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Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners
waderoush writes "Plenty of technology companies serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to their employees, but Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy says that's a form of mind control designed to get people to to work late. To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner. Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers). Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit. And don't hire assholes. Why pay attention to Duffy's advice? Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left."
I'd agree with dinner, and maybe breakfast to an extent.
But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work.
If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner.
That's fine for regular employees, but assuming sys admins want to go home to their families is just silly.
http://xkcd.com/705/
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We have brogrammers where I work. Idiots, every one of them.
Some programmers like free dinners, and enjoy sleeping til noon and working til midnight, and don't mind the 12 hours because their best friends are at work.
Other programmers want to work 9-5 to drop kids off in the morning and get home to them at dinner.
Many programmers go through each of those stages in their carreers.
It's not an either/or question. Just make a workplace that accomodates both groups and keeps both happy.
"...that we shouldn't want things like identities, families, and lives. It is a joy for us to be interchangeable work-bots. Dissention must be expunged so that we can be assimilated. Obedience is happiness!"
"Agile" does nothing of the sort. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
...for having a CEO that actually cares about them.
I've been working as a software developer for the same company for 12. There are 6 other software developers who, apart from 1, arrived before me (1 arrived 1 month after me). Since then, 2 have come and gone. The first came from overseas and inevitably returned there and the second found himself detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure for something or other.
:).
3 of us are single childless males
Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Based on what I've seen and the places I've worked over the years, all of that is nowhere near as easy as it sounds.
It's common sense.
And there's nothing common at all about "common" sense. Duffy is a genius, so you'd expect him to show common sense even at his age (he's only 26).
What he seems to have stumbled upon too, is our industry's ridiculous Peter Pan myth, that youth and rudderless energy trumps experience and wisdom.
A lot of people start startups to flip them. The failure rate is exceedingly high. Conventional businesses that aim to grow organically are less sexy, still fail, but don't fail nearly as often as "startups". I would like to build a serious business once; I don't think I would like to start a "startup".
Isn't it a crucial part of Agile to tell others they are doing Agile wrong? :)
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left"
Just like the CIA.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Without RTFA, not sure if retention rate is the be-all-end-all. I can easily get a retention rate of 100%--hire all the incompetent idiots nobody else wants. They'll never leave my company, because they'd be out of a job. Voila!
Not saying this guy is doing it wrong; just saying that retention rate alone isn't that much of a useful indicator.
how many employees are there? just him?
FTA:
Rather, it's that people just like to stay: Dropcam has hired 30 workers to date, and it's never had to give a single going-away party.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That’s why there are no free dinners at Dropcam—around 6:00 pm the company
I am sorry, at WHAT time? Ever heard the song 9 to 5? 9 to 5! Dinner is at 6 o'clock. Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8. Kids will be in bed by that time. Dinner will be waiting in the oven.
A GOOD going home hour is 5... oh wait. that is rush hour, means you leave "early" and arrive home just as late. Do you know what would be even BETTER? A company with FLEXIBLE hours and a max 8 hours on the workfloor. Now THAT would be a social company. Even better if you can take a half day off to deal with plumbers and other stuff.
Nobody left in the last 4 years. Geez, I wonder why. An economy down the drain may have something to do with it.
Don't get me wrong, a company that doesn't expect unpaid overtime in exchange for a greasy cold pizza (especially if there is no pizza) everyday gets pretty old pretty fast. But closing the doors at 6 doesn't show much of an improvement. You are still putting in a long day, except now you don't get free dinner at the end of the day. What about those without a family for who a company dinner saves time not having to cook for themselves?
It is telling that the article calls him a wunderkind idealist and then fails to list any idealistic thing in the next few paragraphs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Obviously not hiring the right people then!
All the biggest innovators I have worked with in my current gig are married with kids. One has teenage kids.
Hiring kids and brogrammers, you end up with a shitload of very clever people (or 'clever', since many have intelligence, but lack knowledge and wisdom). And a mountain of garbage. What you're looking for is people who _aren't_ wet behind the ears, but who actually give a shit about what they do. If they hack Lisp in their spare time, but have a family, they stand a decent chance of being a good hire.
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
The one consistent thing about Agile: "you're doing it wrong". I have never seen a different answer to any complaint about Agile.
Apple would never exist
Table-ized A.I.
Young, single, childless males are the ones who will dedicate their evenings to making sure not only that things run properly, but that you are in the front of your field. Filling your department with family oriented people is just going to give you a whole bunch of people who will do what they must and anything they need to not to lose their job.
If you follow this advice, DO NOT EXPECT TO INNOVATE!
Because, we all know, young single people never act in ways that just favor their career. And never make mistakes from inexperience that an older programmer has learned how to avoid. And never decide to quit suddenly so they can backpack Honduras.
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
> Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers).
Let me guess which group represents the largest of new programmers out there?
Duffy is a genius, so you'd expect him to show common sense
I don't think the link between genius and common sense is as strong as you seem to think it is.
Though I may only be saying that because I definitely don't have any of one of those.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
30.
All agile does is to make the client more involved in the shorten development cycle, the work more accountable (as in changes and implementations are done earlier), and the team members better team players. Agile has nothing to do with workplace problems.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A young, single male is an automatic 'brogrammer' now?
sic transit gloria mundi
Some creative, innovative youngsters grow up to become creative, innovative parents with children.
That's because they cant get away. They are literally chained to their desks. They dont get free breakfast, lunch or dinner but they do get to spend time with their families. By spend time I mean they have visitation hours.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
"Common sense" is basically wisdom.
The exceptional people I've known can not only assimilate enormous amounts of knowledge in a short time, they can also pick up wisdom faster. Wisdom is definitely an edge when starting and running a business.
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The proverbial "brogrammer" is the only type of programmer your average valley C-level Dunning-Kruger sufferer can relate to.
ralphbarbagallo.com
A 'brogrammer' is a specific subset of young male programmers generally. Anybody using it as a synonym for 'young, probably unmarried, male programmer' is doing it wrong; but there is a recognizable population(unfortunately) that it fits pretty well.
And when the IRS clamps down on benefits in kind will you feel the same way.
Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left.
Not a surprise in this crap economy. How many have been fired? In the '80s I worked for a very small company with an extended 100% retention rate; nothing lasts forever.
