Oh god.... SAFe is the opposite of agile, and PI planning is for people who don't understand the truth in "plans are useless, planning is essential." It's days and days of planning whose value depends on everything happening exactly as planned. And then, every quarter, reality diverges from the plans, meaning 90% of the PI planning was useless, and people insist on hours of meetings about how to do PI differently so that next time planning will match reality. Rinse and repeat.
And people use the failure of PI planning as an excuse for everything being stressful and chaotic. SAFe is the methodology of choice if you want your organization to work smoothly for the first few weeks of a planning increment and then become progressively more dysfunctional as people freak out and/or give up because it no longer makes sense to do exactly what the plan says. Exactly the opposite of agile.
Damn, that is expensive. 100 ppl x 8hrs x 4d x $150/hr = $480000. A half-million dollars to plan the next 3 months… and that’s assuming those were relatively low-paid people ($100/hr x 50% overhead costs).
SAFe is completely insane. I feel sorry for you. I actually left my previous employer because they adopted SAFe and it essentially made working there as a developer impossible. I wrote some of my thoughts here on HN the week after I had resigned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351881
Looking back now, the brutal destruction of our self-organized team had a negative effect on my mental wellbeing, and I have been happy with the decision that I left (eventhough it was painful leaving so many long-time colleagues behind.) These days I do similar work as a contractor for a different company.
BTW in that thread I predicted that the company would abandon SAFe within two years. My old colleagues have told me that by the end of 2021, the actual software development teams were "relieved" of the SAFe process, and apparently went back to their normal more or less self-organized working methods as before. SAFe is now only apparently a tool that the middle managers use to plan their high-level work (LOL).
SAFe lasted about 1.5 years total with the company going "all-in" and investing big time in trainings etc. Probably they would have abandoned SAFe altogether by now but in the "transition" they hired a good roster of SAFe specialists, so I guess they have to keep at least some form of SAFe process going on to not hurt anyone's feelings / lose face on the investment (although the specific C-level whose initiative SAFe was "moved on" already before.) Lots of the SAFe "specialists" have also moved on - most of them back to selling the same snake oil as management consultants to other firms.
Christ what is PI planning? We're doing something "OKR" meeting related which I have neither the interest nor time to look up the un-abbreviation. Luckily one can Zoom with sound and video off at least...
At a FAANG company, my manager once made me sit in a 3 hour meeting on a Sunday to plan for projects that weren't even going to start for another 6 months.
Lol. Sony? Nowhere else on my CV has come close for "the work of work" taking all my time, and only incidentally writing a line of code in between plannings and meetings and SAFe rituals.
I always ask interviewer to see if they use SAFe or not. If they use SAFe, they just don't get it and it means that wrong people are making important decisions in the org.
I used to do a lot of incident response type stuff and I just got tired of everything being on fire 200mph gogogogo all the time. It was already pretty fast-paced and then new management rolled in and decided to 2x the metrics just to do it, and I wasn't the only one with big changes on their linkedin recently.
I realized that everyone and their mother is hiring and decided to scoot off.
Oh, and before [the ordeal] I was doing a lot of travel consulting. If it weren't for [the ordeal] I probably would have quit a lot earlier because the work-life balance was just abysmal.
Yup that's what happened to me at my last job. The stress and lack of sleep it caused me just wasn't worth it and it showed no signs of ever getting better. When I put in my notice they insisted that all these problems were going to disappear any day now but luckily I've been doing this long enough to know better.
To this day I still don’t understand how some businesses expect devs to troubleshoot in production in the middle of the night, and fix underlying issues the morning after.
100%, happened recently to me. IR role with a SaaS vendor-focused IT strategy is pure chaos right now. Every incident of note came from these companies, and the best you can do is proactive safeguards and hope their IR team will call.
Enterprise security is perma-employment, but at a high sanity cost and uses a sense of urgency not really warranted as because if it's always bad, it's not actually bad.
I knew enough coding and comp sci to scoot off into product security and have never been happier.
I complete a ticket, now I've got to spend a day writing another ticket about how it's supposed to be deployed so any regular jack off can deploy it. Then I've got to find a "champion" (aka. a middle manager) to "champion" the ticket I wrote about the ticket. Then I have to notify several Slack channels about it, wait a bit in case someone makes a stink, then finally press "deploy" in Jenkins.
It's a Modern Stack™ – cookie cutter, untestable locally, horde of Golang services on Kubernetes pulling and pushing to various cloud services. Of course, it's ad-tech and for a company that seems to be the media equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.
