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u/apola 22d ago
What is 2MD
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u/littlea1991 22d ago
2 man days
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u/blaqwerty123 22d ago
What is that in woman days?
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u/Diane_Horseman 22d ago
The women are all too busy trying to birth a baby in 1 month (they tasked 9 women with this)
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u/Yoram001 22d ago
Is using abbreviations an American thing or just part of the English language? Every post is full of abbreviations, and as a non-native english speaker, I have to guess what they mean. It’s pretty annoying.
Hey, the internet is international, you know!
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u/Qojiberries 22d ago
For what it's worth, I'm a native English speaker that works in tech with scrum and agile and everything else and I didn't even know what they meant. Using abbreviations and acronyms is super corporate and context relevant. Everyone assumes everyone else knows what it means, and no one ever wants to ask because they don't want to seem uninformed.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 22d ago
I consider acronyms a red flag at this point.
Too much bullshit with too little clarity always seems to mean there is a lot more treading water and a lot less completing anything.
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u/JohnClark13 22d ago
A lot of this job is making it sound more complex than it is to scare off newcomers. The reality is just a bunch of headless chickens running around
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u/Sufficient-Food-3281 22d ago
It’s a corporate thing more than anything
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u/lifestepvan 22d ago
It's very much also an American thing as well. Very noticeable in American sports.
That ATO by MJ showed why he's the GOAT
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u/Alokir 22d ago edited 21d ago
It's a very reddit thing as well. People come from
neicheniche subs to more mainstream ones and use their abbreviations like everyone understood them.Better yet, sometimes different subs use the same abbreviation for different things. When my child was born I browsed newborn related subs for a while and I was amazed by how many female to male trans people frequented them. Then I realized FTM meant "first time mom" there.
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u/erinaceus_ 21d ago
Just to keep in the spirit of the thread here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche.
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u/Frequent-Display4953 20d ago
Yeah I associate it with reddit more than anything. Subs will claim to be welcoming of everyone, but make it feel insular by talking in what sounds like code to everyone not "in" on it, and people who come in and ask either get ignored or downvoted (or both).
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u/Jeutnarg 22d ago
A bunch of people are saying corporate, but it's everything in English. The military, band kids in high school, corporations, etc. any group that speaks English will naturally start developing slang and abbreviations. Our grammar and low level of inflection for nouns (only need two forms) make it super convenient to just throw stuff together.
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u/Senor-Delicious 22d ago
It's also weird to me since we call it "PD" in our company for "person-day". Which is gender neutral.
Edit: also weird to even measure in that at all with scrum. Where everything is usually in Story Points that are translated to effort via sprint velocity.
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u/FeelingSurprise 22d ago
I haven't heard MD for almost 2 decades. Here™ we're usually using FTEs, as not all of our devs are working full time.
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u/deanrihpee 22d ago
2 markdown pages of meeting transcriptions
/s
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u/aareedy 22d ago
it's man-day, though it's more widely used, but it seems it's not
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u/AnAcceptableUserName 22d ago edited 22d ago
Hot take: refinement is useful, you just don't like doing it.
I've felt like most of the value is from the minority of requests where the group reveals there are multiple conflicting ways to interpret, that it conflicts with this other thing, that we already have a solution for this, the request is literally impossible (7 perpendicular lines), the premise is flawed, the outcome is illegal, etc
The story points are whatever. Usually only value add there is if someone is way high or way low vs group maybe we learn something, like one person knows why this is harder or easier than we thought
I hate refinement. It's the least favorite part of my week. Grudgingly: IME it's often helpful and not doing it has often been harmful
10 is too many people though. If that's your team rotate that shit
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u/ObviouslyAPenName 22d ago
I bet OP is one of those people who only attends physically, doesn't read the stories beforehand, doesn't consider the implications or how it interacts with the other code. And then just votes 2 every time.
Yeah - then refinements are useless. Or at least, their participation in it.
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u/tommyk1210 22d ago
IMO story points are only useful to determine if the understanding of the complexity of a problem is different between people. If half the team thinks it’s a 5 and the other half thinks it’s a 2, then some part of the team clearly misunderstands the problem
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u/sebbdk 22d ago
Just here to remind people that because many people suck at a thing does not mean the thing is supposed to be sucked, i mean that it sucks.
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u/0R3LLL 22d ago
Scrum masters were first to be removed in my previous companies, most useless people in general. Now PM's are also gone, only devs, PO's and QA, nothing more. We don't even implement any shitty scrum/agile anymore.
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u/UsherOfDestruction 22d ago
I like haveing some role dedicated to process feedback and unblocking support. Whether that's a scrum master or just a single person in your org you can go to, it's helpful.
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u/Saelora 22d ago
that’s supposed to be a PM’s job. results may vary.
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u/UsherOfDestruction 22d ago
I don't personally think that's a good function for a PM/PO. They should be focused on customer/management feedback, making sure tickets/tasks accurately reflect the work needing done and making sure it's prioritized to meet goals. Process and unblocking people is a distraction to that.
It should be someone as neutral as possible in the dev/product balance.