Otherwise, I generally agree with the sentiment. As for "brogrammers," there's no evidence that young, single, childless males are better than other combinations and I'd argue that herd ("gaggle" -- "braggle"?) of them is a recipe for disaster. Varied experience and perspective are more helpful in the long run.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Meltdown. That's what happens...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Some of us are young, single, and childless (not necessarily male). It's a neat perk that keeps the cost of living down, and in the Bay Area those costs are already ludicrously expensive.
Besides, who wants to take advice from a four year old no name company just barely out of its diapers? Come back when you've been around at least a decade.
There's plenty of cheap (and good) food in the bay area - if you can afford the cost of Bay Area housing, dinners needn't be a major expense. I can pick up a decent meal (Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, etc) for $6 - $8 within a 10 minute walk from home or from the office. Though I usually end up cooking.
everyone they canned they freaking hated.
Slashdot is a .org.
once you take away the "works in silicon valley" and "startup." he says dont hire assholes but then goes on to tout "ethical fiber" as a hiring qualification. what even is that? You dont want a bunch of "single childless males" but what about childless women? as a gay male, is a heteronormative marriage a job requirement for me to work here? sure, people can be hit-or-miss socially but thats why you have harassment and discrimination courses, and adhere to them.
he says he wants a family friendly company that supports paternity and maternity leave but in california those arent things you decide to "do" for employees, theyre state law. saying you're "really diverse" just because you have married couples working for you fails on so many levels to understand what diversity in the workplace means. yes ive worked for startups that buy out bars and clubs for the night, but they also give out baseball and movie tickets too. my last startup work traded in the nightclub perk for a bowling alley because they listened to their employees instead of making vague generalizations about how family friendly or unfriendly the workplace perks needed to be.
he doesnt buy dinner for the company, which is fine. working weird hours in IT means you've alienated my entire shift by robbing me of a breakfast that for you is a dinner. not buying dinner doesnt inherently prevent people from working late. Making intelligent business decisions like purchasing new hardware based on my MTBF and MTTF calculations instead the cost avoidance of making me work 90 hour weeks failing over infrastructure will keep me from working late.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've never heard brogrammer used in this context without a negative connotation. EVERY time I've heard it used prior is in the context of sexist, discriminating work environments that tend to reinforce homogeneous work forces. I hope that term doesn't generically start referring to single, male programmers.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'm not sure the words "beef" and "dinner" were the best choice to use in the headline... :p
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
This is a pretty good little tangential comment thread. IANAPC (professional coder), but I'm quite familiar with professional methods with capitalized names that use the no true Scotsman fallacy to claim that every unsuccessful project was simply one that didn't correctly follow the method's instructions. On the other hand, any successful project was necessarily successful because of the Capitalized Method and the only way to quantify the value added by this method is to claim that the profit generated by the entire project is 100% due to the method's efficacy, of course.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
"single" and "unmarried" are not protected classes and so it is not illegal to discriminate against them. Smokers and fat people are also not protected classes at a federal level, though some states have made them so.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Who's the idiot who came up with "brogrammers"?
The sexist leaders of our oppressively matriarchal society. Ha ha, just kidding. It was probably some guy wearing a "Titty Inspector" t-shirt and backwards baseball cap.
Whats his position on Foosball ? No Foosball, no work, seriously.
1999 called, they want their overused dotcom-era fads back. (*) Seriously, at this point, a foosball table is probably a negative sign, the cliched, almost obligatory easy-choice symbol a company would choose if they wanted to make themselves appear a (superficially) fun and exciting place to gullible young programmers.
:-P
(*) Then again, the 1990s probably want their "[year] called, they want their [subject] back" cliche back, but they're not getting it
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I just stopped reading at that point, he basically belittled every young, single, childless male -- unless I misunderstood and the term "brogrammer" is somehow complimentary. If that's your basic premise then your whole argument is of no value buddy.
Also, random CEO of random start-up expresses own misguided opinion, everyone better take a knee and listen up.
"Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
But that's what agile really is. If you're really doing iterative development (getting to shippable every so often, not merely calling N weeks of coding "an iteration") then you're doing Agile.
Don't confuse "Agile" with products cooked up by Agile consulting companies in order to have something to sell, like scrum and eXtremeProgramming.
Agile is 4 ideas:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan
There's a bunch of buzzwordism and scams and generally bad news sold as Agile, and all the BS has (perhaps rightfully) given Agile a bad name, but those 4 ideas are good ones.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
An honest to god company that
a) doesn't trying to abuse it's workers,
b) hires normal people who are decent workers but also have lives outside the office
I don't need a camera. I just want to send them money.
I doubt Henry Ford gave his workers an equity stake in the company and the chance to make millions in a few years when he was doing this research that proved you can only get 40-50 productive hours/week from an employee. Probably paid them a nickel per hour extra as overtime.
There's more to it than that?
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
There are plenty of place that don't suck. I hope you work in one. There are plenty of places where no one needs to work more than 40 hours to meet commitments, and only the overachievers do.
There are plenty of places where the norm is for a coder to have his or her daily schedule dominated by whether he or she "picks up" or "drops off" the kids, not by meetings. There are plenty of places where keeping your skills current isn't some after-hours effort. Strangely enough, programming doesn't require heroic effort to ship on time if your basic engineering processes are smart to begin with - something that requires experience with many ways of doing things to get right.
A mature workforce is part of all of that. Look at any other engineering discipline, and you'll see careers from the early 20s to the early 60s, and a real career path for the second twenty years of engineering work. Software engineering is still maturing as a field, but we'll get there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As a veteran of TQM, ISO9000, XP, and fuck-knows-what in between, allow me to translate: All agile does is to make us jump more frantically whenever the client farts, get bitched out at for not having it fixed yesterday (as in fuck quality, just slap something together so you don't get reamed at the standup tomorrow morning), and the team members turn into their own slave drivers so that management doesn't have to take the heat for a Bataan Death March.
(You're right in that Agile has nothing to do with workplace problems. It's just another way of not fixing them while looking good on a resume.)
I'm not sure how you managed to read all that from that one sentence.
I read it as, "We don't want a bunch of inexperienced kids who don't necessarily know how to code, and don't understand anything about what real life is like."
I think this is a great sentiment, especially considering that in silicon valley is undergoing an epidemic of age-ism.
He didn't say anything about discriminating against anyone who doesn't fit some hetero-normative world view. He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty.
No mention if his company is making profits either. Easy to keep employees with high payroll based on venture capital debt.
You're ALL doing programming all wrong!! Just ask this guy.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Depending on the quantity of VC available, it could be profitable to rent ~20 cars and park them in your lot overnight.
