swagtricker

You mean, like a Brother Shamus?

The achilles heel of Scrum is that it sold out the prescriptive XP practices that enforce sustainable software engineering discipline as well as communication with business concerns in order to sugar coat the fast feedback cycles. Scrum/Kanban feedback is about "doing the right thing". XP feedback is about "doing the thing right". Codebases on projects using Scrum/Kanban without XP technical practices tend to molder and succumb to what I like to call "Scrumrot" within about 18 months. Seen it happen many times.

Yep. We wanted XP. We got Scrum instead.

The UHK is great. I have a V1 with a V2 on order. My only complaint is that my 2 year old ABS key caps have started to show some wear, but I’ve got the new set of PBTs that are for both versions on order as well. I’m going to give my V1 to a good friend who will appreciate it when the V2 comes in.

Wow! That almost sounds as bad as when they ramped down their Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) team when they figured out the logging example was the best thing you could do with it:) Seems like blockchain is a technology that's been overhyped, just like AOP. If you're not familiar with AOP, welcome to the post-dot.com Internet & enjoy what's left of your youth.

Standard Disclaimer: This is from my own personal experience. YMMV.

This looks like the same type of Gold Rush that happened 20 years ago in the dot.com boom/bust. Same advice I learned the hard way applies today as I wish I'd learned it then - "when there's a gold rush, go sell shovels." Or in this case, as a technologist, sell topographical survey info you've collected, gold panning tutorials, fully outfitted claim excursions (you get the idea) - ANY knowledge you have about HOW to do what people THINK they need to do to find gold. Don't take equity, take cash today. It doesn't matter if they get rich or not, YOU make sure you get paid FIRST and be clear that if they don't want to pay for your services, their competitors certainly will.

To continue to abuse the analogy, to the business person we technologists are now and have always been "resources" to be used as a means to an end. You think they want to give their "pack mules and shovels" a cut of the gold? Unless you have some business domain knowledge, you'll never get an equal seat at the table. 9 times out of 10, if you DO have some business knowledge, you can probably make more money by going off to become a direct competitor. Or, better yet, gain some knowledge of the field and work with a competitor who has a better vision.

I've been inside 4 start-ups in various stages, and one post-IPO company that included stock options over the past 20 years. Only the dot.com era company ever amounted to anything, and that was dumb luck WRT having an IPO when people would force money on you for doing eAnything(TM).

I follow one primary rule when taking a job: you're either there to earn, or you're there to learn. It you're humble enough and not an idiot, you realize that there's a number of things to "learn" at any point in your career between different industries, different career paths, and different levels of position. If you think you're "too good" to do some job, you may be right but you may also just be an asshole.

None invalidation taken:) It's a strange experience to go through - hard to describe. This strange loop where I didn't feel hungry and didn't feel that I should eat "because I was supposed to".

I'm no expert, but from personal experience, when you only manage to eat toast and a hot dog at lunch, or a granola bar + yogurt and some pasta at dinner along with multiple liters of water for a day because "you just don't feel hungry" and you end up losing so much weight you need to buy new jeans and t-shirts (which you're too depressed to pick out, so your wife buys them for you)- there's something going on.

Nobody knows me on here, so I'll have to keep it that way after I post this. Get professional help. A combination of COVID-19, a high paying/high stress consulting job, and a history OCD related stress & paranoia pushed me into a VERY bad place. I was considering suicide. I didn't go outside for weeks if I could avoid it. I'd go 3-4 days w/o a shower (out of character for me). I started subconsciously punishing myself via starvation (Shitty Life Pro-Tip - drink a lot of water & you won't feel hungry! Eating disorders FTW!) because I wasn't hungry & didn't need to eat because I wasn't really doing anything all day. I cut off from people who reached out to me.

I was fortunate to be well off financially after 5 months to walk away from the consulting job. My wife didn't see it because I hid it from her. I reached a braking point when I walked way from the consulting & was well supported by the engagement manager. I took two months off, I started seeing a counselor (virtually, thanks COVID-19), and I started on Prozac. I'm not "done" yet, but I'm an order of magnitude closer to who I was before all this happened. I've started to gain weight back. Suicide no longer holds its appeal. I can consider the idea that there might be a world after the year 2020, and that I should be a part of it.

Sorry - I know this is rambling. Let me pull back to my point: getting help is the only thing that would help. If you could change yourself, by yourself, you would have by now. It takes the push of someone else's perspective to move you, because you simply can't move yourself. Your best bet is a professional - you have your own bias and trust issues with friends & family, no matter how much they mean to you. Hang in there. No matter how bad life gets, don't let anyone, let alone you, tell you that you don't deserve to be a part of it.

