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At a previous employer we had a rule. The only person allowed to say, "just", was the developer responsible for actually making it work. Another developer who s
by btilly 2y ago
At a previous employer we had a rule. The only person allowed to say, "just", was the developer responsible for actually making it work. Another developer who said it, just volunteered themselves.
It was a rule that worked well for us.
- gdsdfe 2y agoThat's a good one!
- jrs235 2y agoNeeds to also be for "that's easy"...
- sharpy 2y agoI am totally going to advocate for this at my workplace. I myself am guilty of it - not saying "just", but questioning people's estimates based on my limited understanding of the research they had to do to come up with the estimates in the first place.
- ffsm8 2y agoIt sounds pretty toxic if you're not allowed to even question other people's estimates. IME that's a large part of Grooming/refinements
- dambi0 2y agoAiming for an environment where uniformed challenges to estimates are discouraged is an entirely different thing to forbidding any challenges to estimates.
- BlarfMcFlarf 2y agoPunishing people with more work doesn’t make sense in a well run organization. Work is continuous and more work only affects the backlog, not the actual developer’s life or experience.
- btilly 2y agoIt was not a punishment. It was more, "You're sure that you know an efficient way to do this? You get a chance to prove that you're right." It made people careful because being wrong had a consequence, but it usually moved work to the person who thought that they had the best approach. This happened in Sprint Planning. Obviously by the end of the meeting, everyone would have a full sprint. So volunteering for one thing required giving something else up. This was definitely part of the equation.
- watwut 2y agoIt is literally punishment for saying something plus passive aggressive explanation. Somewhat manipulative. "Giving someone a chance" is a positive thing and wont make people careful.
- btilly 2y agoHow so is it "literally punishment"? People wind up with as much work as they think they can reasonably do. They would have done that whether or not they "just volunteered" themselves. You only wind up with too much if you didn't estimate your own work well. As for being passive aggressive, the word "just" usually is used in a passive aggressive way. Making people careful about saying it was an improvement. And we all agreed that it was.
- watwut 2y agoPer your description, it is used to stop people from saying or doing something by assigning an uncomfortable unwanted consequence. Someone thinking something is easy does not nor should not imply they actually want it. Most people do not want to do easy tasks all the time. And no, they did not volunteered themselves. That is just manipulative language. And both of these are passive aggression.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoOk so if you have a problem and the developer thinks that the solution to it is to add an API, all they have to do to get their way is to say "let's just add an API!", although they would of course be the one that had to make it work. Yes I like this rule, how many things I could have solved at the worst run place I ever worked at if it had been implemented there. Although I guess the management might not have liked that essentially I could choose what got done and what I got to work on just by running my big mouth. facetiousness aside, I'm trying to point out that most often when people say "let's just" it is because they are advocating a course of action and that rule won't work unless the course they are advocating gets chosen. If they say "let's just make an api" and you say no we're doing a UI and you will work on it because you used the word "Just" I guess that's a way to lose your tech talent relatively quickly.
- evalstate 2y agoGerry Weinberg wrote beautifully about these "lullaby words". https://www.humansystemsinaction.com/lullaby-language/ https://www.humansystemsinaction.com/lullaby-language/ > “Precisely. It’s what I call a ‘Lullaby Word.’ Like ‘should,’ it lulls your mind into a false sense of security. A better translation of ‘just’ in Jeff’s sentence would have been, ‘have a lot of trouble to.'”
- natmaka 2y agoRFC2119 to the rescue: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119
- tjalfi 2y agoWe had a similar rule for application support at my last job. Anyone who introduced an application was assigned as the support lead.
- dataflow 2y agoWouldn't this be a easy way to get out of doing whatever current work you don't want to be doing?
- cgriswald 2y agoThere’s a fundamental difference between being able to recognize the best option and being able to implement the option. These sorts of rules are really about people feeling devalued or disliking being volunteered or told what to do (often by people they consider less knowledgable). They aren’t really about effectively distributing work. “Just” gets a bad wrap. There’s a sort of hidden assumption here that “you can just” is equivalent to “you can easily”. It sometimes means that but more generally it means something more like “…will be easiest” which can be true even when the action itself is hard or a lot of work.
- btilly 2y ago"Just" absolutely deserves its bad rap. There is nothing that you can say with it that you can't say without it. And the alternative is almost always strictly better.
- StefanBatory 2y agoOr it lead to people being silent and keeping any ideas to themselves ;P
- btilly 2y agoPeople were free to offer any idea that they want. But you couldn't say "just". Equivalent weasel words are easy to come by. "I don't see why it wouldn't work to ..." But now you're asking for an explanation, without dismissing the person who will be explaining it.
- CRConrad 2y agoPreferably used in sentences like "That's just not possible" or "No, we'll just not do that", right? (OK, probably not... But let a man dream.)