Not one single bachelor works at The Firm. They encourage children because children promote stability. Also, nobody has ever left The Firm(alive that is).
Maybe "Dropcam" is just a front for some incredibly lucrative illegal business and the employees are blackmailed into staying?
I sort of doubt he'd be giving interviews and drawing publicity to himself if that were the case however.
for a WHOLE 4 YEARS!? amazing!
Did this guy just publicly admit to job discrimination? As in he won't hire single young childess male programmers?
To me, that makes sense.
The purpose of being "agile" is to be able to change things. If you have to complain and bitch on forums about things not working, then you obviously aren't getting feedback from those evolved and changing things to make them work.
A group of brogrammers heroically striving 60 hours a week is going to greatly underperform a balanced group working 40 hours a week with great engineering practices. Engineering practices aren't taught in school, they're learned through many years and the experience of many ways of doing things and how each worked out.
But maybe you're talking about "IT" not "programming"? Work that is IT but not programming is fading - automation always wins in the end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wrong question. The correct question is, "How many years of experience do you have?" If the answer is more than 10, the probability of the person being married with kids begins to climb fairly rapidly. You can, therefore, ensure a more balanced workforce by not hiring people straight out of college, or at least by setting hard limits on the number of junior coders that you hire.
Unfortunately many tech firms do precisely the opposite, setting low limits on the number of senior engineers that they hire (because of the high cost per employee) and filling the rest of the department with new college hires. In the long run, this tends to result in a large volume of poorly written code that has to be thrown away every few years and rewritten from scratch because they didn't have a senior architect working on it.
It also results in accusations of age discrimination, because most companies won't hire senior engineers as junior engineers, and the number of senior engineer positions is limited, effectively forcing a sizable percentage of people out of the market entirely, decades before they're ready to retire. If, instead, the industry hired more senior people and fewer young people, the number of people going into the field would decrease to match the available jobs, and you'd have a much healthier job market for everyone.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
If I hear about a startup that hasn't lost any employees then I just figure they're waiting for the IPO. While l like the description of the diverse group of employees and other aspects of the company, I think not mentioning compensation at all is a little disingenuous
If they're paying the people a reasonable wage and the checks don't bounce then employees tend to stay. Add in stock options and waiting for the big IPO, or as mentioned in the article a very big buyout, then you have people waiting for the big payday. The perks ( or lack thereof ) might have had an effect on employee retention thus far, but you shouldn't ignore the hope of substantial monetary compensation as an additional big motivator.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Of course it is, but self-fulfilling prophecies are the stock-in-trade of the investment community. Without them people might start to realize that the emperor is naked (or at least very scantily clad). For example, say the investment geniuses decide that companies will only succeed if they do more than half their work in India. Since investment geniuses are famed for their group think (oops, I mean great minds think alike) nobody will invest in a company that doesn't do that. Hence the geniuses are shown to be right. Isn't that a nice organized system? Without it you might have the chaos of different companies pursuing different strategies and seeing which worked best.
-Male: Sadly, sexism in the industry is pretty well established. No good reason for it. There ARE reasons, but none of them good.
Sexism is common in workplaces stuffed with mostly young male workers (or mostly young female workers). Hiring a more representative crowd tends to put a damper on "bro culture".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Garbage here too.
People with families are dedicated to writing quality code and testing their code to make sure it doesn't break in production and their family evenings aren't interrupted.
The Brogrammers are just interested in banging out as much code as possible, working evenings, and could give a shit about getting called on the weekend, since they're already working. And they're most likely working because they fixing some shit they broke because of a sloppy refactor they put in because they didn't think the old fart's code, that actually worked, was cool enough.
That's why 1 Sr. Guy, working 40 hrs/week is actually worth 2 brogrammers working 60+ hours per week.
Agile is 4 ideas ...
Congratulations, you've passed the Rorschach test! For bonus points, tell us what the "cloud" really is.
BTW, I not only like your ideas, I've followed them as much as possible since long before "Agile" was a buzzword. But while decrying buzzwordism, you've overlooked that "Agile" (capitalized? seriously?) is itself just a buzzword.
None of which have anything to do with a majority of agile I've seen
*Individuals.. blah blah blah
Yeah, I can't even tell you what this means. I doubt anyone else can either. Its marketing drivel that sounds moderately impressive, but has no real effect on how any company does anything.
*working software over documentation
Even when doing agile the absolute most effective companies I've seen have lots of documentation. Those that didn't either had 1 or 2 amazing developers who were the documentation (have a problem? Ask Gabe), or they failed miserably.
*Customer collaboration blah blah blah
Yeah- I've worked at multiple companies doing agile. Never talked to a customer. Wouldn't want to- we hire technical PMs for a reason. My company wouldn't want me to either- I'm too blunt and too honest.
*Responding to change
Everyone responds to change. And the general response by most agile places is the same as in non-agile- try to save room later in the schedule to meet the final release date you want for feature X. Because regardless of all the hand waving, there's still always a roadmap where you have features planned out for the next X quarters.
Here's what agile actually means in industry- that there's going to be some attempt at organizing work into X week batches. That's it. Do that, and they consider it agile.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"...we want people who understand that they are making a product for normal people, for their family and friends. So we often hire them because either they have their own kids..."
My understanding of federal anti-discrimination laws, is that this is illegal. Of course these laws were designed to protect women and Blacks, not beta males, so of course nothing will actually happen.
One has teenage kids.
A veritable fossil. Has he been preserved through taxidermy? The fact that "has teenage kids" is considered a mark of extreme age says something about this industry. Someday you may even meet an empty nester or someone whose divorced daughter has moved back in with his grandchild. Them little feet keep the old farts spry.
Sarcasm aside, I strongly agree with you. The best places I've worked have had employees from new grads to graybeards. There are pros and cons to different ages, and they make a good mix. But of course this factor is never considered when they talk about diversity in the workplace.
. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
At this point Agile has assume mythical qualities. Any time anything fails to work as promised by Agile, the implementation gets the blame, not Agile. They keep parroting the same thing. "if it does not work, you are doing agile wrong". You could postulate an imaginary waterfall organization, staffed with mythical programmers who do waterfall right. Then I could also say, "if it does not work, you are not doing waterfall right".
We have agile. We have agile tools. We have vendors selling agile management tools to our company making oodles of money. And you ask the agile tool vendor to implement something, suddenly it is going to take 18 months and two release cycles. They are agile, they sell agile tools, they should know how to do agile, and I ask for something simple like, "I want to be able to add/delete people to the notification list of user stories. There is no need to assume, there is going to be only one customer proxy or just one person monitoring progress. So when will I be able to add a notification field and add email ids to it?" 18 months and two releases.