Quick to anger is the 1st thing that comes to mind. "The Detroit 10" - (e.g. if you're not doing 10 over the speed limit some are happy to run you off the road). Lot's of focus on your family history defining your destiny (e.g. "oh. He's a so-and-so they've always had money and power..."). More conservative than the PNW the last time I was there (admittedly, 10 years ago). This was my wife's take as well (she's a native to the PNW).

Also, please ignore the fact that local militias occupied the state legislature, and some were recently arrested by the FBI for a plot to kidnap the governor and overthrow the state government. Come to Michigan!;)

Personal disclaimer: I grew up in Michigan from birth to mid teen years (in the Pacific NW now). I still have family that I love back there, but I'd need a salary offer in the top 3% income bracket of the state to consider moving back (and I'd still only rent). Michiganders are just too uptight for my sensibilities as an adult.

This.

Scrum should at best be viewed as training wheels for agile teams. Not the end state. Good teams abandon scrum for Kanban / Lean concepts once they start building good collaboration structures, better communication with business, earn trust by delivering and recognize (as you point out nicely) that the sprint timebox is artificial B.S. in practice. I think the Parkinson's law can be a common trap for teams to fall into with the Sprint timebox malarkey.

I fully agree. In general, any flavor of agile for software development that doesn't include the engineering focus that Extreme Programming's technical practices bring in (fast feedback, refactoring, good testing & design, CI/CD deployment, team ownership of the solution - weather you pair program or not) is doomed to become intractable legacy after 12-18 months at the most optimistic.

Wow. What the fuck ever happened to forbearance for hardship in federal student loans?! When my wife and I were at university ('94-97, transfer from paying our way through community college) we both had Stafford government subsidized loans through Sallie Mae. When we graduated and I got a job as a software developer & her as a teacher, I then got hit with the layoffs after the dot-com bust all of three years later and was unemployed for 6 months (e.g April - October). During that time, both my wife and I waere able to take advantage of what is known as "forbearance" on both our student loans because I was out of work - deferring payments, but still accruing interest on about $500 perm month in 2000's money for our $40k worth of loans combined. It made the difference between keeping & loosing our car and apartment in Seattle between her meager paycheck as a teacher and my unemployment checks. Why in the HELL isn't this still an option? Why the hell should Trump or any politician be crooning about simply cutting the goddamned interest alone that students today are getting soaked for when they could simply put all the payments on "pause" for the weeks it will take for this to blow over?

Absolutely true. In my experience, some people use "bashing pair programming" to hide their insecurity and incompetence.

Agreed. This has been my experience as well. I've mostly pair programmed over the last 15 years. Very similar schedule. Same pros & cons. There's a counter intuitive key element to Pair Programming - you're slowing down in order to go faster. You make fewer mistakes and correct them an order of magnitude faster when you do. You spend less time "thrashing" on something. You're less likely to loose the better part of an hour going down an implementation rabbit hole. Once you let get of the illusion that you can be better long term "by just going off and cranking this out on my own" (e.g. cowboy coding / hacking / JANGIT - Just Add New Garbage Ignore Testing), then the value of pairing really shines. 18 months into a project, you're looking at something that is still high quality, still manageable, and you still actually want to work on because you're proud of what you and your team have done.

Absolutely. So much so, while they dodged getting broken up, the settle the anti-trust suit with the DOJ and regarding their predatory defense of their monopoly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Please just take it out back and shoot it.

Perhaps the biases around the home PC and video games from the 80's is still embedded today? It's my personal favorite theory: the girls were told they couldn't play in our forts 30+ years ago. This became part of modern western culture with respect to computers & gaming and became applied to computers in general.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

ADDENDUM: This decision is if you're like me & my wife: born into a middle to lower-middle class family. Have made it to where you are in life via hard work & dumb luck. Have no "glass floor" below you. Have no family member who could have even begun to tell you what to do with stock options. If you're "born on 3rd base thinking you've hit a triple" (e.g. mom & dad have money and will make sure you never end up homeless and sleeping in your car) just ask your family lawyer and/or CPA. I'm sure they have contacts to help you out.

Here's ALL you need to know about your company stock options: ask yourself - if I had ($PRICE_PER_SHARE * $NUMBER_OF_SHARES) in cash sitting in my checking account RIGHT NOW, would I dump ALL of it into my company's stock? If the answer is yes - hold onto those options and simply DO NOT exercise them. If the answer is NO - FUCKING SELL THEM NOW! Take the tax hit, diversify into other investments, take a cruse, waste it on strippers & blow in Las Vegas - whatever. At NO point hold actual SHARES of your company stock. Options are compensation lottery tickets. That's exactly how executives view them, that's exactly how you should view them. Trust the guy who "held on" to about $100,000.00 USD worth of options as the stock crashed into the ground between February 2000 and October 2000. I could have paid off $40k worth of my wife's & my student loans, $20K worth of auto loans and still had money in the bank after taxes, but I believe the bullshit & hype. I regret it to this day and I'll probably never get type of stock option shot again.

