Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?
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@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Exactly. So properly implemented scrum would help you here, not hurt you.
No True Scotsman, eh?
You said:
No, you fucker. Your job is to deliver on time. So sit the fuck down and figure out what "on time means."
The deadline is the deadline. I can sit and faff about with tickets in order to give you visibility or I can use my experience and knowledge to deliver whatever I can in the time allotted. Either way, I can't tell you how long it's going to take because I don't know what other snags I'm going to run into integrating all these things.
@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Exactly. So properly implemented scrum would help you here, not hurt you.
No True Scotsman, eh?
You said:
No, you fucker. Your job is to deliver on time. So sit the fuck down and figure out what "on time means."
The deadline is the deadline. I can sit and faff about with tickets in order to give you visibility or I can use my experience and knowledge to deliver whatever I can in the time allotted. Either way, I can't tell you how long it's going to take because I don't know what other snags I'm going to run into integrating all these things.
Ok, I feel like we're talking past each other.
You're talking about an emergency situation. As I said, there are different ways to approach such a situation, probably none of them is to stick to the process. In emergency situations you act in a different manner. There are multiple ways to salvage such a situation, we could probably waste a lot of time discussing it. But this is a whole different ballpark. Scrum is a process for day-to-day activities.
In your situation, the whole clusterfuck is due to the fact that the process has already failed. When working in a scrum, the manager doesn't impose deadlines on you. Sure, there are kinds of deadline that the business can impose on you, this is something that you have to figure out and learn to handle. But a manager imposing deadline on you because they feel they know how long it'll take? Never. And again, if such a situation happens, you need to act accordingly, with agility.
Yes, I am saying no true Scotsman and that's because I worked in a properly implemented scrum and it was beautiful. I know this can work. But I can't defend all of those HPB-corporate abominations that people call "scrum" or "agile", but really aren't. Words have meanings, processes have specs, specs should change depending on your situation. Great scrum process in one place will probably differ from a great scrum process in another place. But it won't SAFe.
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Timelines for tasks, not projects.
No.
Projects have timelines because they are finite. (They also quite probably have tasks within them.)
Argh. What I meant was, developers in a scrum are supposed to estimate how long it'll take to estimate backlog items and specific tasks that they are made of, not whole projects from start to finish.
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@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Ok, I feel like we're talking past each other.
You're talking about an emergency situation.I don't think it was an emergency, exactly...or necessarily, though it could be. Just an arbitrarily decided dictate from above. And of course, you're correct when you say that scrum (or whatever) wasn't implemented in that case. The higher ups just stomped all over whatever process you had.
That stuff happens.
@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Either way, I can't tell you how long it's going to take because I don't know what other snags I'm going to run into integrating all these things.
In our normal process, I'd say that and we'd meet with whomever we needed to meet with to get that stuff figured out. Of course, there are still unknown unknowns, as there are with pretty much anything.
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Just an arbitrarily decided dictate from above.
Remember: if everyone is currently doing pair programming, that means you can fire fifty percent of your programmers and still get the same number of people actually working!!! Just imagine how much better that will make the numbers look for senior management when it comes to year end!
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I don't think it was an emergency, exactly...
Right. Not really an emergency.
And of course, you're correct when you say that scrum (or whatever) wasn't implemented in that case.
It sure looked like scrum, except for the part where most of my stories kept carrying over sprint to sprint.
In our normal process, I'd say that and we'd meet with whomever we needed to meet with to get that stuff figured out.
Sure, I said that. I also mentioned that while I had planned a story for subsystem X, a story for subsystem Y, and so on, what I had to do was integrate subsystems X, Y, and Z to do behavior A, then behavior B, then behavior C. Fortunately, the project manager didn't insist on my rewriting all the tickets.
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The higher ups just stomped all over whatever process you had.
Unless the higher-ups stomping all over is your process.
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@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
As I said, there are different ways to approach such a situation, probably none of them is to stick to the process.
Your "So sit the fuck down" didn't admit to such subtleties.
