Scrum IS AWESOME

Scrum is just an abbrevation for Scrotum. The letters o and t are in a meeting, so they couldn't show up.

I worked with a highly productive contractor at a fortune 100 around 25 years ago, who would occasionally have an upper level manager ask him if he was using the latest project management theory in the project he wanted a status update on. His response was "do you want this project managed, or do you want the project to be completed?" When they answered "well, we want it completed", he would respond with "then let me finish the project".

Vertical monitors have their very productive uses, like virtual pinball and spaceship shooters.

This is why ex-rugby players shouldn't be software developers

as a pretty old developer, when Scrum first hit, i was all in. no PM, ability to iterate, developers doing their own estimates, mandatory participation by the stakeholders, the ability to fail sprints if something goes off the rails ... hell yeah ! but what it turned into was "professional" Scrum "masters" and a daily meeting asking "are you done yet", zero requirements, and zero participation and accountability from the stakeholders.

My whole team has been sandbagging for years now, overestimating everything and barely working, but we keep getting paid by the customer. thanks scrum!

My first exposure to scrum: Me: But why? We've beat deadline every time and ship without any major bugs. Boss: Its apparently the new thing. Also, my wifes sister does it for a living and we just hired her. 3 month later, we have missed deadlines and shipped major bugs. Boss: I guess this is normal as a breaking in period but it will improve. Me: Imagine how much more work we could have done if we hired another dev over a scum master. Boss: Yeaaaaahhhh

When you're 20 ergonomics is 'bullshit'. When coming up on 50 it's the first thing you consider after where the bathroom is.

We've never done any "sprint catchup" anywhere I've been. If we did not make the things in the sprint, they were just moved to the next sprint and that sprint was adjusted accordingly. Sprints are never planned any further than the next sprint, and they are just the highest priority tasks from the backlog. I would absolutely refuse to do any overwork sprint catchup if asked, only thing I would do overwork for, would be critical production bugs, and I'm pretty sure most of the people I've worked with would be the same.

daily reminder that scrum is for making suits feel involved and to protect programmers... it's not about productivity and never was. Without scrum it's this on a loop: 1) You: So, what is it that we can make for you boss? 2) Suits: All I want is (generalized notions without specific implementation nor understanding of requirements and scope). 3) You: Well, what about (specific considerations about implementations and known scope issues) 4) Suits: That's over my head and I wasn't listening at all... just make it happen, that's what I pay you the big bucks to figure out. 5) You work efficiently making a product that fits the requirements... it is wonderful in it's implementation and ease of use, and made with performance in mind. You get it done in record time because you're that good - you made good plans and you executed on them. 6) You show the work to the suits. 7) Suits: this is great, but I don't like this one little thing, it should act slightly different. 8) You: it looks like a little thing, but that's actually a foundational change and even though I write SOLID code, a change like that erodes at the core of this product. What if we... 9) Suits: don't care... that's what we pay you the big bucks for, just make it happen, it shouldn't take that long. 10) You spend any amount of time working on that change 11) Suits: Why is this taking so long! time is money!! This should be done by now... 12) You rush faster to smash and grab the parts of the code that could possibly be reused in this foundationally different product now... you don't have time to start over, so what was once beautiful and performant code, has been frankensteined with duct tape and bubblegum into a malperformant and confusing mess. Everything is unoptimized and all your creative solutions and beautiful systems are heaps of burning rubble. 13) You: Okay, I made the change you wanted... it was much more difficult and time consuming than it needed to be, in contrast with having all of the requirements in hand when I started... but here you go... 14) Suits: Oh, this is good... but we need to change this one little thing 15) Go back to step 8, and repeat the steps until you get fired for being incompetent as everything is obviously your fault aka 'not hitting specific performance metrics'. WITH scrum: 1) You (or the scrum master): Hey boss, lets talk conversationally about the product you want to make. 2) You write down what it actually takes to make said thing, then you dumb it down and put it on cards. 3) You (with or without the team) come up with how long each of those generalized notions on cards will take (in difficulty or time), you assign a point value to each card. 4) You give the deck of cards to the boss and tell them they have X points that they can spend each week and they can choose whatever cards that they want; If they want more points, they need to hire more devs, if they want less points they can fire more devs. 5) Suits play with the cards choosing which things that they want to see in front of them immediately. 6) Using the selected cards, you implement exactly what the suits wanted. 7) Suits: Hey, this is great, but can you make this little change? 8) You: Yeah, you'll get some more points to spend soon, you can spend it on that if you want. It's 100% up to you... 9) Suits: Well, maybe... I want to actually look at the cards again and be choosy with the changes I want to make. 10) Repeat 5 and the suits are once again happy/distracted and feel like they are making the product themselves and are proud of it. The problem that scrum tries to solve is: the money people generally have NO IDEA what they are doing, and they have a HUGE inferiority complex. This generally results in complaining about something small each time something is made, as to put their little thumbprint on it like "look at me, I'm helping", when it's always not the case and they are in reality a huge hinderance. It's so bad that MANY professionals build "thumbs" into their creations in order to artificially give the money something to complain about. (and it's been done that way for at least a century and likely longer, but it is cited as coming from advertising, where you make a poster for your product and it could be 1000% the best thing ever, but the suits will always complain and ask for something to be added to it, and because they are incompetent usually the change is garbage that ruins the final product and adds needless complexity - but they 'feel compelled' to be apart of it, so they toss out a little change just to feel not completely useless. People started "leaving specific and easy to remove defects" into their creative works (like in a photo, leaving the camera mans thumb in the picture) and that way when the money people see the picture they say "this is great, but can you take the thumb out of the shot" and you congratulate them on their keen eye and that you had totally and completely missed that... then you come back 5 minutes later with the thumb removed (aka the actual picture, without the thumb...) and when they see the result of their criticism then they simply love THEIR creation...). Additionally companies "don't know what they want, they only know what they don't like" is inevitable as well... and expecting a suit to have a thought further out than the tip of his nose is a big ask... so you'll constantly be revising and revising and revising some more. All the while the suits will get antsy about the costs and how much time it takes. SO scrum attempts fix these issues: suits feel important like they are directing the show in a 'totally real and not artificial way' and results in less anger and resentment suits can't complain about time restraints: they are the ones choosing what gets worked on and they can hire more developers if they want more points; they feel like their in control. suits feel more satisfaction in the resulting work: no need for thumbs in the shot... they already feel like they 'did something'. The problem that scrum creates is: meetings and meetings and meetings and meetings... wasted time and effort on stuff that LITTERALLY doesn't matter. slows down development across the board (in contrast to 'just doing it right the first time, and let the professionals do professional work'). makes the final code base inefficient (this is more of a gripe with 'solid' and 'modularity' in general... if you know 100% what you want the final product to be, you can make it really really strong and performant... the second things can 'just change whenever or whatever', then you either overengineer solutions or you make a huge mess - building crazy amounts of technical debt - and nothing is going to be performant or well built) And like said in this video, what actually happens is they just give you more work on top of the meetings... and it doesn't feel like they respect your time as most of that time is wasted needlessly. The endless treadmill thing is true too... hopefully less so if you understand the 'why' part of scrum... because it's intentionally a endless treadmill controlled by people that are not software engineers... you're literally a pawn in a card game... That said,... it's arguably better for developers in the long run with scrum... suits should make more reasonable requests (aka, they have a real time budget/allowance, or should in theory) and won't blame the developers so fervently... and granted it's an inevitability that companies will change their mind and add crud all the time randomly... at least this way you are given the breathing room to SOLID and try and make the codebase malleable and maintainable --- and that really should be factored into the time it takes to accomplish given tasks... but the constant meetings are screwed tbh It's 'cool' in theory and would be nice if it worked. I think many times people 'do scrum' and don't really understand the 'unsaid quiet parts' and they just treat it like a productivity tool for collecting performance metrics... but... when done right, usually the suits are happier at the end of the day and devs don't get constant flack because the suits are incompetent... because that's an inevitability that won't change anytime soon...

