FASTER YOU FUCKERS - The ILX Work & Productivity Thread

likewise, a friend of mine put everything into trying to make the company she worked in the best it could be before accepting some years later that nothing would ever change. Since deciding to stop caring about doing/getting the best work (and mentally checking out) she's been congratulated on her increased professionalism. (I should mention she also worked at one of the most successful companies in the world in that field and was very highly regarded there for her insight)
it's not me btw, my workplace is p cool atm

So I'm being rather aggressively headhunted for a role in an "Agile Environment" - is Agile truly as bad and hated as everyone makes out?

Whenever I bring up the issues I have with Agile, the first reply I hear back is "well, they weren't implementing it right." I have yet to see this perfect implementation.

I always ask during interviews if they're an agile shop. If yes, I keep looking.

If the interviewer says "Agile, but...", run.

yeah, the qualifiers are really what kills it

"Agile, but..." is a killer yes. But that highlights the main issue w/projects - the vision, i.e. what are you trying to accomplish/what are you spending money on/what you want to achieve by the end...all of that needs to be much more concrete.

Agile -- and its failure -- exposes the lack of all those things much more quickly than waterfall.

Whenever I hear a manager say "Agile, but..." what it usually shakes down to is "We know we need to use a project management methodology to keep things under control, but we want to slide by doing as little of that methodology as possible". Which is normally not enough. I'm not a fan of Agile, and especially not some of the almost management fad like things that often go along with it, but projects not only need control, they need enough control, which is usually more control than the people in charge of the project think is necessary.

Although to be fair to Agile, I do like the way it emphasises 'controlling the project' rather than 'controlling the people who are doing the project'.

^^

One of the most galling things about this farce of a project I'm working on is the lack of control and vision has been blatantly obvious from the beginning but no bastard did anything about it apart from me and all I did was moan ineffectually and get myself into trouble.

ffs there is a large pack of people shouting user stories at each other and estimating points next to me. I am not in an agile mood.
AS AN office drone I WANT TO staple your mouths shut SO THAT I don't have to listen to your boring user stories
(8pts).

User stories are the new folk tales. You should be listening and transforming the mundane into ART :)

I just quit my job! Yay.

xp
yes! i like it when mundane or realistic details get introduced into a user needs session and it starts to tilt off course as you all argue about what the invented AS A wants to do.

&

Congratulations!

Yay quitting your job!

(I secretly love user stories, if we are talking about the same thing, unless Agile has made that a codeword and not a thing.)

lol woof

Please talk me out of quitting my new job over the timesheets. (This job is under a Federal contract and therefore requires a record of who did what and when, but my manager is asking for details of information regarding the Sharepoint repository. I haven't been trained on that yet.)

Is your job conditioned on knowing Sharepoint already? Did it come up as a job requirement during hiring and you lied about it? If not, why not frankly discuss your getting some training on it with your manager? Not enough info here.

The real source of my stress is culture shock: being an employee after years of being a temp/contractor. I was just trying to blow off steam after my immediate supervisor criticized my timesheet for last week on issues relating to Sharepoint. Never mind that last Friday afternoon she and I established that I hadn't yet been trained on Sharepoint.

The editing/technical writing portion of the job is fine. The administrative portion is driving me up the wall. My Federal clearance has been delayed for unknown reasons, and if something were to turn up on my record barring me from doing this job....

My Federal clearance has been delayed for unknown reasons, and if something were to turn up on my record barring me from doing this job....

knowing absolutely nothing about your situation, this sounds totally normal for feds and possibly even to be expected

The whole clearance system is probably in an uproar because of the Naval Yard shootings imbroglio.

True, but the other four people who started on the same day as me got their first level of clearance without any apparent hiccups.

You're just temporarily snagged on the "moral turpitude" clause. They found out you masturbated when you were 14 and are thinking over the implications.

don't trust a man who didn't masturbate when he was 14 iirc

My Federal clearance has been delayed for unknown reasons,

I couldn't even start my job until the security clearance came through, then I couldn't do half of it until the enhanced clearance came through, and there's still the other half of the work I still can't do because that stuff requires yet another level of security clearance, and there's a blanket policy in place that employees at my position don't get that level of clearance because of the cost.

This job is for a fairly low-risk position (as indicated by the last government email I saw on the topic). Supposedly there may be some holdup connected to past security checks on my behalf.

Or they may think that I'm a security risk because I live next to the Russian Embassy compound, and every Federal employee assumes someone else told me that was the issue. :/

Who coudl love a man who puts
sugar on his cereal?

Who could love a man who
looks at sexual movies?

Interesting in itself, but also because it identifies a point where there's a deliberate definition of practice and workplace culture, the values of which much later can be so embedded as to be thought of only as 'obvious' or 'common sense':

Japan brings kaizen philosophy to Ethiopia.

For Ethiopia's challenge is comparable to the task that faced Japan in the 1950s as it began to build a modern industrial economy in a largely rural society.

Evolving mainly in the countryside but soon taken up by industrial groups such as the car-maker Toyota, kaizen - which means "livelihood improvement" - came to encompass a range of development ideas.

And inculcation at an earlier stage:

Michael Rosen on business practice being built into the structures of education:

Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.

the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.

Reading the various entertaining and interesting Agile anecdotes in this thread, they seem to grind away at a line, one side of which is where Agile is becoming a methodology that is part of the fabric of how many offices run (it's moved away from just software development into project work and some of it even to BAU), the other side of which is where Agile is a veneer on older-style processes (which are what?) being done badly. Does that feel right?

