5 ms·

After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never lea

After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the problems themselves are the same. There’s no short cuts, and I know for a fact that as a programmer I’m orders of magnitude more capable than my 5 years in self. I’m excited to learn more and do new things more now than ever because they will unlock more of the craft to me. The only thing I worry about is my body and mind failing me at some point, not that I’ll run out of things to learn or be lapped by those younger than me.

mp05 3y ago
> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?
- dpritchett 3y ago
  The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
  - mp05 3y ago
    > simple kanban setup That's probably the essence of the "good parts" that I referenced.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Yeah I think kanban is the right model for almost every development team. Teams embedded in a massive orchestrated project across many teams waterfall actually is pretty reasonable.
  - apsurd 3y ago
    Thank you for this recommendation. I've never heard of it before and now I'm reading: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi... It's giving me energy this Monday holiday(USA)!
- benzible 3y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857463
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Scrum forces you to package your work into daily sound bites. It pull your focus elsewhere and reframes your work in a wasteful way where you are always cutting off the corners because of how it affects your 30 second daily advertisement.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    Scrum just got taken out back. Agreed.
  - theteapot 3y ago
    > daily advertisement Not defending scrum but sounds more like you've been abused by bad culture disguised as scrum.
    - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      A place with daily standups? Their "sound biting" of a complex issue resonates. It can be difficult to even explain what I'm doing to several people in the bandwidth of 2 minutes sometimes. Most charitably, it's just a quick, lossy status report and forced request for help with blockers. I feel like something is wrong if you feel like you need to cut corners to perform a "good-looking" report in standup. You shouldn't feel/cave to such a pressure.
      - theteapot 3y ago
        I was referring to "advertisement" part not the "daily" part. Stand ups can be a way for people who know / want to game the system to prosper in the eyes of some idiot scrum master and managers, while our guy here gets smoked and made to look like he isn't productive. You shouldn't cave, but if that's the culture around your in for an uphill battle. > I feel like something is wrong ... Yeah, bad culture.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
- trhway 3y ago
  The idea, and especially its unconditional forcing down the throat, that you can run marathon faster by running it in 100m sprints. That idea is wrong as it has been shown many time in practice, yet even the slightest doubt of that idea is squashed. Scrum is basically an ideology/cult, and as typical for such it is built on a lie - it is sold to rank-and-file as performance improving whereis its real goal is improving reporting to the manager at the cost of rank-and-file's performance, the manager's convenience at observing the status even if the things are relly moving much slower as a result. It is similar to how in a religious cult people would be sold on supposedly reaching nirvana/etc. while in reality the guru/pastor/etc. would be abusing them financially/morally/physically/etc.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It has no good ideas. All the ideas that appear good are taken from agile, which 20 years ago WAS good. But then the process managers came in, the management seeking clarity on delivery dates, and engineers who got into it for a good job seeking ways to avoid doing real work because they’re actually not into engineering. It’s a morass of everything awful about stupid management cargo cult bs meant to emulate but not understand excellent engineering culture, with roles meant to keep project managers employed, and overriding everything stupid “rituals” to try to measure velocity and delivery dates for leaderships need to control. It delivers none of what agile promises because it is satisfying the needs that makes waterfall so slow.
  - PheonixPharts 3y ago
    > from agile, which 20 years ago WAS good. It's completely wild to me to have been in the field long enough to remember when agile was revolutionary, and then to see it slowly become twisted by decades of mismanagement into something that people hate today. For most engineers today "agile" just means using jira, 30-60 minute long "stand-ups", and a perpetual panic about not getting enough done in 2 weeks.
bmitc 3y ago
I feel most of my time as a professional software engineer has been learning stuff that I didn't need to. And I would argue that the majority of debugging time goes into debugging external code from libraries, the language itself, company-provided platforms, code, libraries, DLLs, experimentally figuring out how to use a system or tool that isn't documented, and more. It's pretty miserable. It'd be like being a carpenter or mechanic but spending the majority of your time debugging, fixing, and communication with manufacturer's of broken or poorly working tools. If only I got to spend my time writing interesting code and learning interesting things.
- apsurd 3y ago
  I don't think software is uniquely a mess behind the scenes...
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  >> It'd be like being a carpenter or mechanic but spending the majority of your time debugging, fixing, and communication with manufacturer's of broken or poorly working tools. What do you think a mechanic does ALL DAY? Very few carpenters start with a raw blank of nice wood and craft something amazing. It's all interpreting plans (poor spec), framing (boiler plate), figuring out an addition (bolting on features to a shaky platform), correcting things that have failed (maintenance), addressing things that were built wrong (bug fixes) or fixing shoddy renovations (tech debt). Sounds EXACTLY like the majority of software development.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    > What do you think a mechanic does ALL DAY? Are you implying that they are fixing their tools rather than cars? I don't know any mechanic that would put up with that and would replace their tools with tools that actually work.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Except mechanics tools are fairly simple devices based on thousands of years of standardization. I think probably a better example would be someone working in a lab on experimental devices. Software tooling is often absurdly complex and relatively new with no clear standard. In 100 years I’ll wager things are not like this.