gonna tell you one - I was in the team when there were couple persons who were like "if we don't have daily standups online, we feel abandoned, like we don't have a team at all". Then we introduced some additional "coffee meet" - just a chit chat for teammates, and those two folks they were always silent. Once asked they simply said "Well we didn't mean to talk, we feel good in silence, but really need that atmosphere of discussion happening around"

We recently had a sprint where almost half the items weren't completed, so we just skipped planning for next sprint and used it to complete the work. To go fast, you need to go slow. Also, people misunderstood the meaning of the agile manifesto when it says "over COMPREHENSIVE documentation". The idea was to create a better way to work than waterfall, which was all documentation up front. Architectural design up front is alright. You can spend time on it. Also, you can draw diagrams to validate your ideas. But you can also build some POC alongside with it. You can start fiddling away with some skeleton of an app that you might or might not discard. You can also document the thing while you're working, to enable everyone else to use it as well. There's nothing fun when you have a simple Lambda function that hasn't been updated on 3 years, nobody bothered to write a README, nobody bothered to write comments and it can't be redeployed because the tooling has been updated, and if you take down that lambda apprently your whole website shuts down. So now we have 20 engineers swarming to fix this problem. So document your stuff, people. Just don't write up a guidebook about your app before you write any code.

About the posture. Folks, I had a neurosurgery on my spine 8 month ago because of hernia explosion. It was painful and I almost lost my leg (got partial paralysis in my feet). Now I am on rehab and 80% normal, but still feeling shitty. All the problems start from bad posture and lack of activity - sports. Be careful with your body, it becomes fragile under work routine pressure and inactivity.

About 0.000...1% of this is from Uncle Bob. They kept a few of his words. They took Bobs molehill, shoved it aside and built a mountain in its place. There's just a few molecules left of the molehill under the mountain.

Man, making half an hour reaction from 5 min vid is pure talent. Love you prime

Now having SCRUM with remote teams, now thats another dimension of horror.

The spinal condition is also called "tech neck". On my first Scrum job I voiced my surprise at the sheer amount and length of meetings. The response from the PM was "Let's have a huddle on the topic of whether there are too many meetings." On a more recent job my manager was like "Oh, I hate scrum, it's toxic, I never want to bring it here." Then it was "Let's just have retrospectives because I think they're useful." Then it was "Let's add story pointing to better estimate our time horizons." You guessed it -- sneaking Scrum in piecemeal through the back door and assembling it on site. By the time I heard talk of "sprints", I knew it was too late -- Sinistar had already been built.

Vertical monitors are fantastic. They are so much better for. websites, terminals, documents any sort of list based applications, so chat, spotify etc. I have one large monitor flanked by two vertical monitors and one smaller monitor/ drawing tablet and its ideal. When developing: Terminal on the left vertical, code on the main one in front of me, website/ application on the right and my task list on the smaller monitor then switch spaces for documentation/ the web or teams (ewww) etc.

I was in a company a couple of years ago where I was embedded with 6 development teams as an infrastructure engineer. If I missed a meeting i would hear about it immediately. 6 scrum meetings per day, needless to say there was just no possible way actual work could get done.

Been a game dev for 8 years, never had any major troubles in any friends team, a few time ago i joined some friends on a new project and he had this shitty thing going on, we had daily meetings and so on, and i was always thinking: "but we already deliver all the tasks in time, we can communicate through Discord properly, why do we need to lose our time on those meetings?", 1 week later and 2 friends had abandoned the team and i was the third one 2 weeks later 😅