morning

hello

how are you today?

I'm sightly irritated by the fact I can't really progress on work issues

Yeah, that can be annoying.

I also have great ideas for a new side project that i don't have time to develop myself

Ah yeah... I know the feeling: more ideas than time to do projects... I get that with my crafts.

good morning all! congrats on surviving to friday

achievement unlocked

do i get points for this achievement and what can they be exchanged into

Oh, no... it's more like getting a sticker :P

where's my sticker then ;p

My boss told our team we should take time to monitor our mails that contain test results from the previous day. Those tests are often green and the last person who checked them left the team. I don't check them. Is it unprofessional ? Idk

what kinda tests?

tests results on our dev stack, that compare the outputs of controls one day with the output of the current day. My boss said they require human processing to be certain they are valid. Which is partly true, but it's also true because our test process is insufficiently qualified and outputs garbage

Inherently we're seeking regression and crashes in an extremely inefficient way IMHO

if you don't think the tests are helpful, it might be worth explaining to the boss why that's the case - given he places some value on them

We did some explaining, but he was unsatisfied. We both kept our ground. He believes we're not taking enough responsibility in the monitoring process and we believe our monitoring process is garbage and not worth investing time in, as it is now.

With the pressure we have on deadlines it's virtually impossible to properly monitor and have monitoring tools that are near satisfying - I know they never completely are, but it's a reality I'm prepared for and he seem not to

hmm, could it be worth being proactive and coming up with a better monitoring process to present?

Yea. I'm angry I couldn't propose something satisfying during that standup. But I'm actively thinking.

i always dislike it when i can't come up with something in a meeting on the spot :/

morning

good morning

i was thinking of going to lunch around now but it has in fact started raining :/

Raaaain!

I hope it starts here too soon, there's already some dark clouds gathering... it would hopefully finally break this humid+hot thing.

oh its still humid and hot... just happens that the ground is damp now

@AlexRobinson There's a bit of wind here now, that already is helping a little :)

i'd kill for a little bit of wind to cool everything down...

Artificial wind makers?

@ArthurHv Have you asked him straight-up - "Which would you prefer - us monitoring this and missing the deadlines, or us meeting the deadlines and not monitoring this?"?

(Morning.)

(Afternoon)

No, morning.

@Sarov Nah

I mean, it's possible he prefers the former, though, in which case you really should be doing it! :P

He always believe we can squeeze a lil extra in our schedules. He said explicitly it takes 1mn to check that email

Does it (including context switching)?

In a sense that's true but I did point out i received 2300 automated mails over last 6 months and that leaving them unprocessed is a time saver especially when nobody is explicitly responsible and everybody spends that 1min a mail

So I did challenge the idea he could squeeze more

His last argument was 'your previous tech lead did read those" and we have a lot of respect for him but with all the respect he could still spend a whole day managing things and not produce a line of code

I certainly don't want to do that

nor do my two teammates

in a team of 3 with a product owner there is no room for an extra middle man

It could sound fallacious but consider if i take 1m to process a mail and we receive 2300 a semester, it's 4600 a year, times 3 person a team, so thatś 28 work days a year, it is marginally significant, especially provided our work days are not 8 hours developing but more like 5-6 hours dev and 2-3 hours meetings so accounting for this it's perhaps 15-20% of the productivity of a single person gone. I would rather not spend that time reading 95% of the time OK test results.

that sounds like an awful amount of time in meetings...

It is, we've been also trying to cut down on these

we have an all hands meeting every two weeks (1 hour) and a 90 minute focused strategy meeting on thursdays but thats mostly it

we have 15-30 min standups every day, 2-3 hours meeting every two weeks where every team speaks about their productivity and everybody attends, we have 1h-1h30 retrospective every two weeks, all kind of architecture meetings. We did remove poker plannings though

I might be overstating 2-3h a day but yea

Anyhow it's not so much about the time loss for productivity but the fact we're not willing to spend it because it's inefficient. We're trying to catch bugs like we're trying to catch fish with hands.

Would a mail, on average, be relevant to our work, we would read it

I'm going to propose something to augment the signal over noise ratio tho, I'm just going to try to push using Sentry everywhere

15-30 min for a standup is a lot.

Yea but thats what you get when your boss comes at it saying you should read your mails lol

Wait so your boss is in the standups?

Possibly relevant :P

He's not invited. He comes anyway

Our boss would like we are actually doing scrum but I know all too well we only have the terminology for these things

I'd really like it would not be the case but our boss consider himself a developer because he knows how to program. The problem is, he never had any course in proper software engineering. So he used to submit MR that were unmanageable because he would take days to make review requested changes, in issues he consider urgent;

Fortunately it's no longer the case, but he's still thinking he can be relevant for making suggestions and receive updates I'd think it's best he stays away from.

We've been trying all kind of subtle and less subtle suggestions but he's quite stubborn in thinking he knows what he is doing. And to be fair to him sometimes he does. But working in the legacy code he produced, his behavior and tendency to badly micromanage is part of the reason of departure of a few developers already, which I may join some day. From a pure technical point of view, the working conditions are quite bad. But I have good relationship with people there and the money is good.

Do you have a Scrum Master?

no

Ah. So in no way Scrum whatsoever at all.

Maybe you should go to your boss and suggest "Hey boss, I've been thinking, and maybe we should try doing Scrum"? :P

:D

Humourous and potentially useful.

@Sarov XD That's basically me vs. any form of sports :P

@Tinkeringbell You should be ashamed. :P

I feel targeted. I made a poker variant to have more fun :D

So I've been changing the bats and balls etc

But my variant is the best poker you could play on this planet though.

By any absolutely objective point of view

Now I'm interested. What are the variant rules?