Also, was watching the cricket yesterday, a match held in Chittagong, which reminded me of this documentary, Manufactured Landscapes about the photography of Edward Burtynsky. The scenes filmed in the Chinese factories are v much FYF! material:

http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xeizh2

There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.

This is interesting. Not sure that the end result will be monopoly in British schools but the idea of content and tech being provided together is already there and will only grow.

Rosen is right to identify corporate culture as being transposed to schools - partly because monitoring and micro-assessment are thought to be effective in aiding learner growth and partly because they provide a platform for corporations to make "evidence-backed" claims that their services being good vfm.

It's not enough to look to GCSE achievement year on year, the figures are broadly stable and increased performance is written off as being down to easier exams by many. You have to break each term down into units, each unit into standardised sub-units, each sub-unit into tasks and track performance against each, just as you would if you were looking at efficiency in a car plant.

We have software that breaks homework down question by question and allows teachers to track not just who is getting the answers right but how much time each student spent doing so. It can be used to compare performance across a class group, across a school, across a city and across a nation.

they seem to grind away at a line, one side of which is where Agile is becoming a methodology that is part of the fabric of how many offices run (it's moved away from just software development into project work and some of it even to BAU)

BAU, really? Are people being told to become 'agile' or some such? Because that isn't agile. That sounds like 'do it faster'.

I think that is when people adopt "well, we're agile EXCEPT" approaches

^exactly (at least that's what I had in mind). using agile methods or bits (scrum meetings) because they carry a magic power to get things done. but really, I suspect saying "agile will transform how many cultures perceive the mechanics of the world" is probably a bit much. saying that methodologies derived from engineering and specifically computer programming are increasingly characterising the world of work (and indeed the world around us and our personal worlds), seems more defensible.

the extent to which this is the case is certainly debatable (percentage & type of people actually in this type of work - tho see Rosen for the wider effect). but sometimes I feel the widespread consequences of it are as extensive as a the effects of Romanticism, say. the extreme level of current political centrism and the enforced dereliction of the working class in the uk can make it feel like the world of work provides the defining set of values for a large number of people.

I don't think people could ever be marshalled to do agile or even 'agile, except..' at work. I think bits of it could be a good thing -- who wouldn't want short meetings where the team get to review work packages in 15 mins and then get on with the rest of the day mucking about on ilx.

lunchtime masturbation will increase productivity

currently on a project where the pm insists on having TWO daily scrums (at 11:30 and 4:30, no less)

scrum = masturbation??

cockend next to me on the train is trading Legacy - 15 Lessons in Leadership. What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life.

wd love to read sthn good on the models that business devours. sportsthink is surely becoming yesterday's mode - feel that model was in itself inherited by sport from the army. boot camps and paintball. all that fuckin shit.

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 4:58 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading not trading tho

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 4:58 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's replacing jonny_wilkinson_kick_world_cup.jpg in the nu-management ppt deck? Breaking Bad?

maybe time for a 'faster you fuckers' revive.

― woof, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:05 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There must be some top notch fascism in that.

[...book talk...]

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:16 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol breaking bad am half expecting to see this now.

half-baked theory: there's a sector divide here.

corporate management and finance: sports and army theory. agro-bro bollocks.

corporate tech: agile, scrum etc (feeding into tech and dev heavy areas). all-areas incompetence. feel this is main mode for non-director types. (guy next to me shouting out some recruitment firm saying u got me a deliverer when I needed a business winner trouble is he costs 15K more and tbh I have a prob with that).

start-up tech: still some open-plan, out of box, free your mind hippy philosophy?

need to hit up the fuf thread again yes. wut are u readin no place for this.

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

t/s: 9 Project Management Lessons From Game of Thrones vs Five customer experience management lessons learned from 'Breaking Bad'

"This... is not meth." KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

hooray saturday sitting in a library making up dog licence user needs

woof

do you have user journeys.

daily walkthrough guides

360 feedback sessions feel like tailchasing exercises tho

it's just content for imaginary ulsterfolk confused about dog licence costs

no journeys

ulsterfolk

Mis-read that as clusterfuck but then if you knew where I worked you'd be automatically making that substitution with all kinds of words all the time.

Born: October 27, 1963 (age 51), Belfast
Height: 1.60 m
Spouse: Gina Crossan
Licensed Sobriquet: Mad Dog

No need to bother w/this work suff anymore yes!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/how-robots-algorithms-are-taking-over/

How much it (work) matters may not be quantifiable, but in an essay in The New York Times, Dean Baker, the codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted that there was

a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed.

One reason was suggested in a study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), who found, Carr reports, that “people were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were doing, while they were at work than during their leisure hours.”

We should test this reasoning here!

Been talking to a colleague - pretty much the only person who I've met in my line of work who loves scrum.

Got introduced to it in the military (lol I guess) but has used it in successful IT projects - gotta say the way he talks about it does make a lot of sense as a way to run specific areas of work.

our team of 5 or 6 is responsible for the customer facing bits. we scrum together despite working on 6 different projects. it doesn't make a lot of sense, really - we are effectively giving progress reports to the team lead (who oversees all 5 projects) whilst the other 80% look on bored.

You do scrum on one single project. So that sounds like its not being done the right way. #scrumPartyLine

i guess the alternative is 6 scrums of 2 people each.

to be fair, occasionally one of us will chip in with a solution to other people's problems. but that mostly happens in a skype window.