"Simple ex. You're working with Joe on a year long project, Joe says he's going to do parts D, F, G, & X as his duties, he creates the UI and says he'll add functionality later, 1 month to finish, you find that parts D, F, G, & X don't work with the rest of the system & the project fails. In a workplace, a manager would see that Joe isn't doing what he's supposed to, remotely, not so easy."
What? No source control to check what's been submitted and by whom?
As I pointed out yesterday in another thread, EA have scrapped Dead Space 4 because DS3 sold poorly.
The reason it sold poorly was because of microtransactions, I'd like to think this means microtransactions aren't going to sneak more prominently into games too now as a result, but I'm not sure it works like that. EA's scrapping of Dead Space 4 seems to imply that they don't think microtransactions were the problem, and that it was the franchise that was at fault, which is silly, because that's blatantly false, it was entirely the effect microtransactions had on the game that stopped people buying it.
So yes it's nice to see bad ideas fail, but don't assume that companies necessarily recognise that the games failed because of the bad ideas.
That's not to say this wont select out such stupid companies in the long run, but we're nowhere near yet.
Microsoft has been paying millions to lobby EU staff and politicians to attack Google over non-issues, that's far worse than Google pointing out to the EU that Microsoft was in breach of it's obligations as a result of the investigation against them.
I assume the nearly a billion dollars thing comes from the exchange rate as I believe the figure you quote is euros no?
Exactly, and that's precisely why home working isn't the problem that Yahoo has - inept management with no clue about what there staff are and aren't doing is.
Because TFA talks about stupid stuff like the CEO herself looking at VPN logs, which is not a valid metric on which to make a rational decision on this. Hence the irrational decision.
I agree with this, I'm not really suggesting that permanent work from home is a good idea, but I think eliminating work from home altogether is a worse idea.
In development specifically, I tend to find that you want to minimise working from home to a large extent at the start of a project - you need everyone together until you've got it clear what the scope of the system is, who will be doing what, how everything is going to be done, but as a project goes on you could probably get away with 3 days a week working from home. It does depend partly on your team of course too, if you're a lead developer with a bunch of juniors then you owe it to them to be around if they need help. If you're in a team of senior/lead devs it's a different story again.
But eliminating from work from home completely risks losing talent- it limits you to potential recruits that are willing to live within a daily commuting distance, and if you want talent you really don't want to be limiting the talent pool available to you - you want to do what you can to get it.
I'm not sure if it's the same elsewhere, but here in the UK it's amazing how many of the higher paying contracts on offer allow heavy amounts of home working - I think this is a recognition by a lot of companies offering such contracts that when you're paying for the best, you can simply trust them to get on with their job and working from home.
As I say, it's all very circumstancial, but there's not a chance in hell that a company like Yahoo has absolutely no jobs that would benefit from allowing home working. There's no doubt that scrapping it altogether rather than simply offering it smartly to employees who can use it responsibly and for the best employees whom they'd never be able to get to work for them at all otherwise is going to be to their detriment.
"Are you saying that most people not connecting to VPN are being super productive, "heads down"? Or just that some of them could be?"
I'm saying if you have a competent recruitment process you will be.
I've worked in public sector where home working was a joke, people would openly joke about how they worked a 4 day week (5 day week, 1 day working from home) only in practice they really weren't joking.
I've also worked in private sector companies with liberal work from home policies of differing levels of employee competence. What I know is that the companies I've worked in with the most competent people I've ever worked with have certainly never had to worry about people working from home.
It really hinges on recruitment - if you recruit poorly then yes, people will take the piss with working from home, but here's the thing, they'll take the piss anyway - they'll take sick days as days off when they're fine, they'll make excuses about having to leave early to pick up the kids, they'll spend the day browsing the internet, or chatting around the water cooler. The core problem isn't the working from home, it's the employees you hire.
Therein lies the problem for them, if people are slacking off at home, they're not going to suddenly not be slackers when they get to work. But those who worked from home and genuinely weren't slackers are going to be punished for nothing, the company is going to lose them or their productivity is going to go down. All in all, that's a net loss for the company.
What they should've done before anything else is started getting an accurate measure about how much work people are actually doing from home, the fact they can't even measure that in their current state is a major problem and they're literally just clutching at straws in a desperate attempt now to try anything.
