There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket.
While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
I have been part of some social circles before but they were always centered around a common activity like a game, and once that activity went away, so did those connections.
As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me that not having any kind of social network (not even social media accounts) may have added an additional level of difficulty.
I am still working on the side hustles, though.
Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
People almost never know what they want, so put SOMETHING in front of them, fast, and let's go from there
It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.
It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."
Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.
When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.
This isn't possible in the USA. Companies like this (small, and not in tech hub cities) always try to take advantage of their location and pay peanuts, with the excuse "the cost of living is lower here!", even though it's not that much lower (and not as low as they think), and everything besides houses costs the same nationwide.
Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to bring an effective team to build something high priority or fix a dumpster fire.
A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into our organization in the past year and I would say it was a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from that experience I am now not sure you can even build good software that way.
I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more and more fundamental flaws.
Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.
Now I have no way to know where things stand. It's all disconnected and abstracted. The ticket may suggest that something is done, but if the customer isn't happy, it isn't actually. Worse, now we have people adding tickets without any intent to do the work themselves and there isn't a great way to determine if they're just making up random work, which is something that definitely happens sometimes, or if it truly reflects on what the customer needs.
You might say that isn't technically a problem with ticketing itself, and I would agree. The problems are really with what came with the ticketing. But what would you need tickets for other than to try and eliminate the customer from the picture? If you understand the problem alongside the customer, you know what needs to be done just as you know when you need to eat lunch. Do you create 'lunchtime' tickets for yourself? I've personally never found the need.
We traded properly working on problems for the Kafkaesque nightmare of modern development.
As you no doubt know, Agile is ultimately about eliminating managers from the picture, thinking that software is better developed when developers work with each other and the customer themselves without middlemen. Which, in hindsight, sounds a lot like my previous comment, funnily enough, although I didn't have Agile in mind when I wrote it.
Except in the real world, one day up and deciding no more managers on a whim would lead to chaos, so Scrum offered a "training wheels" method to facilitate the transition, defining practices that push developers into doing things they normally wouldn't have to do with a manager behind them. Once developers are comfortable and into a routine with the new normal Scrum intends for you to move away from it.
The problem: What manager wants to give up their job? So there has always been an ongoing battle to try and bastardize it such that the manager retains relevance. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we as a community have finally wisened up to it and now most pretty well recognize it for what it is instead of allowing misappropriation of the "Agile" label. The bad news is that, while we're getting better at naming it, we're not getting better at dealing with it.
And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers. It sounds counter intuitive, but agile is about autonomy and lack of micro-management, not lack of leadership.
If anything, the one thing those two things reject are “product managers” in lieu of “product owners”.
It is officially marketed as such, but in the real world it is always the managers who introduce it into an organization to get ahead of the curve, allowing them to sour everyone on it before there is a natural movement to push managers out, so everyone's exposure to it is always in the bastardized form. Developers and reading the documentation don't exactly mix, so nobody ever goes back to read what it really says.
> And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers.
The Agile Manifesto is quite vague, I'll give you that, but the 12 Principles makes it quite clear that they were thinking about partnerships. Management, of any kind, is at odds with that. It does not explicitly say "no engineering managers", but having engineering managers would violate the spirit of it.
> not lack of leadership.
Leadership and management are not the same thing. The nature of social dynamic does mean that leadership will emerge, but that does not imply some kind of defined role. The leader is not necessarily even the same person from one day to the next.
But that is the problem. One even recognized by the 12 Principles. Which is that you have to hire motivated developers to make that work. Many, perhaps even most, developers are not motivated. This is what that misguided ticketing scheme we spoke of earlier is trying to solve for, thinking that you can get away with hiring only one or two motivated people if they shove tickets down all the other unmotivated developers' throats, keeping on them until they are complete.
It is an interesting theory, but one I maintain is fundamentally flawed.
I imagine everyone's capacity is different, but you wouldn't want anyone with a low capacity on your team, so that's moot. Frankly, there is no need to go beyond what you can keep in your head, unless your personal capacity is naturally limited I guess, because as soon as you progress in some way the world has changed and you have to reevaluate everything anyway, so there was no reason to worry about the stuff you can't focus on to begin with.
What you actually do is going to depend on the kind of project you're working on and the people you're working with. But it mostly boils down to just talking to people. You can get a lot done even at scale just by talking to people.