The defect reports come from the field via Siebel database, and some script converts it to rally. In the process it fumbles the name of the submitter and the stupid script becomes the submitter. There is no lookup table to go from Siebel ticket number of Rally defect number or vice versa. Hey, vaunted rally tool vendor, when can you fix it? 18 months and two releases. This is already 18 months and two releases gone, and there is no solution in sight.
Rally is snake oil. It promises to deliver skycastles to addled top management which thinks building software is like toasting bread in Quiznos or building a car in the assembly line.
There are problems with waterfall. There is an entirely different set of problems with agile and rally. Agile is not going to make your process more efficient, or your software higher quality.
Now is your time to come in and say, "Rally is not agile" "You are doing agile wrong" completely ignoring the point there is no documented case of agile working better than waterfall given the same resources and goals.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
The very idea that a company is doomed to fail if a Vulture Capitalist doesn't buy them up makes me a saaaaaad panda :(
I guess this means that "The American Dream" has become truly incorporeal...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I hope that term doesn't generically start referring to single, male programmers.
Feeling discriminated against, are we? Fear not. I was once a young single white heterosexual male myself, but given a little time at least one of those things will change. Before you start getting too sensitive, note that the criticism is of places that only hire programmers in that category, not of all people in that category. However, if the bias against brogrammers gets bad enough, you can always file a discrimination suit (or dye your hair gray).
Precisely. I went from working heroic hours to 9-5 once we really were Agile. Most of those long hours in the past could be traced back to poor planning and management acquiescing to last minute customer requirement changes. Once you accept that you were doing Waterfall wrong and want to fix it, life can be much better.
HTFU
But you're the one reading into it.
At face value, the statement clearly implies that young, married, males with children are somehow more valuable. His argument talks about going home to rest, not how skilled they are.
Disclosure: I'm a straight, single, over 30 (old) male without children (or the desire to procreate).
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
silicon valley is undergoing an epidemic of age-ism
Do you think that it's worse than it used to be? And if so, why do you think that? I ask this out of curiosity more than skepticism.
If only I had mod points... Agile is another buzzword for management to hide behind and another way for them to pin their personal failures on the people who work for them. Hooray.
Corporate America sucks.
Agile has been around for quite some time now - certainly before the inanity of extreme programming and long before scrum. But giving something a buzzwordy name helps sell it to management. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are without management buy-In.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Slashdot: Its _dot_ _org!_
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Well, age *is* about the ONLY way you'll gain superiority in experience, which often is a trait that is highly desired, and hard to come by when still wet behind the ears so to speak.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
“We bring in breakfast and lunch because we think it makes people more productive if they don’t have to go wait in line at restaurants in SoMa, which are crowded. But we don’t bring in dinner. We don’t make people work late. It’s a way to keep people from getting burned out.”
Wow, are you people touchy! This is funny. I've heard fewer complaints at a lesbians of color left-handed veterans conference.
Yes. You also spew jargon that is specific to Agile but means things you didn't have a need for a word for before. Like "backlog", "sprint", and "scrum".
And oh yeah, now they're managing operations teams with Agile. Seriously?
I have to agree. The one thing I unconditionally disagree with Agile on is their attitude towards documentation. I agree that this may speed the process of coding... maybe... but it makes long term support a disaster. Code is not documentation, even well formatted and commented (which is infrequent to begin with). Some coders may be able to translate on the fly, but even then, it doesn't explain very well the requirements behind the code or the model being used.
In short, it is coders and architects surrendering to product owners who want their stuff "fast". And as such, I understand that they want features out the door fast to capitalize on trends or whatever, but if the code attains any sort of age, it becomes a nightmare.
If anything, documentation proves that the developer actually understands what they wrote, as opposed to merely looking for validation by it compiling and then seeing it do (mostly) was it is expected to do on the surface. It's great for new features quickly, but I've seen there is a tendency for much Agile-generated code to limp along until it is completely re-written later. Or as I'd call it, TP code, although ultimately I might hesitate to even wipe my ass with it.
That's one possibility. Another is that whatever is supposed to be The One True Agile (tm) requires certain pre-conditions that aren't always met.
I could say "don't blame the single-pass waterfall process - if it failed for you, then you're doing it wrong". In some (rare) cases, single-pass waterfall is exactly right - a single programmer implementing a rigid specification (for example writing an H.264 decoder). But that's a pre-condition. It won't always fail and it won't always work, just like "Agile" or any other "methodology".
The truth is that there's no silver bullet. Every set of guidelines also includes a set of conditions (implicit or explicit). For example, most software development processes assume that the programmers involved are not all back-stabbing psychos. But even that's not always the case. Blaming reality for the failure of a process is the wrong way around.
I assure you there was a time before "Agile" was a buzzword. Of course I also remember NMOS. You may be right about "management buy in" in some places. There are still a few endangered management iconoclasts who think that "good productive way to work" beats a buzzword any day, but you've got to work with what you've got. There are also a few dinosaurs like me who remember when working this way was common practice, but we didn't know it needed a buzzword. I also remember when resources were called people. Would you like to read my first hand account of the American Revolution?
P.S. Since you seem a little touchy on this, I'll remind you that this is a criticism of the buzzword mentality rather than your ideas.
So what happens now with last minute customer requirement changes? I'm really trying to understand this (and hopefully learn from this).
If you have to push them in anyway, then you're still working to crazy deadlines.
And if you don't have to push them in, couldn't you have said "no" before moving to Agile? How did moving to Agile change your relationship with the customer?
Generally if your starting your own buisness you need to work crazy hours to compete with established buisness the first few years. I don't see why the expectations for programmers would be different from a mom and pop store.
I'm just tired of programmers who think that a good idea is all you need, and don't see the value in wrapping good ideas in marketing manure, so that they can grow when planted in the empty skulls of middle management. (Me? Bitter?) The buzzword mentality isn't going away, so buzzword-compliant good ideas are worth holding on to.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
*Software is written by people...
Umm, no duh? Once again, is there anything that means anything in that sentence? At absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology- if it wasn't bad it wouldn't be too much.
*If you spend 6 months...
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code. On the other hand most agile projects fall way to hard on the other side- absolutely no documentation. Architecture doesn't appear- at least not good, clean, usable architecture. You have to think that stuff out beforehand. Its good to have the freedom to change it where it isn't meeting your needs, but spending large amounts of time constantly refactoring things because you didn't think things through up front is also wasteful. Part of the art of software engineering is figuring out where that line is.