It's a simple question: if I had the value of my company stock in cold, hard ca$h today - would I dump it ALL into a brokerage account to buy said company stock?

Are you sure? I read that as being incredibly demeaning to men.

Here's the short list:

Round 1: Dot.com era - 4 years out of college, out of work for 6 months along with a lot of the industry on the West coast of the US. Depressed as hell, never thought I'd work as a programmer again. In desperation, I take a sub-contracting 1099 job and get my 1st taste of consulting rates. I bank over 1/2 of my income planning for the job to end.

Round 2: Consulting job ends, but I've learned to PLAN for layoffs to happen in this line of work. Only searching for about 3-4 weeks as job marked has significantly picked up. Landed 1st start-up job at what became "psychotic start-up from hell".

Round 3: Fast forward a few years - best job I ever had, but the small company decided to use US employment law to shaft me & 4 others who had made millions in profit for them to lay of off with hardly any severance & zero warning after tricking us into TRAINING our replacements from an outsourcing firm in Ukraine (spoiler alert - everything is great at company financially: they just wanted to look BETTER on the books to get acquired). Bastards then had the nerve to call us back 6 months and ask if we'd come back (gee.. I wonder why...). The good news? I'm only unemployed for 72 hours - yes. 72 clock hours on the wall. Former colleague recommends me to a bigger, more professional consulting org that has a job my personal and professional experience is tailored for. Lunch WAS the interview w/ the director of development & development consulting. I sign the offer letter on the new job 45 min after signing the severance paperwork on the old job.

Round 4: I was asked to join a fantastic later stage startup with a bunch of very energetic & inspiring people. Then, there was a political coup where the CEO was thrown out of power and so, who got to go with him? Why the 3 newest technical staff hires + one bystander all in the name of cutting start-up burn rate. This one has ended up happy though, since the new CEO in power felt a little guilt for axing us he put 3 of us in touch with another start-up. 6 business days later for me, I've got a job again (same pay, better benefits, more "stability") and 1 of my other 2 friends also pursued & accepted an offer.

All of this was over the course of 20+ years as a developer. Not as a "team lead", not with any "management" or "architect" experience. Just a work-a-day mid to senior developer who likes to build & ship software. What I've learned from this:

Lesson 1: Never EVER let your skills slack. Keep learning new things, or hang up your keyboard and go sit in meetings (e.g. management, product, whatever). Note: If you're going to do this, it's fucking hard as hell to try and go back. It's also a completely different skill set to do it well as say, a development manager or a technical product owner.

Lesson 2: Keep networking & going to meet-ups and conferences. This helps keep your skills sharp and you inspired to keep learning.

Lesson 3: Lesson 1 + 2 does equal 3 - That is: "You will reach a point where not so much 'what' you know as 'who' you know will lead to your next big jobs and/or big opportunities". Don't burn bridges, as tempting as it may be.

Note to my own comment: Take a look at the "What they do tab" for both titles. You'll think that you've been transported back to 1969 in the punch card room where yes - the lowly Computer Programmers simply write code while the Software Developers talk to the business people and figure out what needs to be done. While hardly writing any code themselves. It's hilarious.

If you look at the description, I believe part of the problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has always been under the delusion that "Computer Programmers" were little more than typists who understood programming syntax. There's an assumption that some sort of all important _DESIGN_ work was done by analysts or other so-called experts perhaps the almighty "Software Developer". Could it be Computer Programmers just type what they're told, and perhaps Software Developers do the important work;)

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Depending on your lifestyle, some areas are just a waste of space. It's just my wife, me, and two cats (children weren't in the cards) in a ~1000 sq/ft 2br/2ba condo. It's open concept built in the late 90's and when we look around on housing/remodel shows on TV or look at floor plans for our dream home (a whole 200 sq/ft larger with a pool) the #1 thing we kill off is the damn dining room. We eat in front of the TV or at the dining counter in the kitchen like normal 'Mericans. We don't need a whole separate room wasted w/ no door and a low hanging light fixture that we might make use of a few days a year.

Poor kid. No, literally. He must be a poor kid. Otherwise, his parents would have just bought his way in, right?

Now the interesting question is - what's the churn rate for those same programmers? Be it into seat-warming work like management, fluff work like "sales engineering", or exiting the software world completely?

Your idea about ending school sooner is spot on. My wife has almost 2 decades experience teaching High School English. Your Junior & Senior years are fluff - they're not tracked with standardized testing of any sort in those last two years (at least in Washington State) and you've met all of the content requirements needed to graduate (just not the credit count). That's why running start exists - you're already "done" with your public education content by the time you've hit year 10 - go ahead and get your "credits" at local college/community college and get both the HS diploma and AA degree.