Shoulder to Shoulder
My former employer may finally have to pay the price. The first thing I noticed in the article's photo of the CEO in their new offices: there's no space. The developers are sitting shoulder to shoulder. Maybe that's just me.
Topic
work
A collection of 74 posts
Scrum Sucks: Standups
Scrum is a development process, and right there it has already screwed up without having done anything. Starting with standups, which rest on three failed assumptions about how much I care what you're working on. Stop stopping work to talk about work and just WORK.
Drunken Monkeys
When this project's done, I'm writing an essay called Drunken Monkeys: a diatribe against formalized project management and feature estimation. First I have to find that paper I read forever ago about the fallacy of the perfect process design.
Mind Numbing
Recruiter: Would you be interested in a job in Maryland? Me: No. A small monument to the mind-numbing arithmetic of making a thousand such phone calls every day.
Commuting
I've done such a good job avoiding rush hour that I only just hit my first metered freeway on-ramp. Drivers clump together like cholesterol in arteries and settle to the speed of the slowest one. If I could drive every car, would we even have a rush hour?
What a Manager Says vs What a Manager Means
On the "team player" line: why must I have an emotional attachment to a 9-to-5? Pay me like a millionaire athlete and we'll talk. A short translation guide for what managers say versus what they actually mean.
Managing Programmers
The single best summary I've found of the peculiarities of managing IT people, so good it reads like my own rants quoted back at me. Read "programmer" wherever it says "geek" and it lands even harder.
Cloud Computing
I can't wait until "cloud computing" gets shoved out of the vernacular. But given that "cyber-" still haunts government press releases two decades past its expiration, I suspect I'll be hearing this one for a long time.
Baseline the Project Plan
Everyone mocks engineers for technobabble, but the product guy's email asking us to "baseline the project plan and milestone dates" left me wondering: we need to WHAT? Now I know how the managers feel.
Follow-Up with the Fruit Company
A more technical interview with the fruit company: TCP versus UDP, congestion control, hash tables. The TCP questions were fortuitously timed, since my latest project has me implementing a TCP-like protocol over UDP. I even got to name-drop Karn's algorithm.