mp05 3y ago

> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?

dpritchett 3y ago
The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
- mp05 3y ago
  > simple kanban setup That's probably the essence of the "good parts" that I referenced.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Yeah I think kanban is the right model for almost every development team. Teams embedded in a massive orchestrated project across many teams waterfall actually is pretty reasonable.
- apsurd 3y ago
  Thank you for this recommendation. I've never heard of it before and now I'm reading: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi... It's giving me energy this Monday holiday(USA)!
benzible 3y ago
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857463
ipaddr 3y ago
Scrum forces you to package your work into daily sound bites. It pull your focus elsewhere and reframes your work in a wasteful way where you are always cutting off the corners because of how it affects your 30 second daily advertisement.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Scrum just got taken out back. Agreed.
- theteapot 3y ago
  > daily advertisement Not defending scrum but sounds more like you've been abused by bad culture disguised as scrum.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    A place with daily standups? Their "sound biting" of a complex issue resonates. It can be difficult to even explain what I'm doing to several people in the bandwidth of 2 minutes sometimes. Most charitably, it's just a quick, lossy status report and forced request for help with blockers. I feel like something is wrong if you feel like you need to cut corners to perform a "good-looking" report in standup. You shouldn't feel/cave to such a pressure.
    - theteapot 3y ago
      I was referring to "advertisement" part not the "daily" part. Stand ups can be a way for people who know / want to game the system to prosper in the eyes of some idiot scrum master and managers, while our guy here gets smoked and made to look like he isn't productive. You shouldn't cave, but if that's the culture around your in for an uphill battle. > I feel like something is wrong ... Yeah, bad culture.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- skeeter2020 3y ago
trhway 3y ago
The idea, and especially its unconditional forcing down the throat, that you can run marathon faster by running it in 100m sprints. That idea is wrong as it has been shown many time in practice, yet even the slightest doubt of that idea is squashed. Scrum is basically an ideology/cult, and as typical for such it is built on a lie - it is sold to rank-and-file as performance improving whereis its real goal is improving reporting to the manager at the cost of rank-and-file's performance, the manager's convenience at observing the status even if the things are relly moving much slower as a result. It is similar to how in a religious cult people would be sold on supposedly reaching nirvana/etc. while in reality the guru/pastor/etc. would be abusing them financially/morally/physically/etc.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
It has no good ideas. All the ideas that appear good are taken from agile, which 20 years ago WAS good. But then the process managers came in, the management seeking clarity on delivery dates, and engineers who got into it for a good job seeking ways to avoid doing real work because they’re actually not into engineering. It’s a morass of everything awful about stupid management cargo cult bs meant to emulate but not understand excellent engineering culture, with roles meant to keep project managers employed, and overriding everything stupid “rituals” to try to measure velocity and delivery dates for leaderships need to control. It delivers none of what agile promises because it is satisfying the needs that makes waterfall so slow.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  > from agile, which 20 years ago WAS good. It's completely wild to me to have been in the field long enough to remember when agile was revolutionary, and then to see it slowly become twisted by decades of mismanagement into something that people hate today. For most engineers today "agile" just means using jira, 30-60 minute long "stand-ups", and a perpetual panic about not getting enough done in 2 weeks.

bmitc 3y ago

I feel most of my time as a professional software engineer has been learning stuff that I didn't need to. And I would argue that the majority of debugging time goes into debugging external code from libraries, the language itself, company-provided platforms, code, libraries, DLLs, experimentally figuring out how to use a system or tool that isn't documented, and more. It's pretty miserable. It'd be like being a carpenter or mechanic but spending the majority of your time debugging, fixing, and communication with manufacturer's of broken or poorly working tools. If only I got to spend my time writing interesting code and learning interesting things.

apsurd 3y ago
I don't think software is uniquely a mess behind the scenes...
skeeter2020 3y ago
>> It'd be like being a carpenter or mechanic but spending the majority of your time debugging, fixing, and communication with manufacturer's of broken or poorly working tools. What do you think a mechanic does ALL DAY? Very few carpenters start with a raw blank of nice wood and craft something amazing. It's all interpreting plans (poor spec), framing (boiler plate), figuring out an addition (bolting on features to a shaky platform), correcting things that have failed (maintenance), addressing things that were built wrong (bug fixes) or fixing shoddy renovations (tech debt). Sounds EXACTLY like the majority of software development.
- bmitc 3y ago
  > What do you think a mechanic does ALL DAY? Are you implying that they are fixing their tools rather than cars? I don't know any mechanic that would put up with that and would replace their tools with tools that actually work.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Except mechanics tools are fairly simple devices based on thousands of years of standardization. I think probably a better example would be someone working in a lab on experimental devices. Software tooling is often absurdly complex and relatively new with no clear standard. In 100 years I’ll wager things are not like this.