Estimation happens even in the waterfalliest of waterfall: if you're in this industry, you're going to have to estimate. But not everything can be estimated.
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@hardwaregeek Heh. Reminds me of the time I found out the very morning after we planned our sprint that another member of the team had been pulled off to work on an unplanned proof of concept integration of the QA director's pet tool.
I should have made them break the sprint.
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@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
As I said, there are different ways to approach such a situation, probably none of them is to stick to the process.
Your "So sit the fuck down" didn't admit to such subtleties.
Of course it didn't. That's how generalizations work, silly.
Estimation happens even in the waterfalliest of waterfall: if you're in this industry, you're going to have to estimate. But not everything can be estimated.
Estimations work in a different fashion in waterfallish, usually. Surely depends on the kind of waterfallish.
What I meant was, developers tend to despise the 2-hours per week they need spend on refinement and 2-4 per sprint they need to spend on planning, ie braking features or tickets (known as product backlog items) into concrete tasks which in turn get estimated in hours. Because they see it as just another meeting and they hate meetings because real work is coding not talking. Note: that's another generalization. A huge group does thinks so. Too large, IME.
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@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@hardwaregeek Heh. Reminds me of the time I found out the very morning after we planned our sprint that another member of the team had been pulled off to work on an unplanned proof of concept integration of the QA director's pet tool.
I should have made them break the sprint.
You should've, definitely.
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@greybeard said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
And of course, you're correct when you say that scrum (or whatever) wasn't implemented in that case.
It sure looked like scrum, except for the part where most of my stories kept carrying over sprint to sprint.
How did it look like scrum if you weren't planning stories based on developer estimates?
In our normal process, I'd say that and we'd meet with whomever we needed to meet with to get that stuff figured out.
Sure, I said that. I also mentioned that while I had planned a story for subsystem X, a story for subsystem Y, and so on, what I had to do was integrate subsystems X, Y, and Z to do behavior A, then behavior B, then behavior C. Fortunately, the project manager didn't insist on my rewriting all the tickets.
Right, I get it. Manglement was stepping all over everything. If you've got clueless management...you've got clueless management.
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@HardwareGeek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The higher ups just stomped all over whatever process you had.
Unless the higher-ups stomping all over is your process.
ISO 9001 Certified!
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blek the concept of "agile" is a really good idea:
- Smaller Changes
- Sooner
Transforming an organization to become agile it quite difficult, because thinking in "smaller changes" is really hard for the business, and even harder for IT to execute.
I don't really get what "XP/Pair Programming" has to do with "being agile", aside from the fact that both practices are misogynistic and racist.
I think this overlooks the main point, that those of us with greater mass are triggered by the word "agile", as if to put a value judgment on the notion that it's better to be agile than immovable.
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@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
We learned pair programming in college. In practice, it was always me doing 95% of the work and some other guy getting my grade for nothing. I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
I do wonder (seriously) if you excluded the other guy. I've been on teams in school where the more senior person did all the work, but that was his choice. I would have preferred that he made himself accessible to the others for questions.
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@tharpa said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
We learned pair programming in college. In practice, it was always me doing 95% of the work and some other guy getting my grade for nothing. I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
I do wonder (seriously) if you excluded the other guy. I've been on teams in school where the more senior person did all the work, but that was his choice. I would have preferred that he made himself accessible to the others for questions.
There was one other student I worked very well with because he was competent. The rest, when I got paired with them, just proved that they had no business being anywhere near a code editor. If I tried to let them work on stuff, even on really simple things, they'd get nowhere and admit they had no idea what to do even when I tried to guide them.
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@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The rest, when I got paired with them, just proved that they had no business being anywhere near a code editor. If I tried to let them work on stuff, even on really simple things, they'd get nowhere and admit they had no idea what to do even when I tried to guide them.
Maybe. In school (especially), you're there to learn. How sure are you that they had no business being near a code editor, as opposed to you just knowing more than they did at that point in time? I majored in the social and behavioral sciences, with a healthy dose of courses in math, engineering, and natural science. When I got to grad school in CS, most of my classmates had bachelors' in CS as well as programming work experience, whereas I had just a few courses and self-study previously. I am reasonably confident that the majority of them were not inherently smarter than I was.