Probably not. Even if literally the entire population of North Korea fled to China leaving Kim Jong Un sat on his potty crying for a diaper all by himself that'd be less than a 1.9% population increase, or roughly the same increase China saw naturally in the 2 years between 2009 and 2012, or the US saw in the 6 years between 2006 and 2012.
Of course, it's different when that kind of migration happens overnight, but when you consider that nowhere near all of them will actually flee, that many will flee to Japan, South Korea etc. instead, that many of them will probably die en-route or of starvation (which would be tragic, but likely) given that they're on the brink of that anyway, and that the Chinese would hold many more off at the border, then I think it would have a fairly negligible impact in practice quite frankly.
"But China's come of age, is a major world power. They're finding N. Korea's crap annoying lately."
I like the idea of China's leaders putting it to Kim Jong Un exactly like this in a text message or something. Like a pair of teenage lovers that grew up together and grew apart.
"Dear Kim, we're finding your crap annoying lately. Grow up."
If you have to connect to VPN say three times a day because it was flaky does that mean you triple turned up for work and are super-productive using the Mayer productivity measurement methodology?
Yes, basically what TFA tells us is not that working from home was ever a problem at Yahoo, but that Yahoo has never ever had any way of measuring productivity, settings goals, or ensuring people are achieving their targets.
It sounds like it was basically a free for all, turn up, don't turn up, do what you want, no one will care or measure you!
It sounds like working from home is their scapegoat instead of refusing to admit to extremely incompetent management.
Yahoo has been haemorrhaging talent for years, removing perks from them like working from home is only going to make the problem worse, especially if they're still refusing to admit to fundamental problems in their company like the aforementioned lack of ability to set goals or check whether anyone is actually doing anything.
Now all that's going to happen is they'll lose more talent, productivity will probably go down as people are tired from long probably sometimes unnecessary commutes, costs will go up as they have to pay for more heating/lighting/office space and Yahoo will continue it's downward spiral
I actually had some sympathy for the move before I saw this story, now it's obvious the decision had no demonstrable merit. More fool them.
News the other day is that EA just cancelled Deadspace 4 because of dissapointing sales of Deadspace 3.
Rather than clue into the fact Deadspace 3 sold poorly because usual customers like me precisely didn't buy it because of the whole microtransactions thing and then continue to develop Deadspace 4 like Deadspace 1 and 2 were - without microtransactions, they just assume it's the game that's the problem and ditch it.
They're literally unable to realise that they're wrong about DRM and microtransactions, they think games with them fail because the games or developers are bad, not because they, the publisher, have forced the developers to implement stupid stuff that ruins the games.
I would've preordered and paid full price for Deadspace 3 on release as I liked the first two, but they killed any chance of that with microtransactions.
"Never seen such a spoiled brat in business in all my life. Its like he just assumes he has created the best product in the world and then anybody that doesn't think so needs to be sued out of existence."
Yes, except in the cases where he has sued (even in this one where the case was thrown out) it's still cold hard fact that the people he sued were outright lying.
It's one thing honestly reviewing a bad product as bad, but when you have to lie and invent faults for a product then yes, you deserve to be sued. Fault something for what it genuinely deserves to be faulted for or give it a good review, don't outright make stuff up and lie because you're either too lame to find fault, or there simply aren't any/many.
If you have to lie in a "review" you're not a reviewer, your a propaganda artist.
So if you have vested interests (the fossil fuel industry) paying a fortune to defame you it's okay, but if you dare ever spend a penny to counter that you're "nasty"?
There is no generic one size fits all project management methodology so you can't simply term it "best practice".
Some projects/teams/companies really aren't best suited as being run in an agile manner, whereas others are. It's a known quantity how long it takes for a building company to build a specific type of house they've built before so there's literally no benefit to doing this sort of house building project in an agile manner, and it would in fact be largely detrimental.
Agile works best with projects where there is a high degree of change and/or unknowns. When you're evolving software that's not been done before, and where client requirements have a high chance of regular change it becomes a far more suitable way of managing software projects.
That's why it has a name - because it's not some generic best practice thing, but a set of ideas. To phrase it in another way, it's like asking why Object Oriented Programming has a name - because it's not always the best option, and because you have to differentiate it from other options - Functional Programming, Declarative Programming, whatever else. Although it's far and away the most common paradigm there is still scope for others when it makes sense so we still need to retain different names.
