 person team with a bi-weekly meeting with our manager. We would have impromptu meetings when needed, but for the most part I was free to work 6-15 hours in a row whenever I got in the zone, and if I slacked off other times noone noticed. Once we got more people and switched to scrum my productivity plummeted. My anxiety went through the roof. Most days the standup left me feeling like I wanted to go back to bed. Most of the time when I was in the zone and feeling engaged I had to waste it on meetings that had no tangible benefits. Busy work is draining, management knows this, they don't care.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes I self-select for sub-5 member teams now, its such a better life.
- bavell 3y ago
  This is a big reason I'm still 100% satisfied being a solopreneur and working with specific clients I've chosen with lots of autonomy. Soooo much more productive and effective in terms of Getting Things Done™
commandlinefan 3y ago
Management has a solution for that, though - they'll bring in an efficiency coach who will talk to you for an hour insisting that every time you say "I can't", replace that with "I will".
- steveBK123 3y ago
  My last place liked to bring in an astronaut or general to talk to us about things like this lol
0xblinq 3y ago
Same
dgb23 3y ago
I don't do "Agile" and never have. But every time I read or hear about Agile it's described like above. Everyone seems to hate it and it all sounds terribly inefficient and frustrating. I scratch my head... Why? Why are people still doing it? Who actually _wants_ that?
- mmcdermott 3y ago
  I think a lot of engineers say they want agile and they mean it in the sense of the ideals in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/). There isn't a lot to complain about with those ideals. Working software, people, collaboration and flexibility are all very good things. When you look at the agile frameworks that are commonly implemented (Scrum, XP, etc.) you see that however well-intentioned they are, they seldom live up to those ideals. Do we care about working software or hitting burn down numbers? Do we care about flexibility or about keeping our iteration plans nice and clean? Do we care about collaboration or about having a paper trail to cover ourselves? Do we care about people or tickets? As agile has gone mainstream more and more experiences are bad, courtesy of Sturgeon's Law. Then you add in the fact that the bad experiences will always be amplified (after all, when things are working well they're "fine"; it's still work).
- m_rpn 3y ago
  We do that, especially in big companies, because management needs metrics, meetings and things like that to keep themselves occupied and relevant.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  What do you mean? I find the exact opposite. People are still wanting their waterfall project with an upfront design and "requirements analysis", and shocked when things run over-time with a crappy end-product. This also goes for SAFE and many implementations of scrum. What don't you like about agile? What do you use that's better?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

intelVISA 3y ago

> no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment Best env, but sadly a bit rare? I used to select for shops like that, no wonder lay-offs are scary if you've been trapped in meetings instead of shipping.

steveBK123 3y ago
I seem to manage getting into these types of roles 30% of the time, which is pretty nice. Granted I am working a zillion hours right now, but I'm less stressed than when I was working 9-6 but in 5 hours/day of zoom. Just feels like I am exercising my mastery vs fighting against inertia.
- pydry 3y ago
  Something similar happened to me too. I switched from working 4 hours a day to 9 in a new job and my burnout healed. 4 hours of bullshitting, meetings, an unclear vision, constantly being blocked, anxiety over a lack of productivity was swapped with 9 hours of clear aims, clear goals and hard work. It was still not sustainable but it felt way better.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yeah especially if in-office, or if theres any operational aspects of the role. It's not like having 4 hours of BS job gives you 4-6 hours/day of free time to go to the movies, gym, spend time with family, cook for yourself etc. Instead you are tied to a PC bored out of your mind. The worst thing in life is a lack of purpose and feeling lack of control.
    - pydry 3y ago
      It did mean more free time, but it also meant that the free time was infected with worries and so was much lower quality. It was easier to put work out of my head in the latter job. Anxiety didn't overwhelm my evenings and weekends. Sunday evenings were restful instead of steeped in anxiety. It felt more like they belonged to me. When I came home each evening I felt tired in a good way.

renegade-otter 3y ago

I think we went from one extreme to the other. While being an "island in the zone" is super productive, some communication and team work needs to be there to avoid the high bus factor. It's nice when a team member leaves and no one is freaking out because there is a level of redundancy in the knowledge. That said, the modern communication culture is out of control. We spend way more time talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing something. "Let's break the whole thing into 40 microservices" does not help. Unlike the neat theory of "everyone maintains their own set of microservices", every change and new feature needs to be over-analyzed for side effects. You are stuck in analysis paralysis. Not only do you not know what you should talk to other teams about, you may not even know who you should be talking to.

