They don’t know there are 20 other life and death situations that came before them. GET. IN. LINE.
Why won’t you sprint the sprint so we can get more sprints in the sprint?
Not a movie but I feel like Mr Robot had somewhat accurate scenes
And silicon valley
Someone watching Silicon Valley could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that most software developers spend 90% of their time screwing around waiting for solutions to unexpected bullshit interruptions…
So yeah, pretty accurate.
When a team of programmers is left to their own devices, they too screw shit up. They all do things in their own way and argue over what is best, and often fail to see the bigger picture.
I watch scope creep and lack of organizational planning from both programmers and managers. It’s all personality issues.
I also don’t believe anyone actually follows or knows what agile is (not saying I do either). Everyone on every team at every place sure talks about it, but it doesn’t seem like anyone actually does it. These are all just labels for “we adapted as we went.”
They all do things in their own way and argue over what is best, and often fail to see the bigger picture.
It sounds like your programming team is missing a senior engineer/director of engineering. You need an engineer who has the experience to see the big picture, architect solutions, and tell the team what’s what.
Found the PM/TPM. The best software was written without Agile and PMs/TPMs. It’s only after software becomes successful that the need is felt for that stuff.
The world runs on open source software and I don’t know of a single open source project that uses Agile or PMs/TPMs.
What’s agile?
A race to accrue as much technical debt as quickly as possible by focusing stricty on individual features while ignoring the long term ramifications of design decisions.
/s
A development philosophy that nobody understands, or actually follows, but every company insists on using, even when it’s a poor fit for their projects.
A family of software development processes for teams, which focuses on cycles of quickly building and delivering smaller blocks of program functionally (often just a single program feature - say: “search customers by last name” - or just part of a feature) to end-users so as to get quick feedback from those users of the software, which is then is use to determining what should be done for subsequent cycles.
When done properly it addresses the issues of older software development processes (such as the Waterfall process) in siuations where the users don’t really have a detailed vision of what the software needs to do for them (which are the most usual situations unless the software just helps automates their present way of doing things) or there are frequent changes of what they need the software to do for them (i.e. they already use the software but frequently need new software features or tweaks to existing features).
In my own career of over two decades I only ever seen it done properly maybe once or twice. The problem is that “doing Agile” became fashionable at a certain point maybe a decade ago and pretty much a requirement to have in one’s CV as a programmer, so you end up with lots of teams mindlessly “doing Agile” by doing some of the practices from Agile (say, the stand up meeting or paired programming) without including other practices and elements of the process (and adjusting them for their local situation) thus not achieving what that process is meant to achieve - essentially they don’t really understand it as a software development process which is more adequate for some situations and less for others and what it actually is supposed to achieve and how.
(The most frequent things not being done are those around participation of the end-users of the software in evaluating what has been done in the last cycle, determining new features and feature tweaks for the next cycle and prioritizing them. The funny bit is that these are core parts of making Agile deliver its greatest benefits as a software development process, so basically most teams aren’t doing the part of Agile that actually makes it deliver superior results to most other methods).
It doesn’t help that to really and fully get the purpose of Agile and how it achieves it, you generally need to be at the level of experience at which you’re looking at the actual process of making software (the kind of people with at least a decade of experience and titles like Software Architect) which, given how ageist a lot of the Industry is are pretty rare, so Agile is usually being done by “kids” in a monkey-sees-monkey-does way without understanding it as a process, hence why it, unsurprising, has by now gotten a bit of a bad name (as with everything, the right tool should be used for the right job).
Thank you for your detailed reply! It also helps explain the cynicism in the other two replies a bit.
Not a PM. But please, keep trying with stereotypical internet replies.
Most PM’s seem to be idiots too and their approaches are all subjective.
What? I’m not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google’s internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.
The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal “implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel”.
Also agile ≠ scrum. If you’re managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you’re following an ad-hoc agile process.
I think what you’re actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure’s size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can’t just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you’re doing waterfall or scrum.