Believe it or not, civilised countries (i.e. not America) they don't send a god damned SWAT team to kick your door down just because you didn't pay income taxes. In fact, in most civilised nations they'll do little more than send you letters to start with, only sending the police round (non-armed here in the UK) if you don't adhere to court rulings against you if made in absentia because you also didn't bother to turn up to court of your own accord.
Sure, I agree with you for the most part. There are those of us who see Agile as what it is though - a group of ideas and methodologies that allow for a more dynamic running of projects.
In which case for people like me, it's much nicer to see it call what it is. Sure you'd have some idiot claim it's not Agile because it's not SCRUM or whatever because they simply don't know what Agile is, but on the flip side it's not helpful to then give in to this stupid ignorance and pretend Valve isn't doing Agile.
We have a similar problem with the whole "responsive" web design thing, we have this new generation of devs spewing the term left and right when they're referring to use of resolution/density adaptive features of CSS3 and such, except responsive web design historically meant make sure the site was responsive to user input by using client side scripting (Javascript). Because people just roll over and let the amateurs who think they know better but that are completely ignorant of the history of such terms in computing it's now ambiguous in it's meaning.
But if you feel really concerned just say we use a "customised Agile process" or whatever. What I take issue with is the summary seems to be raving about this new thing Valve is doing as if they invented it and no one had ever thought of it before, obviously it's not true, and calling it what it is helps others look up what it is and learn more about it and how they can potentially use it for their team if it's of use. The countless comments in this discussion alone of the binary "it would work for us" or "it wont work for us" mindset shows that there's enough people who realise this is just an implementation of a family of ideas that they could adapt so that it would help them work better without having to go the full Valve route or bust.
Sure, in that case it sounds like it was a more fundamental issue - but people making threats etc. should've been referred to HR, again, you don't need a manager to do this.
It sounds like judging by the scale of issues you're talking about the manager you're referring to is a CEO, and yes, I agree you do need someone at the top.
What I don't agree with though is that your team should need an immediate manager that manages just your team and I think that's where the confusion is here. Those saying they don't need managing are those saying they're competent enough to not need immediate management. What you seem to be implying though is a company needs a competent CEO to stop a company turning into the chaotic car crash that you described, and that's true too.
For what it's worth though, in some practices such as SCRUM, the person who acts as a mediator doesn't necessarily have to be a manager, they just need to be someone who keeps all that drama away from the devs, someone who is granted authority to mediate, which is different from being granted authority to control. I agree again though that this wont work if your company has hired so many inept staff in the first place as to create the clusterfuck you describe.
"Sure, humans have always been eager to eradicate competing/dangerous animals. But in doing so, they would come upon puppies now and then. And surely, some humans would find them cute. Then as now!"
IIRC finding certain species cute is in itself an evolved trait that is quite possibly linked to this though - i.e. those humans who found puppies cute adopted them, trained them, and became more successful than those humans who didn't, hence passing the trait on. In other words there wasn't necessarily always a widespread appreciation for puppies.
I'd be weary when reading too much into the idea that we always inherently found puppies cute, as much as anything that seems likely as something that was perhaps a "defect" in certain humans such that some early humans got the same feeling from puppies (and dogs in general) as they did naturally from human babies, and this in itself snowballed into something common in nearly all humans - as research shows this is the case now.
When trying to judge evolutionary paths and reasons for things, you must be careful not to apply modern thoughts, feelings, and understanding to such issues, as they themselves are often inherited traits. I recall reading also that disproportionate fear of creatures such as snakes and arachnids amongst many humans is a similar trait that evolved for good reason for example.
That's why passenger pidgeon flocks so large they take hours to pass and dark out the sky as they do so are still a pain in North America and Canada when all you want to do is sunbathe.
Slashdot Mirror
"Simple ex. You're working with Joe on a year long project, Joe says he's going to do parts D, F, G, & X as his duties, he creates the UI and says he'll add functionality later, 1 month to finish, you find that parts D, F, G, & X don't work with the rest of the system & the project fails. In a workplace, a manager would see that Joe isn't doing what he's supposed to, remotely, not so easy."
What? No source control to check what's been submitted and by whom?
No wonder your theoretical company is doomed.
