This was a daily standup meeting I had in a company that (thought it) was doing Agile development.
Manager: We need to bring over the XYZ feature from the Berlin project. Estimate it.
Dave: Three days
Jim: I say a day, two days at the most.
Steve: Three days, tops.
Bill: I worked on this feature. It's never worked. I estimate six weeks. Quite probably longer. There are a lot of unknowns that need to be addressed first.
Michael: No there aren't. It's in the product baseline, so you just have to activate it. Two days.
Manager: Agreed. Two days. Assigned to Bill. I'll tell the customer it will be ready next week.
Six weeks later...
Manager: why are you still holding things up? The customer is screaming that we're overdue. You promised this would only take a week!
Bill: No, *you* promised it would take a week. I told you it would be six weeks minimum. And that was with lots of unknowns.
Manager: Everyone in the scrum agreed it should only take two days.
Bill: And yet you assigned it to the one person who said it would take six weeks.
Manager: You were the only one who had experience with XYZ.
Bill: Yes, and that's why I said six weeks. Funny, that.
Manager: Unacceptable. I'm re-assigning this to Jim. And the VP assigned you to another team starting next month. If you can't get this done, I don't need you in my team anyway.
Bill: 👍 🥳
Five *months* later, I was getting panicky emails from the group, asking for my help to explain how the "two days, tops" migration feature was even supposed to work in the first place. They couldn't find the baseline, they couldn't even find the requirements.
The real schadenfreude was when the customer demanded to know why the original estimate was only a week. Apparently they tried to pin it on me, only to find my emails in the email chain saying it was months of work. That led to the customer asking why, when the only person experienced with the feature said it would take months, why did the manager overrule him and say it would be week, hmm?
I’ll bet. 🤡 🤖 🦾 The promises made based on what a sales dood reads from Sam or Dario every morning while drinking his coffee-soaked Cheerios have gotta be wild.
I left “big tech” last December and even then the deluge of slop being generated in the enterprise overwhelmed everyone’s ability to review and test it.
What do you mean "review and test"? What is this sorcery you speak of? Never heard of it.
I quit boob tech about a year ago. The back then company was getting funky like some extra ripe cheese, even without AI slop. Later that year they got restructured (again). The new upper management apparently introduced mandatory AI usage. So I expect things will get turned around any day now.
The last time I actually felt sorry for a colleague, twas some 18 months ago. We had one of our sales representatives selling software before it was actually built, based on the information provided by product boobs. The product boobs gave sales the green light. The application was supposed to be ready by Q[whatever is the next quarter] in 202[whatever is the next year].
They duck taped the application together and sent it to production. Testing and reviewing would only prevent them from doing so, so they just skipped it. Promises were made, deadlines were crossed. Besides, how does one review without documentation? Silly.
There was one extra ridiculous user testing this application in live production environment. There was no documentation. The lead dev was fired. There were several bugs reported every day. With each bug they would report, I'd run into at least two more. Ridiculous meetings would ensue.
Things (lying) got so bad that the sales fella contacted us (support) to inquire about the state of this application. It was just sad. Some months later I quit. Just a few months after that the sales fella quit. Everyone in the middle management above me was either fired or quit (depends on who you ask), or transferred to another department.
Aww. Now I want to work in boob tech. 😐 That has to be more fun than cybersecurity was. 👙 😏 The only boob tech I was directly aware of was underneath certain "extreme" volleyball video games. Seemed like a job that would interest many teenagers until they realized how much math was required to simulate anatomically correct (and hyperbolically inaccurate) boobs. We might get more people studying STEM disciplines if there were classes on boob physics.
Tragically un-boob-related, at least in the case of the teams that I led, we had to be careful because people tend to notice and get a little grumpy when AWS services and/or Amazon.com falls over. Hence the modicum of review and test required to reduce the effort required to write the COE (correction of error) document when something did inevitably go wrong. 🫠
I hear these days amazon services have been going tits up quite often. I also read something about github barely topping 90% availability over the past year. For a long while, 99.99% was the norm. I guess one too many engineer quit boob tech.
At a former job we had a sales guy who regularly took our estimates and cut them down to a quarter, then constantly made non-trivial revisions along the way. We trained him in on "the way." He eventually communicated our accurate estimates and stopped changing the projects all the time.
One day we had a meeting where he was bringing on a new sales guy. New Guy acted pretty much like Original Guy did in the beginning, but a miraculous thing happened: Original Guy trained New Guy in on "the way!" I almost shed a tear.
I would not call you a bald faced liar, but this reads like a fairy tale. To run into one trainable salesy guy is like running into a unicorn in a dreamy meadow. Not likely, but OK, maybe.
To run into two, in SUCCESSION, ... my calculator does not support sufficient decimal places to calculate the odds.
I remember the sales department has already made me work weekends in a row due to their efficiency. So if I can give a senior advise, be very prepared to say NO and always have your capacity plan ahead the sales dept, not only your delivery capacity but also system capacity to hold incoming demand. This is special if you deal with big data volumes. Always be aligned with sales so that you aren't caught by surprise.
Maybe also crank up the fire under that side hustle you have on the back burner. Maybe crank it up all the way up to simmer or simmer plus. Or even simmer double plus.
This was a daily standup meeting I had in a company that (thought it) was doing Agile development.
Manager: We need to bring over the XYZ feature from the Berlin project. Estimate it.
Dave: Three days
Jim: I say a day, two days at the most.
Steve: Three days, tops.
Bill: I worked on this feature. It's never worked. I estimate six weeks. Quite probably longer. There are a lot of unknowns that need to be addressed first.
Michael: No there aren't. It's in the product baseline, so you just have to activate it. Two days.