*PMs are your customers.
No, not really. Not even close. My PMs represent a subset of my customers. Who aren't the same as my users. Listening to them is a good idea. Giving them what they want unfiltered is a bad one. And neither of them are necessarily the user, who also needs a seat at the table. But guess what- I don't interact with the PMs anymore at an agile company than at a non-agile one. The amount is relatively unchanged.
*Early delivery- has as many minuses as pluses. Ever work on software that had a meaningless deadline 3 months in and need to scramble to meet it? Iterative development gives you that fun ever couple of weeks. Plus you get to show the customer half finished software and get yelled at for it not working when you know you won't have it working for months. There's situations where this is actually worth the costs- heavily GUI software where the user really deeply cares about the look and feel of the UI, is paying by the hour so you have infinite time to tweak it, and doesn't have a lot of dependencies that take a long time. There's also situations where its a miserable failure- backend software where you need to do heavy calculations and heuristics for your result where the results will need to be massaged for weeks. Or anything where you're doing actual research, and not just development. A real project needs to weigh these factors and decide which set of problems is a better one to have.
Here's the problem- you, and a lot of other agilers, seem to think you've found something new and creative and preach it as a programming religion, and the solution to all problems. It isn't any of those things. The ideas have been around for decades. They're mostly being applied in the same way they always have. And some of the common practices are good for some types of situations. Some aren't. And those can switch up depending on the personalities of the team, the customer, the company, and the type of problem you're solving.
You throw out the baby with the bathwater with a lot of practices recommended by Scrum, XP, etc. Particularly the utter lack of documentation, design, and forward planning. And rather than listen when people try to give you feedback all you say is "you're not doing it right".
You want a real development methodology, I'll give you one. Think about what you're trying to do. Think about what the customer and user wants. Think about your team, their skills, and how they interact. Think about common practices and whether they fit those other things. Then choose the ones you think will work. Implement them. When something starts causing you problems, change something to fix it. In a reasonable timeframe, evaluate if that fixed it. Keep it or alter it based on that. Repeat.
The problem is that this doesn't follow a preset plan or a nice 4 bullet points manifesto. It requires people actually work at it. Its much easier to say "we're going to be Agile" then adopt a bunch of processes (and yes, daily scrums, automated unit tests, tdd, etc are all processes and may or may not be a good fit for you) and treat that as holy writ. Then when things change and
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Slashdot is now for angry older people in their 30s and 40s.
Who keeps moding this guy down? The comic relief is great! And no, I don't mean that as a joke.
It's important to use cool sounding terms in brogramming so that outsiders can know that, despite the pale complexion, that the development team is a bunch of strapping young bucks dismissing with the conventions of the establishment and putting in their all while drinking indecipherably named beverages wrought from free-trade organic coffee beans.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Did you warn them? You didn't?!
http://xkcd.com/875/
don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males
You can't hire and fire based on gender, age, marital status, or family status, it is discrimination. Hire qualified, experienced people.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Your severance package is a roll of stock options, and all the copper wiring you can tear out of the walls.
Dark Reflection
It also isn't clear that "retention rate" is an important metric, or even if it is a positive thing.
Nice insight. But also, he might just hire dipwads who can't find another job somewhere else. 100% retention!
The buzzword mentality isn't going away ...
Damn, buzzwords are the one resource I wouldn't mind a shortage of.
THe problem is that when you sell it based on strength of buzzword, you sell it to people looking for a buzzword. So they'll treat it like they do a buzzword- half understanding half not, so they implement the wrong parts in wrong ways. The end solution is just as bad, possibly even worse and you wasted a lot of time doing it. You do more harm than good.
You can't solve a management problem that way, not reliably and not for long. The solution is to replace the manager, or find a job with sane management- when enough people do that they'll figure it out. Or they'll fail, either way it isn't your problem.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology-
You've clearly never worked for/with people for whom "too much process" is meaningless. Hint: some people have process as their full-time job. The more process, the more job security and the better they get paid. Glad you've had it so good.
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code.
You never did, so no one did? Believe me, such places are real: I have worked in one. Glad you've had it so good.
My PMs represent a subset of my customers. Who aren't the same as my users. Listening to them is a good idea. Giving them what they want unfiltered is a bad one.
So you have bad PMs? That's not rare. But thinking you have better insight into users than a PM who spends half his life talking to users is also a mistake - or are your PMs so bad they don't even do that? In any case someone who's not a dev needs to be the customer-advocate and call bullshit on the occasional "only makes sense to an engineer" design element that leaks through", and someone needs to be able to officially accept or reject work as meeting requirements - ideally they're the same person (ideally they're actual customers), but of course you have to work with what you've got.
Ever work on software that had a meaningless deadline 3 months in and need to scramble to meet it? Iterative development gives you that fun ever couple of weeks.
Every software project I've ever been on that badly missed it's deadlines did so because integration blew up. Multiple teams each thought they understood the spec, and each had a reasonable, but different, understanding. Forcing everyone to get not only checked in, but working together, every few weeks is the only way I've ever seen teams of 100+ meet their dates.
Here's the problem- you, and a lot of other agilers, seem to think you've found something new and creative and preach it as a programming religion, and the solution to all problems. It isn't any of those things
I'm not an "Agiler" and I think none of those things. All these good ideas pre-date Agile. (Are you confusing the agile philosophy with goofy methodologies like XP and scrum?) Selling a good idea to middle management requires marketing, and agile is some good (and frankly obvious) ideas dressed up with a ton of marketing and buzzwords, so that it fits in the mindset of a "VP of Engineering" who likely never coded.
You throw out the baby with the bathwater with a lot of practices recommended by Scrum, XP, etc. Particularly the utter lack of documentation, design, and forward planning.
Scrum and XP are products invented by consultants so that they would have something to sell. They each have some good and some bad points. But where the fuck does the idea that agile means no design come from? Heck, I've taken stupid multi-day classes on scrum (more than one) and they ridiculed that idea. Of course no sane person would work that way. Agile means not designing stuff until you must for the code you need to work on next, as opposed to designing everything before coding anything, which is just as nuts as no design.
The heart of agile is "avoid work that you'll throw away because the requirements changed before you shipped it". Most of the rest is just expression of that aversion to throw-away work.