As I pointed out yesterday in another thread, EA have scrapped Dead Space 4 because DS3 sold poorly.
The reason it sold poorly was because of microtransactions, I'd like to think this means microtransactions aren't going to sneak more prominently into games too now as a result, but I'm not sure it works like that. EA's scrapping of Dead Space 4 seems to imply that they don't think microtransactions were the problem, and that it was the franchise that was at fault, which is silly, because that's blatantly false, it was entirely the effect microtransactions had on the game that stopped people buying it.
So yes it's nice to see bad ideas fail, but don't assume that companies necessarily recognise that the games failed because of the bad ideas.
That's not to say this wont select out such stupid companies in the long run, but we're nowhere near yet.
That and so what if Google did tip them off?
Microsoft has been paying millions to lobby EU staff and politicians to attack Google over non-issues, that's far worse than Google pointing out to the EU that Microsoft was in breach of it's obligations as a result of the investigation against them.
I assume the nearly a billion dollars thing comes from the exchange rate as I believe the figure you quote is euros no?
Exactly, and that's precisely why home working isn't the problem that Yahoo has - inept management with no clue about what there staff are and aren't doing is.
Because TFA talks about stupid stuff like the CEO herself looking at VPN logs, which is not a valid metric on which to make a rational decision on this. Hence the irrational decision.
I agree with this, I'm not really suggesting that permanent work from home is a good idea, but I think eliminating work from home altogether is a worse idea.
In development specifically, I tend to find that you want to minimise working from home to a large extent at the start of a project - you need everyone together until you've got it clear what the scope of the system is, who will be doing what, how everything is going to be done, but as a project goes on you could probably get away with 3 days a week working from home. It does depend partly on your team of course too, if you're a lead developer with a bunch of juniors then you owe it to them to be around if they need help. If you're in a team of senior/lead devs it's a different story again.
But eliminating from work from home completely risks losing talent- it limits you to potential recruits that are willing to live within a daily commuting distance, and if you want talent you really don't want to be limiting the talent pool available to you - you want to do what you can to get it.
I'm not sure if it's the same elsewhere, but here in the UK it's amazing how many of the higher paying contracts on offer allow heavy amounts of home working - I think this is a recognition by a lot of companies offering such contracts that when you're paying for the best, you can simply trust them to get on with their job and working from home.
As I say, it's all very circumstancial, but there's not a chance in hell that a company like Yahoo has absolutely no jobs that would benefit from allowing home working. There's no doubt that scrapping it altogether rather than simply offering it smartly to employees who can use it responsibly and for the best employees whom they'd never be able to get to work for them at all otherwise is going to be to their detriment.
Even if that means driving away what little remaining talent you have left?
"Are you saying that most people not connecting to VPN are being super productive, "heads down"? Or just that some of them could be?"
I'm saying if you have a competent recruitment process you will be.
I've worked in public sector where home working was a joke, people would openly joke about how they worked a 4 day week (5 day week, 1 day working from home) only in practice they really weren't joking.
I've also worked in private sector companies with liberal work from home policies of differing levels of employee competence. What I know is that the companies I've worked in with the most competent people I've ever worked with have certainly never had to worry about people working from home.
It really hinges on recruitment - if you recruit poorly then yes, people will take the piss with working from home, but here's the thing, they'll take the piss anyway - they'll take sick days as days off when they're fine, they'll make excuses about having to leave early to pick up the kids, they'll spend the day browsing the internet, or chatting around the water cooler. The core problem isn't the working from home, it's the employees you hire.
Therein lies the problem for them, if people are slacking off at home, they're not going to suddenly not be slackers when they get to work. But those who worked from home and genuinely weren't slackers are going to be punished for nothing, the company is going to lose them or their productivity is going to go down. All in all, that's a net loss for the company.
What they should've done before anything else is started getting an accurate measure about how much work people are actually doing from home, the fact they can't even measure that in their current state is a major problem and they're literally just clutching at straws in a desperate attempt now to try anything.
Yes, that you're busy working on something that doesn't need connection to Yahoo's central systems probably.
That or Yahoo's hiring process is so flawed they ended up employing society's layabouts and nothing else.
Probably not. Even if literally the entire population of North Korea fled to China leaving Kim Jong Un sat on his potty crying for a diaper all by himself that'd be less than a 1.9% population increase, or roughly the same increase China saw naturally in the 2 years between 2009 and 2012, or the US saw in the 6 years between 2006 and 2012.