It's a holdem with 3 twists.

@ArthurHv You're only being targeted if you made your variant before fully understanding the rules of basic poker. That's the essence of the thing - you need to try [Baseball/Scrum/Grandma's cookie recipe] as-prescribed before you try modifying it to your own personal situation/taste.

1. 3 cards every player, you have to use exactly 2 to make your best hand of 5 cards

2. The flop is split in 2 times 2 cards. You can use one of the flop, but not both. You have the turn split in 2 times 1 card. Similarly, you can only use one of the turns. You can use any flop with any turn. The river is 1 card as usual.

3. Fibbonacci fixed size betting on preflop. First bet is call + 0.5 + 1 = 2.5x blind, then call + 1 + 1.5 = 5x blind etc.

Wait isn't that 6-card hands then though?

You choose the best of your 2 card in hand with 3 of the board

the board is indeed 4 cards but you get to choose the best 3 out of them like in holdem

I'm misunderstanding something. 2 (hand) + 2 (flop) + 1 (turn) + 1 (river) = 6

yea. But poker you play combinations out of 5 cards

Right...?

So you choose 2 out of hand, and 3 among the flop of your choice, the turn of your choice,and the river

lets imagine

Oh, you mean the flop is two groups of one card?

I thought you meant the flop is 2 groups of 2 cards each.

two groups of two cards

if your hand is A67

the flop is A6/A5

Your best hand is likely two pairs AA66 and one of the river or turn

if turn is K/Q and river J your hand is AA66K

OH so you pick a turn or the river.

yes. Or the turn, the river and 1 of the flop

Oh, so you can take part of a turn group.

You realize this is incredibly complicated? :P

@Sarov I refuse. Excercise is like brushing teeth: No fun, but necessary. And nothing can convince me otherwise :P

Not to people that are used to holdem :D But I agree it's a bit difficult

@Tinkeringbell Don't try to modify it and claim moral superiority then!

There are interesting properties on the variant you don't have in other forms of poker. It's a more complicated, but in return sightly deeper strategically speaking

@ArthurHv I'm used to Hold'em and I read the Pathfinder SRD for fun and it still took you several minutes to explain it to me!

@Sarov I don't? I just tried to modify things and still didn't find them good :P

@Sarov Thats because we're not IRL and I can't show you with a proper deck

@ArthurHv Like what?

@Tinkeringbell Don't try to modify without trying as-is first!!

@Sarov The importance of the hand and betting is pushed further in the hand. In holdem you have a very strong preflop dominance. Not so much here, you can come in with garbage and outdraw your opponent. There is also more bluffs opportunities than in omaha where you'd run in the nuts more often.

"omaha where you'd run in the nuts" - you are no longer speaking terminology I understand. :D

There is also solvability and computational complexity of solving the game

Its much more complex to heuristically solve than holdem

@Sarov Omaha is a variant of holdem where you play with 2 out of 4 dealt cards (the board rules are the same than holdem though). Player tend to make the strongest possible hand of the board (the nuts) often in this variant. Which mean they can't be bluffed because they won't fold the best possible hand

If you'd like we could play it one day btw. I have developed the software to host games.

I just delayed the idea to broadcast the game as is because there is a few key features I lack to animate a community around the game. But all the colleagues who tested told me it was fun

@ArthurHv I might. I'm also debating whether or not to relate this to a friend of mine. I know she likes Hold'em and there's a 50/50 chance she'll find this interesting/sacrilegious.

Oh that's great

But yeah - if anything, this is a perfect counterexample to the baseball story. You understand basic Hold'em to the point where you can start talking about computational complexity. That is the point where it actually makes sense to start making modifications!

Completely agree

By the same vein, Scrum-by-the-book is not ideal in the same way that Hold'em is not ideal. But trying to modify Scrum without mastering it first is like a layman trying to create a poker variant without even having memorized the hand values!

Yes. I think the problem with my boss is not in the understanding though. He's smart, but his ability to trust is limited.

Scrum was not his idea although he likes what he understood of agility. It was introduced by a former product owner

That's kind of its own understanding, though... If you can't trust your employees, fire them and hire employees you trust. If you can't trust anyone, fire yourself.

Lol that's pretty bold and I like that statement

Witty and/or pithy one-liners are why I'm here. :D

It's a difficult subject for him. I think if I was him I would try to establish metrics or "KPI" as people say and try to hold some people accountable to it, while leaving them doing their job - either middle managers or developers themselves. Instead, what he does is popping in and out very randomly. Like half our standups. And micromanage people dropping a punchline or two about management. When not telling them how to do their jobs

I have a junior colleague who reported me being actually stressed out by the sole fact he's attending meetings. Just because of the boss behavior

The management is upside down, we have to manage him

That's not uncommon.

I'd be curious to hear his response to "Do you actually enjoy managing this way?".

We were having a drink a few days ago, and it's sometimes difficult to guess to what extent he believes what he says, but he told me he's thinking hes too bad a manager to allow us more remote work iirc. So I think he's partly aware something but I'm not sure he would put the good and bad to the same places I would

??? How does his ability as a manager correlate to that?

It's vague to me too, but I guess the idea is he think he didn't empower us enough to be autonomous

There's a ... pretty easy way to fix that... :P

Yes but you know trust issues. He's even been admitting a bit of them when we pushed for more remote work

I feel your pain. Though in my case, my manager is on-board but unable to convince HR that results are what matter, not arse-in-chair.

meh

"Meh"?

I feel sad for your HR

And for you obviously.

Remote work is fantastic

At least it is for me. Because I have a dedicated room and no kid

Yeah. I miss it greatly.

More productive at home than here, too.

going to bed. Good night/day

Night.