4 ms·

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...

marcosdumay 1y ago
You have a funny definition of "dysfunctional".
- wavemode 1y ago
  How so?
  - tra3 1y ago
    Surely it was in jest. Tons of places are like that.
    - ianbutler 1y ago
      Perhaps tons of places are dysfunctional. Nothing says quantity makes right.
      - Apocryphon 1y ago
        And when it's systemic, maybe you could say the industry has dysfunctions.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Wait, is your question serious, and people talking about it being in jest directed at my comment and not the one above it? How often do you think the OP's "functional" team fixes small problems with their code before they become large problems? How often do you think they discover small features that lead to huge gains but need a developer's understanding of sized to discover it's small? And also, how often do you think they get stuck creating nearly impossible features that can be worked around with a small amount of work from the users that they would rather not do? And none of those is the large issue anyway. The large issue is that teams working like that can barely create any software, for much more complex reasons than fits in a comment.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  You can either laugh or cry about it. Laughing is more fun. This is nearly the norm for ENTERPRISE software development, and it's such a tragedy.
ramon156 1y ago
My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.
- schneems 1y ago
  I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned. Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done. I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Also there is value in having an audit trail of who did what when and why, both for operations and system evolution, and for all the compliance junk. Not so much value that a tiny bit of cleanup needs a huge amount of overhead though.
    - serial_dev 1y ago
      If you want a trail, there is already the PR. It has description that explains why the change makes sense, code changes, reviewers, if relevant screenshots and videos. If you want small PRs that contain one meaningful, easy to review change, and that change only concerns the development team, there is no reason to create a ticket for the sake of creating a ticket. Also, in some dysfunctional teams creating a ticket means it requires prioritization and you will most likely never work on it and ticket will be deleted five years from today when nobody you know with at the company anymore. Believe me, no sane CFO (or include any person not in the dev team or product team) will look up your Jira ticket explaining why you wanted to refactor the GitHub actions because you had to update 10 files whenever there’s is a new version of a tool used in your pipeline. Also, usually these changes are so small and straightforward, arguing about putting it in a ticket takes longer than reviewing it and merging it.
fnord77 1y ago
Disallowing non-tracked work isn't necessarily dysfunctional. Let's say you're working on spaceflight software where lives are at risk.

marcosdumay 1y ago

You have a funny definition of "dysfunctional".

wavemode 1y ago
How so?
- tra3 1y ago
  Surely it was in jest. Tons of places are like that.
  - ianbutler 1y ago
    Perhaps tons of places are dysfunctional. Nothing says quantity makes right.
    - Apocryphon 1y ago
      And when it's systemic, maybe you could say the industry has dysfunctions.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Wait, is your question serious, and people talking about it being in jest directed at my comment and not the one above it? How often do you think the OP's "functional" team fixes small problems with their code before they become large problems? How often do you think they discover small features that lead to huge gains but need a developer's understanding of sized to discover it's small? And also, how often do you think they get stuck creating nearly impossible features that can be worked around with a small amount of work from the users that they would rather not do? And none of those is the large issue anyway. The large issue is that teams working like that can barely create any software, for much more complex reasons than fits in a comment.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
You can either laugh or cry about it. Laughing is more fun. This is nearly the norm for ENTERPRISE software development, and it's such a tragedy.

ramon156 1y ago

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

schneems 1y ago
I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned. Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done. I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Also there is value in having an audit trail of who did what when and why, both for operations and system evolution, and for all the compliance junk. Not so much value that a tiny bit of cleanup needs a huge amount of overhead though.
  - serial_dev 1y ago
    If you want a trail, there is already the PR. It has description that explains why the change makes sense, code changes, reviewers, if relevant screenshots and videos. If you want small PRs that contain one meaningful, easy to review change, and that change only concerns the development team, there is no reason to create a ticket for the sake of creating a ticket. Also, in some dysfunctional teams creating a ticket means it requires prioritization and you will most likely never work on it and ticket will be deleted five years from today when nobody you know with at the company anymore. Believe me, no sane CFO (or include any person not in the dev team or product team) will look up your Jira ticket explaining why you wanted to refactor the GitHub actions because you had to update 10 files whenever there’s is a new version of a tool used in your pipeline. Also, usually these changes are so small and straightforward, arguing about putting it in a ticket takes longer than reviewing it and merging it.

fnord77 1y ago

Disallowing non-tracked work isn't necessarily dysfunctional. Let's say you're working on spaceflight software where lives are at risk.