I've been, for the last two years, asking my teams business leadership to open up remote hiring and start championing higher salaries for my team mates. My team works on internal infrastructure and we build tools and capabilities that are unlike many/most teams at my company, every one of which are on the critical path. One of the baseline requirements of this team is that engineers pick up four different working languages for our products (which are software development kits, CLIs, and some backends).
I have now lost all of the original engineers I joined the team with (minus one who was promoted), my team of five has shrunk to two (twice), and management has been riding "people only use us for counter offers" (which can't be true because we're several orders of magnitude under our peer groups in competitive offers - ask me how I know). I'm now trying to interview, handle incidents, develop features, and release patches with the help of one other engineer.
Please, for the love of god, take me out back and fire me like Old Yeller.
It's not a bad idea to give free meetings and charge extra for normal hours.
It also allows you to give free intro and consultations, subsidized by existing clients.
Architects and lawyers (even a few doctors) frequently do this and it makes for a smooth way of onboarding new customers - I'm glad I'm not paying just for some basic info and I don't mind paying a bit more once I get the service.
I am relatively high up in the eng org for a medium-sized company that has a fair amount of natural churn in our userbase. The past 2 years or so, our revenue has been declining and at first it was hand-waved away as COVID-related, but now people are starting to try to figure out why.
The reason is blindingly obvious - our new user input has dropped to multi-year lows and churn has stayed constant. For some reason, people are convinced it is something else, and we've had endless meetings about it. I am constantly being asked to pull up more and more contorted reports to answer people's pet theories about what is going on, none of which make sense, but we spend forever on them.
Eventually if you torture enough data, you'll find something, I guess. But it feels odd to overlook the things that are well-supported by data and make intuitive sense as well. It is like going into the ER and complaining that you feel lightheaded and when they notice your left arm has been severed and blood is spurting out, they rush to treat it, but you instead say "I had a lot of bread this morning, maybe I'm sensitive to gluten.. Can we test that first?"
We do not have basic operational metrics around things like signup conversion and whenever I've tried to draw attention to those, it devolves into trying to create a dashboard with thousands of mostly useless metrics instead. The last time I tried to get everyone to focus on collecting a few operational metrics at first, I got shouted down and told we didn't want to limit anything upfront, and I have sort of checked out of those meetings ever since.
No raises/bonuses this year and everyone was forced back to the office. I'm torn between being more and more worried about losing people and being worried about them being left in a tough spot here as things get worse.
I'm not sure what my boss does. He could be a deep-fake AI Zoom bot, only existing for our weekly 1:1 calls and I don't think anything would be different.
Also the principal engineer on my team insists on well optimized solutions for new features when I just don't think it will matter. And it would take the same amount of time to implement later as it does now, except we'd have more understanding of the problem then.
> He could be a deep-fake AI Zoom bot, only existing for our weekly 1:1 calls and I don't think anything would be different.
Sorry dude I got really into my animation side project and just wanted to see if I could pick up one of these extra wfh 9-5 salaries the WSJ keeps saying are out there. Things spiraled.
Agree. Creating very optimized features is rarely achievable in an agile way. It will take so long before the user can see any value, and maybe they won’t like it in the end
Haven’t been able to do work all day because policy dictates that we must do all work on a VM that we RDP into. Thing is, remote computers sometimes go down, and today, all of our VMs are down. I’ve tried bringing up the issue but everyone seems to either not care/want me to fix it myself by knocking on the right doors and pushing the issue to leadership. But I don’t want to do all that, I’m a developer, and I just want my work environment to work for me, not against me. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sigh. Should’ve got out early, but I liked the pay and flexibility. It’s not worth it though.
My problems aren’t extreme as yours but for the last couple weeks, we’ve been having niggling, and almost nonstop environment issues. It’s hard to get anything done or commit code when things beyond my control keep breaking :(
Took > a month off after being burned out by a previous corp. It did wonders for my mental health and gave me time to learn a lot of fun stuff.
I already had a new job lined up, but I highly recommend saving up a bit of cash reserves to do this.
During this time I also moved to a new state, signed up for sailing classes and read several technical books. Way better than sitting in useless meetings and not growing (again, if you can afford it, do it)
Colleague got laid off a month ago, but I'm still here. He has 3 months off over the summer before looking for work again. I haven't had a break more than 10 days since college, I'm super jealous.
Companies are usually okay with people taking unpaid leave. Tell your manager "I'd like to take a 3 month unpaid sabbatical to do $fun, would July - Sep work okay?"