Of course, it's different when that kind of migration happens overnight, but when you consider that nowhere near all of them will actually flee, that many will flee to Japan, South Korea etc. instead, that many of them will probably die en-route or of starvation (which would be tragic, but likely) given that they're on the brink of that anyway, and that the Chinese would hold many more off at the border, then I think it would have a fairly negligible impact in practice quite frankly.
"But China's come of age, is a major world power. They're finding N. Korea's crap annoying lately."
I like the idea of China's leaders putting it to Kim Jong Un exactly like this in a text message or something. Like a pair of teenage lovers that grew up together and grew apart.
"Dear Kim, we're finding your crap annoying lately. Grow up."
If you have to connect to VPN say three times a day because it was flaky does that mean you triple turned up for work and are super-productive using the Mayer productivity measurement methodology?
Yes, basically what TFA tells us is not that working from home was ever a problem at Yahoo, but that Yahoo has never ever had any way of measuring productivity, settings goals, or ensuring people are achieving their targets.
It sounds like it was basically a free for all, turn up, don't turn up, do what you want, no one will care or measure you!
It sounds like working from home is their scapegoat instead of refusing to admit to extremely incompetent management.
Yahoo has been haemorrhaging talent for years, removing perks from them like working from home is only going to make the problem worse, especially if they're still refusing to admit to fundamental problems in their company like the aforementioned lack of ability to set goals or check whether anyone is actually doing anything.
Now all that's going to happen is they'll lose more talent, productivity will probably go down as people are tired from long probably sometimes unnecessary commutes, costs will go up as they have to pay for more heating/lighting/office space and Yahoo will continue it's downward spiral
I actually had some sympathy for the move before I saw this story, now it's obvious the decision had no demonstrable merit. More fool them.
I wish that were true.
News the other day is that EA just cancelled Deadspace 4 because of dissapointing sales of Deadspace 3.
Rather than clue into the fact Deadspace 3 sold poorly because usual customers like me precisely didn't buy it because of the whole microtransactions thing and then continue to develop Deadspace 4 like Deadspace 1 and 2 were - without microtransactions, they just assume it's the game that's the problem and ditch it.
They're literally unable to realise that they're wrong about DRM and microtransactions, they think games with them fail because the games or developers are bad, not because they, the publisher, have forced the developers to implement stupid stuff that ruins the games.
I would've preordered and paid full price for Deadspace 3 on release as I liked the first two, but they killed any chance of that with microtransactions.
"Never seen such a spoiled brat in business in all my life. Its like he just assumes he has created the best product in the world and then anybody that doesn't think so needs to be sued out of existence."
Yes, except in the cases where he has sued (even in this one where the case was thrown out) it's still cold hard fact that the people he sued were outright lying.
It's one thing honestly reviewing a bad product as bad, but when you have to lie and invent faults for a product then yes, you deserve to be sued. Fault something for what it genuinely deserves to be faulted for or give it a good review, don't outright make stuff up and lie because you're either too lame to find fault, or there simply aren't any/many.
If you have to lie in a "review" you're not a reviewer, your a propaganda artist.
So if you have vested interests (the fossil fuel industry) paying a fortune to defame you it's okay, but if you dare ever spend a penny to counter that you're "nasty"?
Seriously?
That's why Steve Jobs was such a dismal failure at turning a profit, because of his $1 salary and refusal to take stock options and bonus.
Oh wait, never mind, he was arguably the most successful businessman in the last decade.
If you think wage defines talent, you're as stupid as they come.
There is no generic one size fits all project management methodology so you can't simply term it "best practice".
Some projects/teams/companies really aren't best suited as being run in an agile manner, whereas others are. It's a known quantity how long it takes for a building company to build a specific type of house they've built before so there's literally no benefit to doing this sort of house building project in an agile manner, and it would in fact be largely detrimental.
Agile works best with projects where there is a high degree of change and/or unknowns. When you're evolving software that's not been done before, and where client requirements have a high chance of regular change it becomes a far more suitable way of managing software projects.
