space_comrade [he/him]

I worked in a large company where they used scrum and I just don’t see where it ever helped me. Sure I guess forcing you to write down in Jira or whatever all the features/bugs you worked and will work on is good practice but I can do that without scrum too.

Daily standups were annoying and rarely ever helped people resolve issues that wouldn’t have been resolved by just talking to some people directly, which you would have done anyway regardless of the standup meeting.

Sprint plannings were useless and amounted to either taking 3-4 things off the top of the backlog or the manager forcing their priority feature in the sprint.

Story point estimation was awful, everybody pretends the points aren’t just measures of time but rather this complex abstract of multiple factors and whatnot but everybody still just converts them to time in their head anyway because of fucking course they do because the time estimate is the most important thing to know and the only truly objective measure of task difficulty.

In the end management gets what it wanted when it wanted no matter our complaints because that’s how things work in privately owned companies. Scrum for the manager at worst just becomes another bureaucratic hoop they need to jump through to get what they want.

This is also the experience of my colleagues from other companies, and also I read a lot of similar anecdotes online. I have literally never heard anybody seriously claim scrum works great in their company that also wasn’t personally invested in the ideology like a “professional” scrum master or consultant or whatever.

What’s the difference between that and just receiving orders from managers, like every other office worker in any company ever?

I don’t read such books because they’re almost always written by “consultant” grifters trying to make money off of proselytizing the latest bullshit corporate fad. And it’s almost never based on actual data or a coherent theory, just gut feelings and a few anecdotes. My own felt experience and that of my colleagues is enough to confirm that it’s all just corporate ideology bullshit.

They are empowered to work autonomously, which is a big difference.

That means nothing to me. Just platitudes. I’ve never felt “empowered to work autonomously” in scrum.

I don’t think you can truly change anything with these methodologies. At the end of the day most companies are still privately owned companies, and you as a developer will do what the owners and/or the managers tell you to do. The owners aren’t going to delegate important decisions to developers unless it’s a really technical thing. The part where “developers take control” in scrum is bullshit and always will be by necessity of how our economic system works.

I feel like Scrum and similar stuff just serves to obfuscate real material relations in the company that aren’t going to change no matter how many story points you assign to this or that or how many scrum masters you have. Also it makes micromanagement easier I guess.

It’s just difficult to start using it when the corporate culture isn’t able to adapt and change it’s structures, that’s the hard part.

Yeah but that’s almost every company ever. At what point do you blame the methodology then if it doesn’t work properly almost anywhere?

I feel like scrum and agile in general are almost religions at this point, just blind belief in a system you haven’t really seen work properly ever but you still believe in it.

Death to all golf courses. Except minigolf, that’s fun.

I’ve used it a few years ago, it might have gotten better but when I was trying to use it it was annoying as fuck, cross-application links that you would expect to open the browser or whatever other app just didn’t seem to work right and that was kind of a big deal for me since I use Slack a lot.

Also I’d imagine your disk usage would go through the roof with it.

I just don’t see the point in it tbh, what was wrong with Linux package management as it is?

but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Somehow we always seem to be starting with US geopolitical enemies, never the US itself, despite literal centuries of heinous crimes.

Curious how that works.

In principle I agree but considering the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel are participating in all competitions without any sanctions I don’t see why we should be making a special case for Russia.

I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.

I’m really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I’ll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don’t have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.

I’ve been using all of the major OSs and they’re all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don’t think it’s as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.

I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I’d prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it’s not the worst thing.

Damn you’re such a pathetic little baby lmao, you should have disengaged like 20 comments ago.

I’ve had pretty much the opposite experience. My friend has a macbook that he drops all the time and still works.

Also it’s not like other brands are immune to denting, it’s just kind of the nature of the material.

Kinda agree on the keyboard but I got used to it and also most brands have that type of keyboards nowadays anyway.

ThinkPads are far superior than MacBooks for longevity

Not sure that’s true. I have a pretty top-of-the-line ThinkPad (3 years old) and it started falling apart after like a year of regular use. Maybe years ago that was true but nowadays I feel like everybody except maybe Apple has crap build quality.

Ah you’re right, completely forgot about those. They were absolutely dreadful to use.

I’m on a relatively well known private tracker. It’s just a kind of a tradition of some release groups to do this. I think it goes back to the times where this shit was shared through unstable FTP servers where you needed to restart the download of a file if the connection broke so they .rar it and split it into a dozen or so chunks. Nowadays it’s almost certainly unnecessary but they still do it.

I’m seeing it less and less thankfully.

Not so sure about that tbh, I’ve found my decompression speed is often slower than my download speed.

It’s super annoying when they pack movie/show torrents in .rar, just a complete waste of time.

I’m here for it, it’s already a complete shitshow, might as well go all the way.

Oh that’s definitely going to lead to some hilarious situations but I don’t think we’re gonna see a complete breakdown of the whole IT sector. There’s no way companies/institutions that do really mission critical work (kernels, firmware, automotive/aerospace software, certain kinds of banking/finance software etc.) will let AI write that code any time soon. The rest of the stuff isn’t really that important and isn’t that big of a deal it if breaks for a few hours/days because the AI spazzed out.

Ah ok I guess I misread that. My point is that by itself it’s not gonna help you write either better or shittier code than you already do.