Comment by m23khan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m23khan | Hacker News Reader

Just stop please. If you are a IT leader and reading this, do us technical workers a favor and just stop. Please get a life outside of work to satisfy your slave leader/world conquerer appetite instead.

As a developer, I am really getting tired of all these nanny/big-brother style theory of how to make IT workers work harder and faster. It is bad enough always being student for life and having uphill battle trying to raise a family and having some social life.

All these items like agile, scrums, standups, support tickets, SLAs, retros, post mortems, overnight support, 24/7 slack channels, etc. are only targeted towards IT workers and are being embraced by companies in name of being more nimble and ship out faster.

Meanwhile finance, accounting, legal, traders etc don’t bother with any of these, make more money (in Canada) on average and have cushy team lunches and bonuses. Hell, these non IT folks end up becoming managers and directors often on basis of seniority while not even understanding how to work properly with basic Windows functions.

All these things combined have led to a dangerous culture where a 15 year experienced developer is often being grilled by a pointy head scrum master or product owner who doesn’t even have half that amount of experience and is being artificially emboldened by top management while being obsessed with work related and productivity metrics.

I don’t mind if IT workers are subjected to some of these changes at a Company but to bring out all these changes and apply them towards us is just inhumane.

Sorry for the rant but I really didn’t get into IT to be treated like a dispensible factory worker or to be case study for management on how to extract more juice out of me.

Author here - the point of the article was to outline a super basic process to understand what people are working on and what can be expected of them. You may notice in the article that the individual opts-in to what they'd like to accomplish. That's the starting point.

We don't use Jira. We don't do scrums. We have one meeting every week. We definitely aren't a sweatshop.

I care deeply about making sure people are performing at their best, but in a way that's considerate of their lives outside of work. Process is required, but the level of process is negotiable and this post aims to outline the minimum process needed that's also respectful of the individual.

You must admit that this is all they can do. Management has no clue about quality of software or how to achieve it. For them incidents either just happen randomly or are completely unexpected. So all they can actually control is the pace of change of the product and what incomplete, unsound features make it into this week's release...

I read it very differently, just a "instead of scrum, what works for us is a Monday meeting with objectives for the week and a Friday meeting to retrospect", more of a "how our team works" than a manifesto for overworking or anything.

Then go get one of those other jobs. As an employee you are an asset to be utilized. Companies that are too heavy handed about it lose employees. IT is one of the cushiest professions in the world, if you want it to be even less demanding then there are people willing to take your place.

your last sentence says it all - it is the same age old, classic, in-your-face, thinly-veiled-threat management style attitude that is behind this micro management era.

Frankly, among white collar jobs, not sure how exactly you are calling IT related profession cushy. If you are talking about free coffee, catered lunches and beer fridge tech startups, these ‘perks’ usually equally ungodly amount of work hours and employees taking even less of break during regular business hours.

And yes, rewind back 15 years and I would definitely pursue another line of work.

If you compare IT to venture capital or just being a Senator’s son then sure it’s got its problems. But when you look at the pay and difficulty of IT compared to nursing, teaching, truck driving, coal mining, construction, etc... it’s the easiest money you’ll ever make. So if you don’t want it, please show yourself the door.

> it’s the easiest money you’ll ever make

The idea that you have to do back-breaking physical labour for something to be "hard" is silly rubbish. There's absolutely nothing "easy" about getting into and sustaining a career in IT.

Find some people who have worked in an engine room or a McDonalds or similar, and supported themselves from the income from that job, and also had a career in IT. I think they will have a different opinion.

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