I absolutely hate project managers. In my almost decade of IT work, every PM I’ve ever dealt with was garbage. They have no idea what is going on, and then ask an ass load of questions at the end of the meeting about things that were already covered. Useless.
Have you seen Anti-Trust?
I was going to bring this one up. The least realistic part of Antitrust is how the antagonist is defeated, but the parts where somebody is impatiently waiting for
javacto finish so that they can pack their.classfiles into a JAR, or typing in a list of IPv4 addresses one-by-one to see which one works, were painfully plausible.
So like the first few seasons of silicon valley?
It’s practically a documentary
I think the Pentagon Wars is about as close as it gets for now. Not about programming of course but all about company bureaucracy and feature creep
It’s definitely satire, but I feel Silicon Valley did a decent job. Yes they absolutely made things up, but it was more about the backend and pushing updates and servers being erased because someone accidentally sat a drink on a keyboard.
In an interview about silicon valley the creators said they interviewed a lot of people in the industry and had to actually cut out a bunch of stuff because it wouldn’t be believable by people outside the industry. One small example was the valuation. The VC people they talked to said pied piper would have gotten a lot more money than what ended up being in the show
Yeah, you can definitely tell the show was filtered through the lense of “what will the average person understand”. I just appreciated the focus on actually building something vs just seeing the business side of it.
Reminds me of this one
https://youtube.com/watch?v=synJZAtH58E
when you rob a big tech company, but the employees are…
(that’s the title of the video, the clickbait isn’t me)
That’s the one for me, from Spider-Man no way home. Keep adding more stuff to a complex working until reality itself breaks.
Black Mirrors Hated in the Nation makes fun of this briefly iirc
Proj. Mgr: “We’re tracking our development work in this Excel spreadsheet on Teams. Be sure to update it regularly…”
15 mins later.
Proj. Mgr: “We’re tracking our development work in Azure DevOps. Be sure to update it regularly…”
15 mins later.
Proj. Mgr: “We’re tracking our development work in Smartsheet. Be sure to update it regularly…”
15 mins later.
Proj. Mgr: “We’re tracking our development work in ServiceNow Virtual Taskboard. Be sure to update it regularly…”
The last one hurt a bit.
“Quick! Hurry! Scrum! 5 minute stand up team! We need to sort this crisis out NOW!”
“Joe! The building is on fire! Move! RUN!”
“No! We need to have a meeting first! SCRUM! STAND UP! AGILE! SILICON VALLEY!!!1!!!1!! When is the next sprint!?”
Looking for a passionate, motivated team member to be part of a newly refreshed team created to replace an unsuccessful team (RIP) promoting our incredibly competitive product!
- You must have at least 40 years experience working with Windows 11.
- GENEROUS remuneration package!*
- You need to be able to work 26 hours a day 9 days per week.
- You will need to bring PASSION! ENTHUSIASM! EXCITEMENT! [synonym not found]!, and GRIT!
*as we are a small start up, we can’t afford to pay wages, but when we are successful, we promise to write your name somewhere on an archived version of our website.
Some people like happy movies, some like action movies or horror movies even!
I like frustrating movies.
PM: “Hey, I know you said it’ll be done in a week, and you need me to stay out of your way so you can focus, but it’s been 7 hours and I was wondering if you have an update for me. Can you create a report that outlines what you’ve done, what is remaining, and precisely when each step will be finished so that I can pester you about each step throughout the development process, interrupting your productivity? It makes me feel like I’m contributing.”
Not programming, but the plot of Shin Godzilla was about bureaucratic red tape holding back the actual solutions.
It’s my favorite Godzilla movie because of this aspect. There’s a scene where I lost it in the theater when the >!prime minister is completely certain in telling the press that Godzilla will absolutely never, not in a million years, not make landfall… only to have an underlying whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.!<
I worked for a Japanese company at the time, and could recognize that it wasn’t even heightened for parody. That’s just exactly how it is.
only to have an underling whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.