It's not that I hate Agile, I don't. I hate people who push agile as "the way". And I hate Agile when its put in a place where it doesn't fit
True enough - there will always be people who think software is created by process, and for them Agile is just the new process to slavishly follow. At least with agile, you have "too much process is bad" right there on the label, so you have less of an uphill battle.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, but it does no good to write design docs for code that never ships. Better to have both, of course - but if you only get one of code or docs? As code ages you also run into the problem that it's easier to refactor code than docs. While in a glorious utopia design docs would be kept up to date as the design changes over time - I've never seen that actually happen. So the valuable lifetime of good docs is short.
Anyone who writes no docs at all is just being an idiot, but it's really easy to find yourself doing throw-away work when writing docs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, my kingdom for modpoints. This.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
ROTFL!
As per my blog post a couple of years ago at http://use-cases.org/2011/06/04/getting-good-estimates/ and http://use-cases.org/2011/06/22/updates-on-getting-good-estimates/
Most good estimates have a range - and not a number, or a number with a confidence (both are interchangeable).
If an engineer says it will take two weeks - I push for a range or a confidence. If the range is weird (2-8 weeks), I push for the engineer to tighten their estimate through discussing or raising and discovering the unknowns or the risks that they are aware off. That sort of estimate would usually end up around 3-5 weeks which is a reasonable margin - and a lot better than than underestimating by 50%.
Same with estimates that are too narrow. "2 weeks +/- day". That implies a full level of understanding, no risk and no dependencies. Almost never happens. Work through the same risks/unknowns and the estimates usually become really bad - typically at least double of the "high confidence" estimate - similar to TFA.
The is lots of reasonably applicable theory behind this (confidence intervals, cone of uncertainty, etc).
Damn. Too many articles open... See in context http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/04/23/2021201/overconfidence-why-you-suck-at-making-development-time-estimates :).
http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html :
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) contains a number of prohibitions, known as prohibited personnel practices, which are designed to promote overall fairness in federal personnel actions. 5 U.S.C. 2302. The CSRA ... It also provides that certain personnel actions can not be based on attributes or conduct that do not adversely affect employee performance, such as marital status and political affiliation.
...
Note: Many states and municipalities also have enacted protections against discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation, status as a parent, marital status and political affiliation. For information, please contact the EEOC District Office nearest you.
It's just the Hotel California, you can check-in, but you can never leave!
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
What reality do you live in? I'd really like to move there if that's true, because it sure isn't in mine...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
We write much of our documentation while the software is being developed--it's descriptive, not prescriptive. Works for us. Much better than waterfall.
The difference is that saying "no" can mean the client gets it in 3 to 4 weeks (if it is really important enough to push out other work), instead of getting it in 2 years. 2 years isn't an exageration, I've worked on a project that the turn around time for a new requirement was 2+ years from conception to release to production. If you know you'll have to wait 2 years if it doesn't get in NOW, you'll fight tooth and nail.
Ah, nice to see the rampant ageism in the industry hasn't gone anywhere.
I'd agree with dinner, and maybe breakfast to an extent. But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work. If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
Agreed. But dropcam does a lot of things that you expect in other areas ... like "maternity and paternity leave and all of the things that used to be things that only big, mature companies did."
Sure, it might be required everywhere outside the USA, but that's a common sense program that really helps an employee get back to being productive, quickly.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
"At this point Agile has assume mythical qualities. Any time anything fails to work as promised by Agile, the implementation gets the blame, not Agile."
I do not agree with you at all. My point was that there are good and bad environments all over the place. You can't blame the particular things GP complained about on Agile, because they simply don't have anything to do with Agile.
Please explain to me where it is written that Agile methodologies have anything to do with any of these things:
Your identity, your family life, your life, being a work-bot, dissention, obedience.
I have seen bad office environments and I have seen good office environments. And those things can be bad anywhere, for any kind of work methodology.
I have also worked in bad "Agile" shops. And I worked in one very GOOD Agile shop. The difference is night and day. The first one was kind of like GP describes. The other was like the difference between night and day. I'd work in a place like that again any day.
But, the important part is: they were all "Agile" shops. Those things GP complained about had nothing to do with the Agile methodology at all. Some workplaces were good, some were bad. The bad ones had bad management. Period.
Didn't mean to repeat myself in that 5th paragraph. Wasn't paying enough attention to my editing.
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left..."
...the CEO said as he glared ominously at the interviewer then laughed manically. "No one."
If you need to work more than 40 hours a week to meet your commitments, that's definitely not over-achievement. You're taking 80 hours to do 40 hours of work.
We write much of our documentation while the software is being developed--it's descriptive, not prescriptive. Works for us. Much better than waterfall.
I write a lot of MY documentation BEFORE the software is coded. Basically, I was doing Literate Programming before Knuth named it. I also wised up to Agile before it was a Big Deal when I realized that every time I delivered something to users, they said "That's great! Now I can do this! Oh wait, now I see that it would be even better it could do that!"
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept (speaking of silver bullets that didn't Solve Everything) included a librarian as part of the team.
Of course that was back before the days when the Chief Programmer was also supposed to be the Network Administrator and DBA.
Oh, my kingdom for modpoints. This.
Modded down for "This."
Just kidding. I think.
the cliched, almost obligatory easy-choice symbol a company would choose if they wanted to make themselves appear a (superficially) fun and exciting place to gullible young programmers.
Hmmm... We obviously work in the same company....
bickerdyke
I'm guessing you don't live in Europe. The foosball table at a Paris client of mine is a *necessity*, as is the espresso machine.
By the way, they call it "babyfoot". Isn't that adorable?
Tom Geller
Let's hope they are not all frozen in the basement.. ;)
http://www.hawknest.com/
he was probably just ego-wanking all over you to make you realise what an important big man he was.
only big, already successful companies can afford to own or rent their own parking lots. startups rent office space and most of their employees rely on street parking or nearby commercial parking (or public transport, bicycles, or living withing walking distance of work etc).
The startup might rent a few parking spots for the founders or maybe top employees...but they certainly won't be in an easily identifiable Startup Inc Parking Lot that you can do a drive-by eyeball at 9pm, they'll be a few reserved spots in a nearby car park.
now go wash that VC spoof off your face. and stop lapping it up.
"Flamebait"???
Come on, modders, you can do better than that. Read my comment again. I didn't insult anybody.
Um... except the idiot who came up with "brogrammers".
How is at-work entertainment a fad? At Netscape, we had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and arcade machines. It builds camaraderie and is a great way to blow off some stress when you need to clear your mind for ten minutes.