Manager: Agreed. Two days. Assigned to Bill. I'll tell the customer it will be ready next week.
Six weeks later...
Manager: why are you still holding things up? The customer is screaming that we're overdue. You promised this would only take a week!
Bill: No, *you* promised it would take a week. I told you it would be six weeks minimum. And that was with lots of unknowns.
Manager: Everyone in the scrum agreed it should only take two days.
Bill: And yet you assigned it to the one person who said it would take six weeks.
Manager: You were the only one who had experience with XYZ.
Bill: Yes, and that's why I said six weeks. Funny, that.
Manager: Unacceptable. I'm re-assigning this to Jim. And the VP assigned you to another team starting next month. If you can't get this done, I don't need you in my team anyway.
Bill: 👍 🥳
Five *months* later, I was getting panicky emails from the group, asking for my help to explain how the "two days, tops" migration feature was even supposed to work in the first place. They couldn't find the baseline, they couldn't even find the requirements.
The real schadenfreude was when the customer demanded to know why the original estimate was only a week. Apparently they tried to pin it on me, only to find my emails in the email chain saying it was months of work. That led to the customer asking why, when the only person experienced with the feature said it would take months, why did the manager overrule him and say it would be week, hmm?
I wonder how bad it's gotten in presales during our "vibe coding" era. 😬 😖
I believe it's bad. Really, really bad. And funny.
I’ll bet. 🤡 🤖 🦾 The promises made based on what a sales dood reads from Sam or Dario every morning while drinking his coffee-soaked Cheerios have gotta be wild.
I left “big tech” last December and even then the deluge of slop being generated in the enterprise overwhelmed everyone’s ability to review and test it.
What do you mean "review and test"? What is this sorcery you speak of? Never heard of it.
I quit boob tech about a year ago. The back then company was getting funky like some extra ripe cheese, even without AI slop. Later that year they got restructured (again). The new upper management apparently introduced mandatory AI usage. So I expect things will get turned around any day now.
The last time I actually felt sorry for a colleague, twas some 18 months ago. We had one of our sales representatives selling software before it was actually built, based on the information provided by product boobs. The product boobs gave sales the green light. The application was supposed to be ready by Q[whatever is the next quarter] in 202[whatever is the next year].
They duck taped the application together and sent it to production. Testing and reviewing would only prevent them from doing so, so they just skipped it. Promises were made, deadlines were crossed. Besides, how does one review without documentation? Silly.
There was one extra ridiculous user testing this application in live production environment. There was no documentation. The lead dev was fired. There were several bugs reported every day. With each bug they would report, I'd run into at least two more. Ridiculous meetings would ensue.
Things (lying) got so bad that the sales fella contacted us (support) to inquire about the state of this application. It was just sad. Some months later I quit. Just a few months after that the sales fella quit. Everyone in the middle management above me was either fired or quit (depends on who you ask), or transferred to another department.
The product boobs still going strong.
Aww. Now I want to work in boob tech. 😐 That has to be more fun than cybersecurity was. 👙 😏 The only boob tech I was directly aware of was underneath certain "extreme" volleyball video games. Seemed like a job that would interest many teenagers until they realized how much math was required to simulate anatomically correct (and hyperbolically inaccurate) boobs. We might get more people studying STEM disciplines if there were classes on boob physics.
Tragically un-boob-related, at least in the case of the teams that I led, we had to be careful because people tend to notice and get a little grumpy when AWS services and/or Amazon.com falls over. Hence the modicum of review and test required to reduce the effort required to write the COE (correction of error) document when something did inevitably go wrong. 🫠
I hear these days amazon services have been going tits up quite often. I also read something about github barely topping 90% availability over the past year. For a long while, 99.99% was the norm. I guess one too many engineer quit boob tech.
At a former job we had a sales guy who regularly took our estimates and cut them down to a quarter, then constantly made non-trivial revisions along the way. We trained him in on "the way." He eventually communicated our accurate estimates and stopped changing the projects all the time.
One day we had a meeting where he was bringing on a new sales guy. New Guy acted pretty much like Original Guy did in the beginning, but a miraculous thing happened: Original Guy trained New Guy in on "the way!" I almost shed a tear.
I would not call you a bald faced liar, but this reads like a fairy tale. To run into one trainable salesy guy is like running into a unicorn in a dreamy meadow. Not likely, but OK, maybe.
To run into two, in SUCCESSION, ... my calculator does not support sufficient decimal places to calculate the odds.
I know, right? But I had a room full of witnesses, so I know I didn't dream it.
Come clean, how much tequila did you guys have in that room? Come on now.
Definitely a party afterward.
Oh I do hope there's a comic for "4 weeks later, when the customer asks where the collaboration feature is"... :)
But, YOU are the expert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Ah, I love the absurdness in this project. We still experience discussions like that.
And so you shall. That type of people never learn. They thrive on ignorance. God bless.
How am I just seeing this for the first time 😂😂
If you have worked for a corporation, you have likely seen same variation of this on a few occasions, live.
Good lord yes. I think it’s something to do with organisations. Even fairly rational / sane people are driven to absurdity by them.
Couldn't be more true than that... LOL
I remember the sales department has already made me work weekends in a row due to their efficiency. So if I can give a senior advise, be very prepared to say NO and always have your capacity plan ahead the sales dept, not only your delivery capacity but also system capacity to hold incoming demand. This is special if you deal with big data volumes. Always be aligned with sales so that you aren't caught by surprise.
Maybe also crank up the fire under that side hustle you have on the back burner. Maybe crank it up all the way up to simmer or simmer plus. Or even simmer double plus.
The estimate and the commitment are filed under different departments. They are not required to match.
Hallucinated features are the best ones 😅
I would be the engineer.