That's why it has a name - because it's not some generic best practice thing, but a set of ideas. To phrase it in another way, it's like asking why Object Oriented Programming has a name - because it's not always the best option, and because you have to differentiate it from other options - Functional Programming, Declarative Programming, whatever else. Although it's far and away the most common paradigm there is still scope for others when it makes sense so we still need to retain different names.
Believe it or not, civilised countries (i.e. not America) they don't send a god damned SWAT team to kick your door down just because you didn't pay income taxes. In fact, in most civilised nations they'll do little more than send you letters to start with, only sending the police round (non-armed here in the UK) if you don't adhere to court rulings against you if made in absentia because you also didn't bother to turn up to court of your own accord.
"I'm not so sure that applies to the rest of the world."
Of course it does, they just need to dig a bit deeper that's all.
(Hint for the humour impaired: Read the above as sarcasm)
Sure, I agree with you for the most part. There are those of us who see Agile as what it is though - a group of ideas and methodologies that allow for a more dynamic running of projects.
In which case for people like me, it's much nicer to see it call what it is. Sure you'd have some idiot claim it's not Agile because it's not SCRUM or whatever because they simply don't know what Agile is, but on the flip side it's not helpful to then give in to this stupid ignorance and pretend Valve isn't doing Agile.
We have a similar problem with the whole "responsive" web design thing, we have this new generation of devs spewing the term left and right when they're referring to use of resolution/density adaptive features of CSS3 and such, except responsive web design historically meant make sure the site was responsive to user input by using client side scripting (Javascript). Because people just roll over and let the amateurs who think they know better but that are completely ignorant of the history of such terms in computing it's now ambiguous in it's meaning.
But if you feel really concerned just say we use a "customised Agile process" or whatever. What I take issue with is the summary seems to be raving about this new thing Valve is doing as if they invented it and no one had ever thought of it before, obviously it's not true, and calling it what it is helps others look up what it is and learn more about it and how they can potentially use it for their team if it's of use. The countless comments in this discussion alone of the binary "it would work for us" or "it wont work for us" mindset shows that there's enough people who realise this is just an implementation of a family of ideas that they could adapt so that it would help them work better without having to go the full Valve route or bust.
Sure, in that case it sounds like it was a more fundamental issue - but people making threats etc. should've been referred to HR, again, you don't need a manager to do this.
It sounds like judging by the scale of issues you're talking about the manager you're referring to is a CEO, and yes, I agree you do need someone at the top.
What I don't agree with though is that your team should need an immediate manager that manages just your team and I think that's where the confusion is here. Those saying they don't need managing are those saying they're competent enough to not need immediate management. What you seem to be implying though is a company needs a competent CEO to stop a company turning into the chaotic car crash that you described, and that's true too.
For what it's worth though, in some practices such as SCRUM, the person who acts as a mediator doesn't necessarily have to be a manager, they just need to be someone who keeps all that drama away from the devs, someone who is granted authority to mediate, which is different from being granted authority to control. I agree again though that this wont work if your company has hired so many inept staff in the first place as to create the clusterfuck you describe.
"Sure, humans have always been eager to eradicate competing/dangerous animals. But in doing so, they would come upon puppies now and then. And surely, some humans would find them cute. Then as now!"
IIRC finding certain species cute is in itself an evolved trait that is quite possibly linked to this though - i.e. those humans who found puppies cute adopted them, trained them, and became more successful than those humans who didn't, hence passing the trait on. In other words there wasn't necessarily always a widespread appreciation for puppies.
I'd be weary when reading too much into the idea that we always inherently found puppies cute, as much as anything that seems likely as something that was perhaps a "defect" in certain humans such that some early humans got the same feeling from puppies (and dogs in general) as they did naturally from human babies, and this in itself snowballed into something common in nearly all humans - as research shows this is the case now.
When trying to judge evolutionary paths and reasons for things, you must be careful not to apply modern thoughts, feelings, and understanding to such issues, as they themselves are often inherited traits. I recall reading also that disproportionate fear of creatures such as snakes and arachnids amongst many humans is a similar trait that evolved for good reason for example.
That's why passenger pidgeon flocks so large they take hours to pass and dark out the sky as they do so are still a pain in North America and Canada when all you want to do is sunbathe.
Wait no, fat lot of good numbers did them.
Yes, this is the basic premise of Agile.
Basically the story here is that Valve has adopted Agile, just that no one has called it what it is yet.