I was burned out on start ups and wanted to join a larger company that had more support and a work life balance. I effectively joined a start-up within a larger company and have worked insane hours trying to help push out their V1 product with one other engineer. I pushed back on the hours and subsequently have been screamed at by HR for refusing to regularly start at 6am and work 70 hour weeks - they attempted to make me quit so they wouldn't have to pay me severance (I declined - said if they weren't satisfied with me they can fire me). Now that the V1 is out things /have/ gotten better work-wise, but almost in a completely opposite way where now we have to deal with compliance and I need approval from the technical manager just to sneeze. I know upper-management doesn't like me because I was a squeaky wheel (I even championed the other engineer on the team to threaten to quit to get a raise) and it's just a weird situation. I'm definitely not getting any kind of raise from this company and they for sure don't care about my growth (or any of their employees really). I've been trying to make it at least a year (coming close) before looking elsewhere for my resume's sake but it's been hell at times and I feel like I've been at this company for 2+ years. Even with the recent slow-down in hours, I would love to get fired, take a couple months off, and deal with some personal health issues while studying for the next gig.
Consider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.
I'm working in a dysfunctional team for several months now, every one wants to solve problems his way. Waiting for my contract to finish to hit the door. Bought a farm lately where I spend my free time and money. This brings me back to sanity every week-end. Nature heals, you just need to visit her often.
Just started a new job. Last place had people without technical or domain knowledge trying to lead a project that really needed both of those. New place seems much better.
Also the new place only wants me on site when there's a specific need, not 'just because'. I hear from a former colleague that they interviewed for my replacement, offered the job to someone and he turned them down because he's not interested in being on site just because either.
About four years ago I started pushing for MFA for everyone. Two years ago we finally got approved to enable it for all staff. Last year we got approval for all students.
Now the CEO wants us to remove MFA because students are quitting over this (although everyone else I talk to hasn't heard a single student quit from it). I have to find legislation that requires MFA or he will ask to remove it.
I’d quit tomorrow if my company offered a decent severance package. I’m super burned out and with attrition and hiring freezes, I’m stuck with double the workload. I wake up in the middle of the night stressing and full of anxiety about going to work. I despise going to work on Mondays due to the slog of meetings all day long. Writing software used to be fun and I’d do it after hours as a hobby. Now, I can’t stand the thought and just hope I can get 3-5 more years in the industry before I bail out for good.
Just a small tip for Mondays. I stopped going to the gym on Mondays and essentially got rid of any miserable activities for the evening, clearing it up.
I still dread Mondays, just a little less because I know after work I can just relax and cook a nice meal.
Me. Just want a good severance package. Already been planning for it and going to hopefully get them to convert. I know what buttons to push.
Just start calling management out in larger meetings. ;) Making it clear that people don’t know what they’re doing tends to really send you out on the “not a team player” track.
[+] [-] danielovichdk|3 years ago|reply
What the fuck is going on in the world of software delivery.
100 people has to spend 4 days planing 3 months ahead based on headlines from the business.
I have in my 22 years of professional experience never ever tried anything so shocking.
Fire me. Please
[+] [-] dkarl|3 years ago|reply
And people use the failure of PI planning as an excuse for everything being stressful and chaotic. SAFe is the methodology of choice if you want your organization to work smoothly for the first few weeks of a planning increment and then become progressively more dysfunctional as people freak out and/or give up because it no longer makes sense to do exactly what the plan says. Exactly the opposite of agile.
[+] [-] moistly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vesinisa|3 years ago|reply
Looking back now, the brutal destruction of our self-organized team had a negative effect on my mental wellbeing, and I have been happy with the decision that I left (eventhough it was painful leaving so many long-time colleagues behind.) These days I do similar work as a contractor for a different company.
BTW in that thread I predicted that the company would abandon SAFe within two years. My old colleagues have told me that by the end of 2021, the actual software development teams were "relieved" of the SAFe process, and apparently went back to their normal more or less self-organized working methods as before. SAFe is now only apparently a tool that the middle managers use to plan their high-level work (LOL).
SAFe lasted about 1.5 years total with the company going "all-in" and investing big time in trainings etc. Probably they would have abandoned SAFe altogether by now but in the "transition" they hired a good roster of SAFe specialists, so I guess they have to keep at least some form of SAFe process going on to not hurt anyone's feelings / lose face on the investment (although the specific C-level whose initiative SAFe was "moved on" already before.) Lots of the SAFe "specialists" have also moved on - most of them back to selling the same snake oil as management consultants to other firms.
[+] [-] rglullis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmakunbound|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiyer|3 years ago|reply
I quit soon after.
[+] [-] junga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RealityVoid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schmookeeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stunt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aunlead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blindmute|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|3 years ago|reply
I realized that everyone and their mother is hiring and decided to scoot off.