“Our plan worked, sir. Jet fuel can melt steel beams.”
WHICH IS WHY WE SHOULD DEREGULATE EVERYTHING! INCLUDING FOOD AND DRINKING WATER, AND WE SHOULD ALLOW ALLOW COMAPNIES TO DUMP INTO RIVERS!
I love hollywood
…you know this was a Japanese movie, right?
Oh I thought it was one of newer ones. I was envisioning the creep of conservatism into films, like that scene from Independence Day where Will Smith declares that he never wants to pay taxes
The project manager keeps asking for an update every 15 minutes.
Not only do I feel this in my soul, I’ve been working for almost 13 years, and to this day, I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.
The only thing I can tell is that their job is to be the designated impatient person.
I’ve had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery… he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to “do his best for the day” and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management… sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise “using AI” in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.
A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn’t need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.
Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.
Good project managers are worth their weight in gold
Both project managers at my company quit at the same time, so they’re spreading the workload to engineering instead of rehiring.
It has not been going well. Turns out the PMs were doing actual work.
They’re technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.
Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don’t need them, but they sure as hell need me.
I don’t work in software, I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Some project managers are superfluous if they don’t have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I’ve worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.
Being able to say: “we’ve done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress” and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.
This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I’d imagine the same still applies.
Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.
But I’ve never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it’s once a week, or by email as required.
I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Well now I’ve got this song stuck in my head again, which probably accurately describes life with particularly bad peoject management.
This song is near and dear to my heart after having only heard it a handful of times before
Though, the problems described are not from the project managers, it’s the higher ups and owners squeezing every last cent, with disregard for the people who will be killed.
So, so many unnecessary deaths because someone wanted to save money and cut corners in my industry.
This is why people who advocate for small government and lax regulations, are idiots
I’m a project manager for a team of IT systems, engineering, and infrastructure folks with just over twenty folks and my key purpose on earth is that I take one hour or less of their time once a week and by doing so they never have an email or conversation with anyone else outside of our team. I know enough to talk to any stakeholders and complete monthly status reports by simply knowing what is going on and communicating strategy to them. I’ve been praised heavily which feels very dirty being an individual contributor for so long in my career. I can speak the same language as everyone on my team spanning logistics, networking, systems, and software development but I don’t DO anything. I have major imposter syndrome as I near retirement so the praise is also appreciated greatly from them. It’s a really weird period in my career.
Good project managers are invaluable. I’d much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don’t have to be a party to.
When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit… and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they’re too green (or you’re too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won’t be materially different.
It’s like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone’s lives harder… the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it’s more likely you’ll get a shitty roll.
The really good ones understand they are in administration and leave technical things to the technical people.
They are the ones that talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to.
Often those customers are others in the same company.
They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.
In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.
Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.
Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).
I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.
I’ve well over a decade in software project management. The number one thing we contribute to a project is saying to the client (internal or external) “Sure, we can add that feature but it will have an impact on the delivery timeline unless we deprioritise other features. Are you happy for us to extend the deadline? If not, let’s talk about what we can cut from the existing scope in favour of your new feature.”
I have a friend who was a project manager. He took the time to learn every platform used by his team, but held no pretenses that he could actually develop anything without the team. His main goal was filter all the horseshit from the stakeholders and higher-ups so that they wouldn’t overwhelm the team with minutia. By learning the platforms and observing the team developing, he could make accurate predictions on timeliness based on whatever arbitrary feature was being requested and he’d always answer “let me ask my team” before discussing deliverables if he wasn’t sure.
The number of times that he explained in meetings that’s the team’s timeline didn’t change, but that the stakeholders’ expectations did and that introduced a new additional timeline was incredible. It’s unsurprising that he only lasted a year or two before his bosses started pushing for a promotion. Seeing him work made mean bit jealous that I couldn’t be on his team, but we work at different companies and I don’t want to join the private sector if I can be of benefit to public education.