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@tharpa said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
How sure are you that they had no business being near a code editor, as opposed to you just knowing more than they did at that point in time?
Because they were college seniors, majoring in Computer Science, having already taken dozens of credit-hours worth of Java courses and yet somehow didn't know how to print to the console or convert an int to a double.
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@tharpa said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I am reasonably confident that the majority of them were not inherently smarter than I was.
A disappointingly large number of universities are best described as being outposts of the University of Bums-On-Seats. Any education obtained there is purely by accident; students are there to provide income from tuition fees, nothing more. (It seems that this isn't wholly true at WTF-U; our entry requirements are so high for CS that things mostly work as they should. I understand that we're unusual.)
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
our entry requirements are so high for CS that things mostly work as they should. I understand that we're unusual.)
Like what?
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
University of Bums-On-Seats.
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@pie_flavor said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Like what?
“Like what?” what? You mean our entrance requirements? I believe we're currently requiring just about the highest exam results of anyone, and that probably includes having to do it in Maths and a science, which are areas that really don't tolerate a lot of fooling around. Yes, academic ability at high school level is an imperfect proxy for capacity to finish a degree, but it's the metric we can measure. We still get vastly more applicants than we can accept due to the physical constraints of the building (the lecture theatres and labs are only so big), so we are really choosy too, and (according to a colleague) are the toughest school in the university to get into by quite a stretch, so much so that the university's standard rules on how to handle admissions don't meaningfully apply. The Dean basically tells everyone else “be more like CS; they're doing it right”.
Since we're able to select on ability and desire-to-succeed so strongly, we don't really have so much of a problem with idiots and slackers dragging down those who want to learn. (OTOH, tutors do have to watch out for people burning out and having a mental breakdown. That's not predicted by previous performance so much, as late teens/early twenties is the time of life where that sort of thing first tends to manifest…)
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@dkf What about requirements for people looking to switch majors? I just want to compare yours to the ones here.
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@pie_flavor said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
What about requirements for people looking to switch majors?
I'm sorry, but that's something really I don't know.
In my experience (long ago, at a different university) to switch majors after one year I had to work really hard to catch up with the material for the courses that I'd not taken over the preceding year. It was a fun couple of months catching up with the basics of computer hardware (which I mostly actually knew already as I'd already been fabricating my own computer peripherals from basic parts) and functional programming (where I did all the exercises in the set book on paper and got a good understanding that way; ended up knowing that course better than virtually all my colleagues). I was told that it would have been much more difficult to switch later than that, as the course I'd switched from and the one I switched to diverged a lot more in the second year.
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@anonymous234 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I have no obligation to educate people
This is like the first meme all crazy SJWs learn. There's not one out there that doesn't repeat that when asked about anything.
It's stupid on the face of it. The sole purpose of talking (or typing) is to "educate" others. There is no other reason anyone has ever spoken since the beginning of speech.
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@Weng said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@apapadimoulis It's used a lot. By the tens of thousands.
And yes, by and large it's a management failure. One that's been underway for literally decades.
These subsystems accreted over the past 30 years, mostly through M&A. Some of them have direct lineages back to 70's big iron.
This is Fortune 500 legacy manufacturing. IT can tell senior management stuff until we're blue in the face and we'll never actually get to fix that giant ball of mud properly, it's too risky.
Hell, we recently spun off into 3 separate companies along very deep dividing lines. The first our CIO heard about it was on the news after it was announced to investors. With a hard date by which it would be complete. And a $0 IT budget.
We STILL haven't finished disentangling the IT two years after that date.
What works for small businesses should also work for huge ones, but good fucking luck convincing them of that.
I can almost see that one, and I don't tend to be a management sympathizer. There are substantive reasons for keeping that kind of information on a very strict need-to-know basis. Every additional person who knows before the public does is an additional risk of insider trading, etc.