Seriously, I just don't get what's with the Slashdot crowd, half the time. It's like they just want to hate what they do for a living so much and hate their work environment so much that when the opportunity to enjoy both comes along, they have to attack it with one ridiculous mentality or another.
The next best thing to loving what you do for a living is at least loving the environment you do it in. By some of the comments, here, you'd think everyone wanted to work in a coal mine and have people whipping them.
I'm fortunately child-free and I enjoy working. I'm in no rush to not be working and even if I weren't paid to do what I do for a living, I would probably be doing some form of it on the side, for free. I always enjoyed having a cafeteria with several restaurants in it open for at least two meals a day (and good food, too -- made by a variety of professional chefs). I've always enjoyed the free drinks and coffee. The free donuts, muffins, bagels, and fruit. The on-site star-bucks (with ice-cream parlor). The recreational activities. Bringing the dogs to work. Having a concierge to help with arranging, planning, or finding things around town. The high quality vending machines. The giant beanbags and comfortable community seating and open-areas.
All of these things contribute to a positive and friendly atmosphere for the place you spend more than a third of your life at. Just because some people might be in a rush to get home to park themselves in front of the television all night with a house full of noisy kids doesn't mean everyone is and creating a great work environment doesn't mean that people who don't want to be there more than they have to be can't just go home and do whatever it is they're itching to go do.
Besides, I've gotten far more value out of such amenities and environments over my career than I ever got from countless stock options (even restricted options). :D
That's the difference between an anecdote and a statistic. More than 80% of people are married by age 40, statistically, versus (currently) only 21% of people under 30. Assuming you enter the job market at age 22, this means that the statistical probability of someone being married increases very rapidly beginning in the mid-20s or early 30s.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left...
... alive.
No what Agile means is "we're too lazy to develop specifications before development and we're too lazy to document the behavior when we make a release because we're already working on the next sprint".
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
http://programming-motherfucker.com/
The idea of "brogrammers" was a successful attempt to hoax the tech press. Dice being a little slower than the rest, they haven't caught on that it's a hoax yet, and also they don't get the reference ("brogrammers" are programmers who otherwise act like "bros" -- they write code, pump iron, and chug Red Bull. Yes, they're young, single, and male, but that's only part of it).
I suppose there may be a few cases of life imitating hoax (as with the 5-blade razor) but it isn't any less a hoax.
Yes, we need to leveragize the forwardly of the resourcerons.
Give it five years, you'll see it. Even better, /. didn't mind the spelling of the middle term. Ouch.
It's happening sooner than I thought, but it's the only maxful way to methoderate ownerage through synergation.
"Blaming reality for the failure of a process is the wrong way around."
Chisel that into stone. Except for those bits of reality that we collectively build.
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
And even the people on slashdot with unproductive, trivial, meaningless lives don't care.
It's more insidious than that. It's not management that pins the failure on the grunts. It's the grunts themselves who pin the failure on each other.
In the one Agile conversion I worked at, I saw teams of convival developers end up going at each other's throats. *I* can't do *my* stupid little kanban card because *you* are busy doing *your* stupid little kanban card. In theory, you have the daily standup so that everyone gets the dependencies ironed out for the day.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Kanban - it's just that we used to call it a defect tracking system, and we used computers to track it, and to generate reports that we could grep through for interesting keywords, rather than covering cubicle walls with paper index cards. Got nothing better to do? Pick a bug that looks like you might be able to solve it in the time you have available, with the longterm goal of reducing the number of open bugs.
In practice, it turned into "Hey, doofus, why the fuck didn't you solve $INTRACTABLE last night, I needed it solved by this morning!" / "Because $OTHERGUY didn't solve his $TRIVIAL yesterday!" etc. etc. etc.
"He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty."
But why? It's not like there's any evidence that demonstrates these people as being generally worse employees. It's just mindless stereotyping.
I'm sure we all have personal anecdotes of such people being useless, but I know that I at least have just as many anecdotes of married individuals knocking off early "for the kids" and leaving a job half done whilst the single guy is left to finish off the job and clean up the outstanding mess, or simply not giving a shit generally because said person is just after an easy ride to retirement at that point in their life and not bothered about doing a good job to maximise career potential.
You get bad workers in all demographics, stereotyping full stop is stupid and I agree with the GP, the guy in TFA is an idiot for doing so. If the best candidates about all happen to be "brogrammers" (whatever the fuck that even means) then so be it. Don't write them off if they're the best candidates just because this idiot has some kind of ageist bias against younger candidates himself.
I once worked on a place with such "mind control" (I would have put it as "emotional blackmail"). Oooh, free food! Oooh, videogames to play after lunch -there is a one hour mandated break, although most people will be done by 15-30 minutes-! Ooooh, free pizza&beer every Friday! Oooh, lots of parties on weekends! Yeah, well, I got fired because of the mortal sin of going home at about 7-7:30pm despite having been told that I had very good technical capabilities, so I wouldn't say it was a good job.
I'll take owning my time over such "perks" any day, and I wish there were more CEOs like this guy.
I work, I go home when I've done my 8 hours, I get paid. Simple. Why is this so difficult to grasp?
Well that's probably because it's true.
Agile is such a varied and broad list of principles which you can pick and choose from that it's flexible enough that you shouldn't really have any problems from it.
Effectively, if you take waterfall and apply some of the most simple agile principles, like the idea of regular client engagement to ensure that what you understood from the original spec, and what the client understood from it (because everything is always open to interpretation, no matter how hard you hammer down the initial spec) match correctly and that the end project will be what is expected then you've still improved waterfall. If something isn't working there then it's not really the fault of agile, agile wont magically fix a failing team, but it can certainly improve processes.
I agree there are a lot of advocates of specific well defined agile methods like SCRUM that will moan and bitch at you if you don't do anything to the letter, and I agree that in the agile community that there are lots of petty pointless arguments of what "to the letter" even is.
But fundamentally I've never once seen a scenario where waterfall couldn't be improved by at least some of the ideas that are encompassed in the agile ideology - even if it's just allowing your developers to timebox if they work better that way, or to have retrospectives every now and then to figure out what went wrong, why, and how it can be avoided in future.
Agile works best when you pick and choose elements that best suit your environment and in fact, if you choose to move towards SCRUM I found this better in general, moving one idea at a time, than moving directly from waterfall to full on SCRUM or whatever.
