[andrewsw]

[ArtificialSoldier]

Quote

post-juvenile consumption of milk is, as far as I know, a unique to our species.

It's also apparently very prevalent in some countries. If you ever go out to dinner with a group of Finnish people, you can marvel about how they all order milk with dinner.

[depricated]

Just had it out with Azathoth again. There's a prod issue I was trying to help analyze, and I'm asking some basic questions to get a grasp of the situation - what table is the problem in, what are the symptoms, what logic is being used to select the data - and he's like "well why do you need to see the logic? just trust me the problem is the data not the protocol. It's probably user error" /facepalm

I tried to explain that I need to know what I'm looking for if I'm going to help, and he's like "well I've told you if you'd listen! I'm trying to teach you!"

There it went. I was done. I just did a double-take and went off about how I can't do my job if he withholds information, and I wanted to see the logic so I could understand how the data correlates so I could identify what's wrong in the data. To which he responds "Well that's just your opinion." I'm like NO! No that's not an opinion. That's fact. That's not even something you can have an opinion about. This is objective reality and I need to understand the data in order to fix it. Now the entire time, mind you, he's been talking to me with this tone like "how the fuck don't you know this? you're dumb!" Finally he starts talking down to me in more than just tone - "your generation needs to learn to listen" and I'm just like "ok I'm not going to be disrespected like this." got up and walked out. Went straight to my boss's office and got out "I just walked out of Azathoth's office. There may be fallout, but I'm not going to let him disrespect me." and then Azathoth trundled in and shouted "whatever you're saying about me you can say to my face!"

So I turned to him and said "I said it to your face before I walked out. Are you done being disrespectful?" to which: "are you?!"

Fuck that guy. Seriously.

We sat back down and went to work on it again but with my boss there he minded his tone. After I left, my boss told him that my instructions were to walk out on him if he talked to me like that and that I was just doing what I was told.

Now I'm flying solo and making more progress understanding this issue blind than I was with his "teaching."

[NeoTifa]

I've noticed some leads do that on purpose to cripple you so you're reliant on them. This gives them an ego boost. My old test lead was like that. I would ask a question and she would literally ask "why do you need to know that?". Like, uhhhhhhhhh, I don't know, to know the app better?

[depricated]

Oh we're convinced that he's literally sabotaging us. Things break with no explanation. Things that have worked fine suddenly just stop - and when I find the cause, it never should have worked at all. Like a stored procedure that returns nothing because of a bad inner join where it should have been a left join, or the SQL log file being set as read-only so SQL couldn't start up. All sorts of weird shit like that. But we all we have to go on are means and motive - there's no logging to say who set it or when the log file was flagged read-only, no versioning of stored procedures, nothing that we could point back and say "Azathoth made this change on Friday, when the problem started occurring."

[astonecipher]

I just witnessed our "Dev" and CIO have an interesting conversation. They were working on code together for reuse, cause you know that makes coding nicer. CIO comes from his office and starts yelling at him that it is broke now.

Spoiler

Dev, says "I was trying to make it cleaner."
CIO: "It's NOT! It worked before and now it doesn't! AND I CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WERE THINKING"..... "FUCK IT I WILL WRITE MY OWN GOD DAMN FUNCTION!!!"

Dev: "Wait I saved it, I can go back to it"

CIO: "fuck it I will write my own way"

[NeoTifa]

Your team sounds.... functional. So you guys are trying this Scrum thing out, eh? nvm I was thinking about andrew

This post has been edited by NeoTifa: 07 December 2016 - 02:16 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

Yeah, wow, not the best of all possible team interactions.

Sometimes we worry that our team is "too processy" but we don't have conversations like that. I'll take an extra meeting over that any day.

[andrewsw]

We were supposed to adopt Kanban and attended a course two months ago, but suddenly the CIO said we're going Scrum, I believe because the software he wanted to use wasn't suited to Kanban. I don't think our Department Head was too pleased as he was told in the stand-up after 10 days holiday. He'd been pursuing all these changes to our practices from day one (I believe it is his main remit to bring us up-to-speed with modern practices quickly.)

astonecipher, on 07 December 2016 - 08:51 PM, said:

I just witnessed our "Dev" and CIO have an interesting conversation.

Is your DevOps guy named Dan? Or Dave? I get the impression that all DevOps are named DevOps Dan, Dave or Danielle/Danny.

[jon.kiparsky]

That's not a great reason to choose kanban vs scrum. They're really suited to completely different modes of operation. I think of scrum as being for developers and kanban for IT - scrum is about planning and making reasonable promises of iterated improvement, while kanban is about reacting to situations you don't control and meeting promises of guaranteed service levels.

I've used kanban in development situations, and it's not really all that helpful. I guess I could see it on a highly heterogenous team, for example if you have a team with one back-end person and a front-end person and a UI designer and a QA person or something crazy like that. I know that doesn't really make sense, bear with me and imagine a team where each person specializes in some particular aspect of the product, and maybe doubles on some other area (the UI designer can write some front-end stuff if needed, that sort of thing). In that case, you might find that kanban allows you to move tickets through the workflow, and when things back up at QA, someone comes over to help them out, but that's a strange scenario and I don't think it's one you're likely to find yourself in.

Scrum is probably what you want, so it's good that you're landing there. The hard thing is doing it well - this requires everyone really doing some work to understand all the pieces and how they work together, and it requires a high degree of commitment to active collaboration. Basically, if you can start thinking as a team, you're going to get there. When things go badly, do you look for someone to blame, or do you look for something to improve in your process? The answer tells you whether this is going to go well for you.

[astonecipher]

Our team is great. This one dev on the other hand... Usually he has other devs do his work for him in the guise of "Can you come look at something real quick?"; when he does his own it is normally buggy as hell. This is the same guy that went to a bar for lunch and came back wasted, and the company decided he would get 1 more chance. There are asides for why he wasn't gone before, the drunk at work I don't know where the chain broke that kept him here. 4 hour tickets turn into 3 week projects. He is a prime reason why cheating in school does not mean you will learn it as you go when you start a job.

[macosxnerd101]

My first final grade is in- an A on my algebra final and an A for the class! Now to make sure I don't get screwed tomorrow in analysis.

[depricated]

literally 2 minutes before EOD

"Hey guys this report is due today. What's the status on it? It's not running."

/facepalm

[NeoTifa]

We tried doing hybrid Scrum/kanban since we're a run team. It... got interesting.

[depricated]

So I got that report out in minutes last night. Posted the above while it was being created. No errors, mind you...no idea why the users couldn't run it. Gonna look into that today so this doesn't come up again in a month.

Everything aside, I really love that I'm not dealing with the same monotonous thing day in and day out. A variety of fires is more interesting than one fire.