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Top comments (49)
I'd say it's gotta be development effort estimation. In an Agile workflow, this would involve planning poker during sprint planning, where each member goes about assigning story points for various tasks. The results can be widely subjective. Here are some reasons in my experience:
Most activities in software development can be solved to a degree, but this one seems so subjective that it almost feels like rolling a dice. Other than just adding extra time to the estimate (which raises the question - how much time?) to account for contingencies, I don't know if there is any strategy for this. Would love to hear other's thoughts. 😃
I worked in a setting where estimates were not essential to business. The founder came up with a system like the following for communicating what work was being done and raising awareness of blockers:
You get very detailed visibility about blockers, direction of tasks, and choice of approach. Tech leads can daily or weekly provide feedback and steer in a different direction if choice of tasks or milestones are not leading to delivered results that will continue to accomplish overall project goals. There is no estimation, but you can look back and see gantt charts or calenders of microtasks.
This is an interesting approach to work! Would love to know more on what was the business domain that you worked in, where estimates were not super essential.
The company was a mixture of custom scientific consulting (writing running long, expensive batch jobs), custom application development, and a long term SaaS product, still in development. The projects that I worked on were for custom application development, and our clients were very flexible about delivery dates.
We had four experienced engineers using this workflow on four solo projects and they each loved it. I especially liked the visuals that Asana produces once you enter the microtasks. We also did a weekly report to summarize our feelings on how the project was going.
I see! I think more companies should adopt this working style. From what I've seen, many of them just want you to keep grinding sprint after sprint, insisting on deadlines even when there isn't any actual pressure from clients to ship a certain feature.
It actually is agnostic about how hard you work. For example, I put a lot of pressure on myself in that system to deliver a lot each day. I just like that it focuses on recording as you go and looking back, rather than spending lots of time on estimation, velocity, etc, and excessive time specifying tasks so that you can estimate them. I like deep requirements gathering though. I just don't like an obsession with estimation. My ideal system is something between the described system and kanban with bi-weekly retros.
The worst job that I ever worked (worked for about 10 different development shops), at a "best employer in healthcare" and "best employer in region", shoved this top down quarterly planning process on all the developer teams and had us spend 15% of our time in backlog grooming, task creation, scrum ceremonies, etc. Mostly well meaning people, just horrible experience for developers, no ability to focus or reach flow, task creation and grooming was a constant nightmare.
After that experience, I shudder whenever I see a tech company that has won "best employer" awards. I also don't trust Glassdoor anymore. I think the only way to learn about these problems is to experience a company first hand for a few weeks.
Also, if I see someone is using Jira, I start to ask very probing questions in interviews to try to understand why they arrived at heavyweight, clumsy jira.
Estimation is definitely a challenge that requires a team effort to get right. I recently shared a guide that I wrote for my own teams, perhaps there are insights that can help? A Guide to Story Point Estimation
Yes, this is one of the problems why I left a company.
this cannot be the reason why would you leave a company. perhaps suggest a process that would work with you or the entire team?
I would shorten this reply to "Agile generally"
Haha, i guess with the planning poker activity you can certainly say it's generally Agile.
But, planning poker or not, estimates are still hard wouldn't you say? 😅
They're a waste of time, so I don't do them
Interesting! Is it because your workplace doesn't really need you to calculate estimates one way or another? Or perhaps they're flexible enough?
I just gave up doing them. Maybe the PO filled them in for me, who knows?
The happiest, most productive teams I've worked on we're ones where we were allowed to self organise, and not estimate
Explain development estimation to sudo technical manager is frustrating.
One extreme way to solve this is to go with #noestimates but it's a highly polemic subject. Some people (mostly managers ?) really love estimating things beforehand.
It's frustrating, but also gratifying with the right mindset: When you spend hours on a problem, and the solution is some stupid typo.
It's literally the worst. Like— I just ruined my day for a typo.
The gratifying part is that these are usually the times where I read a lot of documentation, reach a lot of source code, and generally level up as a developer. Without that appreciation and acknowledgment, it's only frustration. 🥲
Endless meetings about nothing..
Non-technical managers
Reality.
You have a nice idea, and then you checkout what the market offers to help, and it's either legacy solutions or not yet production ready.
Software development is all about making compromises. The smarter you are, the better the compromise is.
Should you go all in on AWS because their CDK supports all their services? This means you have to use something like DynamoDB, which is rather low-level for a DB, or a relational alternative that isn't billed on demand.
Want to use something more modern, like FaunaDB? Well, then good luck finding a IaC framework that supports it and doesn't kill your vibes with YAML.
Reality usually sucks.
When I want to code, and I'm stuck on problems with my tech.
Yesterday I spent an hour solving wrong DNS setting in Ubuntu as I was cut from my remote repository, instead of finishing feature.
Finally solving this, my battery died out without warning.
Then I couldn't continue working in a bus as my ntb charging got stuck on 4%.
Configuring AWS IAM policies lol
Requirement change after completing 90% task 😂
this needs to be higher. my most recent job has been actually pretty good about this though telling the business that they have to deal with it until a new story can be brought in an completed in the next sprint
My frustrations typically stemmed from one of two sources:
Collaboration with Team Members
Because of my style as team lead, I worked hard to manage expectations, and that meant delivering promises on time. I actively worked to keep expectations conservative, but when team members would drop the ball, I was often times left being the one putting in the long hours to make good on the promise.
This ranged from PMs not getting hands on with a MVP scheduled to launch, to Direct Reports quitting because they over promised and under delivered while refusing to be transparent on the actual progress of the work.
Tier 0 Support
Our engineering org doesn't have a dedicated support team, instead engineers are rotated weekly with the responsibility of handling support requests. It's often times a disruptor to planned work, and you can easily find your days being derailed by one support issue. I quickly became frustrated with these duties in part to my past experience. Unlike most engineers in my org, I had a 10 year background in helpdesk support. I don't mind providing support, but I paid my dues handling requests that haven't been triaged. My purpose in support should be to train others, and only get involved when tickets get elevated to the top tier.
Business. It dictates everything. No matter how cool and ambitious your ideas are, if you cannot sell them properly, they’re useless. No matter how sure you are that doing “A” is wrong, if it’s requested by a major customer, just do it silently.
But no matter what, this industry is the best ❤️