As a counter to your "you're doing it wrong" jibe I've similarly found that the only thing consistent about people who complain about agile is that they've doing it wrong, largely because they haven't learnt enough about it, haven't spent the effort figuring out how it fits in for their work patterns, and haven't bothered to explain it to their team properly and make sure their team gets it. It works both ways. It's a bit like taking a team of Java programmers and then telling them from tomorrow everything will have to be done in assembly - it's not a change you can make overnight, some developers are going to struggle with the transition and changes, and your entire tool chain is going to have to change and so forth. A lot of people who have tried and failed simply don't get that and blame agile, rather than their poorly researched understanding and poor planning for the changes. If you really want to do the move then nothing beats some professional training from a genuinely good trainer, but many just try to hack it in with no planning based on nothing more than a few shitty articles they've read on the internet. The other common reason for complaints I've seen have been from development leads who have misfunctioning teams that keep failing and/or doing a bad job and expect agile to be a magic fix, then blame it when it isn't, and when in reality they needed to solve the inherent problems with their team, be that lack of cohesion, incompetence, demotivation, or whatever.
It's not that I'm some agile fanboy or something, where I work now we're still primarily waterfall oriented and haven't made the move and I don't really have a problem with it, but I've done some decent agile training, have worked places where it does work, have worked places where a hash up was made of it, and have successfully transitioned teams to it. I also understand that as in my current place of work, it's a large initial time and cost investment to move over to it successfully precisely because you do have to do it right and that right now, we just don't have the free time for that level of investment and have a strong enough team of only senior developers and up that the current status quo is working okay despite the flaws in the methodology which we're experienced enough to work around (often by using elements of agile informally
How is at-work entertainment a fad? At Netscape, we had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and arcade machines. It builds camaraderie and is a great way to blow off some stress when you need to clear your mind for ten minutes.
Go back and read what I said. I didn't say "at work" entertainment was a fad.
:-)
It was *specifically* (and clearly) a criticism of the overuse of foosball as the lazy man/company's superficial choice of showing what a "fun" place they were to work at (i.e. it wasn't even really a criticism of foosball in itself).
It's become a cliche since the dotcom era (which, I assume, is the time you worked at Netscape.) Yeah, we get it- the fortysomething guy in charge wanted to make this a "cooler" place to work, so he got his secretary to buy a foosball machine and paint the walls in bright, funky (*) colours. Bingo, we're cool- end of story. Also, I hear that "Friends" is popular with young people!
Is foosball really *that* blooming great?!
(*) To paraphrase Alexei Sayle, anyone who uses the word "funky" that isn't in the music industry is a right ****!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 protects federal civilian employees onlyâ€"not private sector workers. When I wrote "at a federal level" I meant federal law applying to private employees, not federal law applying only to federal employees.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
If companies didn't hire brogrammers and fire anyone over 35-50, as they do, then half of Silicon Valley companies would go bankrupt tomorrow. Their entire business model is dependent on H1Bs living five to an apt. and having nothing to do but work.
Oh and about the assholes. The assholes are already there from the top of management on down. Assholes inevitably hire assholes because they unconsciously recognize each other (assholes are a generalization of narcissists, who like themselves a lot) and because there's nothing an asshole has more contempt for than someone showing obvious signs of having a, you know, conscience.
So what you end up with in all these companies is a two tiered caste system of brogrammers and their asshole overseers. Brogrammers are disposable, assholes are inviolate and the whole thing is run on the model of a pirate ship.
And these are the blue chip NASDAQ companies we're talking about. (been there, done that) Beneath that level , the startups it's likely to be the same dynamic but maybe the asshole tier is populated by a runaway-H1B or three.
American business's go-to model is always exploitation of anyone stupid enough to send in their application, ingenuousness in its dealings with its partners and customers and tax evasion to the limit of the law and beyond.
It's the American mindset and it has been around at least since the days of the building of the railroads.
In Germany and Scandinavia and other more, you know, evolved nations it's very different . There's just not the default assumption that the only / best way to get ahead is through exploitation and as much criminality as you think you can get away with or will still be profitable once you're caught.
There they''re more concerned with building quality products and letting the consumer make their choices.
This is what capitalism is supposed to be about, but the US regulatory structure is deliberately kept too weak to enforce anything like what's needed for a a "free market" to flourish for labor or services or anything else.
It's one of the ironies that people can't get past. A strongly regulated environment is the freest. Employees who work fewer hours and have meaningful time for things like vacations, families and maintaining an interest in the broader culture in which they live are just more productive.
Americans are just not that smart. It really sort of comes down to that basic fact. And I say this as an American.
Many start up restaurants do exactly this.
No one wants to eat at an empty looking restaurant.
I hope that term doesn't generically start referring to single, male programmers.
Fear not. I was once a young single white heterosexual male myself, but given a little time at least one of those things will change.
So...sex change, or pigment augmentation? Or just started hanging around in the right nightclubs, maybe? ;o)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Well you are doing it wrong. In my experience (I worked in one of the top 3 video game companies in the world) it worked like it claims to do. A different team member was the scrum master every week, assured that the daily meetings were short and concise. We had our iteration planning done properly and our death mortem meetings at the end of each iteration to discuss improvements and fails. Once your team gets into the groove, your team velocity is calculable and improvable...maybe you guys were just lazy?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
This is sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
Are not some young, single, childless males being responsible by planning their careers and family life?
Why do I keep seeing the notion that agile speeds up coding? That is simply not true! All it does is releases certain features sooner so the client can approve of them instead of releasing everything at the end and having an "oh shit, he changed his mind" moment when it's too late. As for the documentation aspect, we had several tasks in our iterations to document code, use cases, etc. The team lead or project manager usually took care of obtaining the specs from the clients and writing the documentation for it.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Sorry, how does their future life relate?
Sorry, wrong thread.
Once again- a prime example of the problem with agile. Believes that it solves every problem, and his first reaction, rather than asking for details an analyzing, is to say "you're doing it wrong".
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It doesn't solve every problem but it can darn well replace the old waterfall development practice which is/was used for pretty much every project. If agile works for making AAAA games as well as a wide variety of projects involved in game development, HR systems, IT, finance, etc...why wouldn't it work for your projects?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Yes, I do understand that. And I will concede the point as soon as you can demonstrate that there is a systemic alienation of young people for tech jobs.
I do think it's worse, but not in and of itself. It's a symptom of an increasing amount of general (legal) abuse that corporations are perpetuating on their employees, and society in general.
I don't want to repeat, but here's a comment I just wrote in reply to someone else:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3677925&cid=43546149