mpweiher 3y ago

> in a meeting-heavy agile environment Everytime I see that, I cringe. But sadly, you're not wrong. Agile is anti-meeting, anti-heavy and definitely anti-meeting-heavy. I really don't know what to call this weird thing that was created. Just as an example: why are there standups? Because in XP, meetings are frowned upon. So the idea is not to have meetings whenever humanly possible (better to pair up, talk to individuals etc.). And if there's a meeting you really really can't avoid or eliminate, let's at the very least incentivise everyone to keep it as short and meaningful as possible. By having everyone stand and thus be slightly uncomfortable. How that fun, focused, no-nonsense, get-things-done approach got turned into ... whatever that "meeting-heavy" thing is ... is in some senses fascinating. And terrifying. > I'm currently in a no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment AKA, an agile environment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

orra 3y ago
Don't get me started. The agile manifesto says “individuals and interactions over processes”. So, of course a whole industry popped up of managers (and agile consultants) prescribing scrum. In practice, it's not unlike waterfall, because requirements and timetables are prescribed from above. But hey, the team has a sprint kickoff meeting every two weeks, so we call it agile.
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  It's so much worse than waterfall. Every "agile" shop I've worked at still had deadlines 6 months out, they just didn't give you any time to design and estimate our the work because it was "agile". They were all twice as process heavy and had twice as many meetings as the shops that didn't call themselves "agile".
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yeah instead of defining where we need to be in 6 months and the steps needed to get there, we micro-focus on the next 1 week of work. It's almost like Manhattan projecting your own team, except theres no one who actually knows the full picture. Amounts to short term "wins" and constantly missing the actual target.

taneq 3y ago

This doesn't really sound like an Agile problem specifically, more like a broader problem of "your on-call technical support roles shouldn't be shouldered by your core development team." I've worked in an Agile team on a pre-launch product and after the 10min morning scrum (which served more to cement personal accountability and discover blockers than as the showboating and bikeshedding venue that some people here seem to have encountered) the rest of the day was more or less uninterrupted dev time with a few impromptu soccer games thrown in (for research purposes). It worked pretty well. I'm currently in a 100% Agile-free environment, experiencing the delightful after-effects of good product-market fit, which means even if I have a clear schedule I never know if I'm going to spend half the day trying to help troubleshoot issues or helping end users integrate our product. I don't mind doing this, I want our customers to have the best experience possible and so far it seems to be working pretty well. It does, however, wreak havoc on my ability to 'get in the zone' because subconsciously I know I'll probably just be interrupted anyway.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago

Another factor here is in a meeting-heavy agile environment, many engineers can't even give a good forward estimate of the number of "in the zone" hours they will have in the coming week. As a developer my highest level of productivity was on a 2 person team with a bi-weekly meeting with our manager. We would have impromptu meetings when needed, but for the most part I was free to work 6-15 hours in a row whenever I got in the zone, and if I slacked off other times noone noticed. Once we got more people and switched to scrum my productivity plummeted. My anxiety went through the roof. Most days the standup left me feeling like I wanted to go back to bed. Most of the time when I was in the zone and feeling engaged I had to waste it on meetings that had no tangible benefits. Busy work is draining, management knows this, they don't care.

steveBK123 3y ago
Yes I self-select for sub-5 member teams now, its such a better life.
bavell 3y ago
This is a big reason I'm still 100% satisfied being a solopreneur and working with specific clients I've chosen with lots of autonomy. Soooo much more productive and effective in terms of Getting Things Done™

commandlinefan 3y ago

Management has a solution for that, though - they'll bring in an efficiency coach who will talk to you for an hour insisting that every time you say "I can't", replace that with "I will".

steveBK123 3y ago
My last place liked to bring in an astronaut or general to talk to us about things like this lol

0xblinq 3y ago

Same

dgb23 3y ago

I don't do "Agile" and never have. But every time I read or hear about Agile it's described like above. Everyone seems to hate it and it all sounds terribly inefficient and frustrating. I scratch my head... Why? Why are people still doing it? Who actually _wants_ that?

mmcdermott 3y ago
I think a lot of engineers say they want agile and they mean it in the sense of the ideals in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/). There isn't a lot to complain about with those ideals. Working software, people, collaboration and flexibility are all very good things. When you look at the agile frameworks that are commonly implemented (Scrum, XP, etc.) you see that however well-intentioned they are, they seldom live up to those ideals. Do we care about working software or hitting burn down numbers? Do we care about flexibility or about keeping our iteration plans nice and clean? Do we care about collaboration or about having a paper trail to cover ourselves? Do we care about people or tickets? As agile has gone mainstream more and more experiences are bad, courtesy of Sturgeon's Law. Then you add in the fact that the bad experiences will always be amplified (after all, when things are working well they're "fine"; it's still work).
m_rpn 3y ago
We do that, especially in big companies, because management needs metrics, meetings and things like that to keep themselves occupied and relevant.
willsmith72 3y ago
What do you mean? I find the exact opposite. People are still wanting their waterfall project with an upfront design and "requirements analysis", and shocked when things run over-time with a crappy end-product. This also goes for SAFE and many implementations of scrum. What don't you like about agile? What do you use that's better?