Oh, and before [the ordeal] I was doing a lot of travel consulting. If it weren't for [the ordeal] I probably would have quit a lot earlier because the work-life balance was just abysmal.
[+] [-] ryanmcbride|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|3 years ago|reply
To this day I still don’t understand how some businesses expect devs to troubleshoot in production in the middle of the night, and fix underlying issues the morning after.
[+] [-] dogman144|3 years ago|reply
Enterprise security is perma-employment, but at a high sanity cost and uses a sense of urgency not really warranted as because if it's always bad, it's not actually bad.
I knew enough coding and comp sci to scoot off into product security and have never been happier.
[+] [-] barefeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TT-392|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmakunbound|3 years ago|reply
It's a Modern Stack™ – cookie cutter, untestable locally, horde of Golang services on Kubernetes pulling and pushing to various cloud services. Of course, it's ad-tech and for a company that seems to be the media equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.
[+] [-] 1-more|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
I have now lost all of the original engineers I joined the team with (minus one who was promoted), my team of five has shrunk to two (twice), and management has been riding "people only use us for counter offers" (which can't be true because we're several orders of magnitude under our peer groups in competitive offers - ask me how I know). I'm now trying to interview, handle incidents, develop features, and release patches with the help of one other engineer.
Please, for the love of god, take me out back and fire me like Old Yeller.
[+] [-] pragmatic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cehrlich|3 years ago|reply
Obviously it’s up to me to fire these clients, but still…
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|3 years ago|reply
It also allows you to give free intro and consultations, subsidized by existing clients.
Architects and lawyers (even a few doctors) frequently do this and it makes for a smooth way of onboarding new customers - I'm glad I'm not paying just for some basic info and I don't mind paying a bit more once I get the service.
[+] [-] danielovichdk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway42614|3 years ago|reply
The reason is blindingly obvious - our new user input has dropped to multi-year lows and churn has stayed constant. For some reason, people are convinced it is something else, and we've had endless meetings about it. I am constantly being asked to pull up more and more contorted reports to answer people's pet theories about what is going on, none of which make sense, but we spend forever on them.
Eventually if you torture enough data, you'll find something, I guess. But it feels odd to overlook the things that are well-supported by data and make intuitive sense as well. It is like going into the ER and complaining that you feel lightheaded and when they notice your left arm has been severed and blood is spurting out, they rush to treat it, but you instead say "I had a lot of bread this morning, maybe I'm sensitive to gluten.. Can we test that first?"
We do not have basic operational metrics around things like signup conversion and whenever I've tried to draw attention to those, it devolves into trying to create a dashboard with thousands of mostly useless metrics instead. The last time I tried to get everyone to focus on collecting a few operational metrics at first, I got shouted down and told we didn't want to limit anything upfront, and I have sort of checked out of those meetings ever since.
No raises/bonuses this year and everyone was forced back to the office. I'm torn between being more and more worried about losing people and being worried about them being left in a tough spot here as things get worse.
[+] [-] wnolens|3 years ago|reply
Also the principal engineer on my team insists on well optimized solutions for new features when I just don't think it will matter. And it would take the same amount of time to implement later as it does now, except we'd have more understanding of the problem then.
[+] [-] 1-more|3 years ago|reply
Sorry dude I got really into my animation side project and just wanted to see if I could pick up one of these extra wfh 9-5 salaries the WSJ keeps saying are out there. Things spiraled.
[+] [-] thefourthchime|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barefeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necessary|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvhashim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rschachte|3 years ago|reply
I already had a new job lined up, but I highly recommend saving up a bit of cash reserves to do this.
During this time I also moved to a new state, signed up for sailing classes and read several technical books. Way better than sitting in useless meetings and not growing (again, if you can afford it, do it)
[+] [-] rr808|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prewett|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taternuts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rburhum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meepmorp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caffeine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikesabbagh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incone123|3 years ago|reply
Also the new place only wants me on site when there's a specific need, not 'just because'. I hear from a former colleague that they interviewed for my replacement, offered the job to someone and he turned them down because he's not interested in being on site just because either.
[+] [-] Xoke|3 years ago|reply
Now the CEO wants us to remove MFA because students are quitting over this (although everyone else I talk to hasn't heard a single student quit from it). I have to find legislation that requires MFA or he will ask to remove it.
I'm thinking this will be the hill I die on...
[+] [-] amatxn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] putsjoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Kaze404|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradlys|3 years ago|reply
Just start calling management out in larger meetings. ;) Making it clear that people don’t know what they’re doing tends to really send you out on the “not a team player” track.