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@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@polygeekery said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
only 2-5% of the population make good developers
I think you are being optimistic by at least an order of magnitude.
Here's an exercise for someone more motivated than me: Estimate what percentage of the total population is developers, then multiply that by the percentage of good programmers. The result ought to be amusingly tiny.
TBH, I didn't have to do the first part. Multiplying by 0 always yields 0.
Eh, to kill the joke, it's a meaningless question. The percentage of good programmers depends completely on where on the spectrum you draw the line. At almost any point on the spectrum, there are programmers who are worse, and programmers who are better.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blakeyrat said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
But really though -- a good programmer is not a procrastinator, nor hard to motivate. If a programmer cannot perform his job duties faithfully and enthusiastically, then actually... he's pretty bad at his job.
I am bad at my job, but that doesn't mean I'm worthless to the company. If I could be better at my job by teaming up with someone, how is that a bad thing?
If you are so bad at your job, it takes two people to do a task that someone else can do individually, then you are quite literally half the worth of someone who is good at the job.
That blakey says he is a bad programmer does not mean he is necessarily any worse than you. ;) And yes, it's true that some programmers are worth twice as much as others. And, as a general rule, they get paid more, though not exactly twice as much. But the alpha geeks cannot do all of the work on their own.
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@chozang said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@anonymous234 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I have no obligation to educate people
This is like the first meme all crazy SJWs learn. There's not one out there that doesn't repeat that when asked about anything.
It's stupid on the face of it. The sole purpose of talking (or typing) is to "educate" others. There is no other reason anyone has ever spoken since the beginning of speech.
A lot of (perhaps most) communication is about socialisation - maintaining or manipulating status and relations rather than imparting information.
The SJW example above is obviously political posturing and a lazy attempt to assert dominance. It may well be a successful strategy - depending on who the person is trying to impress and to what extent power-politics requires shutting down of a conservation where they might otherwise lose face.
e.g. how many committee meetings do you go to that last for hours and everyone talks voraciously yet no-one learns anything? Middle managers often love such meetings because they are the ones for whom social status is probably most precarious and where social politicking is their primary objective.
e.g. this post is only marginally about trying to change your understanding ('to educate') and is mostly to try to make myself look clever (~ feel better about myself) or to compose my own thoughts. The same can probably be said of the majority of posts here - if someone learns something along the way then that's a bonus.
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@chozang Need to know is one thing, but for fucks sake at least accept that there will be unforeseen costs involved and throw a few tens of millions into the "might need that" pile for each of the likely problem areas.
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@chozang said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@polygeekery said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
only 2-5% of the population make good developers
I think you are being optimistic by at least an order of magnitude.
Here's an exercise for someone more motivated than me: Estimate what percentage of the total population is developers, then multiply that by the percentage of good programmers. The result ought to be amusingly tiny.
TBH, I didn't have to do the first part. Multiplying by 0 always yields 0.
Eh, to kill the joke, it's a meaningless question. The percentage of good programmers depends completely on where on the spectrum you draw the line. At almost any point on the spectrum, there are programmers who are worse, and programmers who are better.
There are worse and better, but we're talking about "good". I draw the line for a good programmer at good software. There's not much of that out there. Sturgeon's Law, just with a tad higher percentage. 99% of software is pure shit.
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@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@chozang said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@polygeekery said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
only 2-5% of the population make good developers
I think you are being optimistic by at least an order of magnitude.
Here's an exercise for someone more motivated than me: Estimate what percentage of the total population is developers, then multiply that by the percentage of good programmers. The result ought to be amusingly tiny.
TBH, I didn't have to do the first part. Multiplying by 0 always yields 0.
Eh, to kill the joke, it's a meaningless question. The percentage of good programmers depends completely on where on the spectrum you draw the line. At almost any point on the spectrum, there are programmers who are worse, and programmers who are better.
There are worse and better, but we're talking about "good". I draw the line for a good programmer at good software. There's not much of that out there. Sturgeon's Law, just with a tad higher percentage. 99% of software is pure shit.
Sturgeon's Law applies recursively.