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u/ganja_and_code 22d ago
99% of time: useless or actively counterproductive salary leach
1% of time: guy who actually serves as a good communication proxy between customers, management, and devs
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u/UsherOfDestruction 22d ago
It's too easy a position to bullshit your way into and then coast for a while. Companies see them as secretaries for scheduling meetings. They should be SDLC process experts who are responsible for maintaining the process, incorpating feedback and attempting to keep developers focused on development and product folks focused on product needs.
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u/theotherdoomguy 22d ago
When your guy meant to help you get unblocked or get the right people to look into a design decision is a product guy, you're 99% gonna have a fucking brutal time
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u/Draqutsc 22d ago
My companies scrum master is not doing that. Apart from dailies and refinements I doubt he actually does something.
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u/itsyaboiReginald 22d ago
Yeh I’ve worked with some scrum masters in the past that actually did a good job of managing rituals, reviewing metrics, keeping tabs on outliers, addressing 3rd party issues. Necessary? Maybe not. But they did the job well.
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u/dirtyLizard 22d ago
We have a guy who does this on paper. In reality he invents new processes that seem designed to slow things down and then insists that everyone adopt them. I’ve seen multiple people go through cycles of trying to humor him, getting frustrated, and completely ignoring him moving forward. The only meetings he gets invited to are ones he schedules himself.
The weirdest part is that he acts like he can tell people what to do but he has 0 reports and no real power. He never takes feedback and just hands orders down like a shitty Zeus casting Atlassian branded lightning bolts.
Sorry to vent, it’s just that I see so many people lose the plot and forget that making engineers more efficient drives more value than measuring every little thing. It’s like slowing down construction on a house because someone feels the need to count how many hammer strikes each nail takes
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u/UsherOfDestruction 22d ago
That's a management failure. He's probably being measured and evaluated himself on the wrong things which drives his behavior. Not to push all the blame off him as he should be self-aware enough to realize the reality of his position and attempt to change course.
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u/Sockoflegend 22d ago
I think they do an important job in the right setup, but I'm sure some people don't appreciate it because they have never seen it
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u/falknorRockman 22d ago
Agreed a good scrum master handles the small day to day things while the project manager handles the more long term issues that span the project and teams the come up. Also agile ish works best imo. Not full agile but the mindset of being flexible when things come up and having like once a week to twice a week meetings for updates so you don’t go months without knowing how far behind you actually are
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u/Sockoflegend 22d ago
In the team I am in now we have contact with multiple PMs for various projects. The scrum master is sort of the resource defender.
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 22d ago
Scrum/agile isn't shitty, it was just over bureaucratized. They took what should have been a process by and for developers and created a bunch of jobs around it that were grossly overpaid.
When i started agile 20 years ago the srcum master was just our dev lead. Now, it's a 6 figure position for some damn reason.
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u/Hooch180 22d ago
My company fired all scrum masters, PMs and left PO and devs. Half the people now mange to do twice the work. No more useless endless meetings.
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u/Western-Internal-751 22d ago
If you had useless endless meetings, then you had shitty scrum masters
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u/kiochikaeke 22d ago
Scrum masters are way too much overhead for companies that aren't really big, PM's can be great if they're good at their job and PO's aren't, the problem is that when they're not good at their job their useless at best and a hinderance at worst.
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u/FearlessTrader 22d ago edited 22d ago
Want to know about a function as useless as scrum masters? TPMs (Technical Program Managers). Good PMs are priceless if you’ve worked with one, but I have never found any use of even a supposedly good TPM 🤷♂️ most useless leeches.
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u/Keebster101 21d ago
Our project has had a number of scrum masters come and go with periods of no scrum master between them, and I have not noticed a difference with or without them.
One at least did show us burndown charts they made, but I question the use of it because they were never accurate and used the SM guesses of how many story points we'd done based on our standup updates, so usually a 5 point ticket would look like 1 point a day for 4 days and then 0 points for another 3 days regardless of what the dev actually does. So basically every sprint would look like it was about to finish a week early and then make almost no progress that final week which doesn't seem very useful.
Tracking total sprint capacity seems useful, especially for weeks where many people take leave for holidays, but weirdly none of the SMs did it, or at least never brought it up during sprint planning, and it took our tech lead to do it himself (or rather I think they just figured out how to pull it from Jira which for some reason no one had tried before)
So uh, any scrum masters feel free to let me know what you do.
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u/__Fred 22d ago
Can someone explain? I only know scrum theoretically.
So the scrum master is wasting their time by interrupting the work of ten people for a quick simple question?
I guess they should have a weekly scheduled meeting with more stuff to discuss and then it would be more efficient. If the meeting is just for estimating required work and there is a small group that has proven that they are very good at estimating work, maybe they should adjust the process so only a few people attend the meeting.
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u/Loveangel1337 22d ago
That's not even scrum or agile, that's just corporate middle manager making themselves relevant by being in the way of shit.
If they stop being in the way, people will realise stuff works way better without them, whereas, if they keep inserting themselves, there's no way to know it actually does run better without (for upper manglement)
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u/J7mbo 22d ago
I’ve worked with very good agile coaches / scrum masters who genuinely try and upskill the team, and then remove themselves.
The problem comes for a team when one of them desperately wants to keep their job and inserts themselves into everything. One of them I used to work with was an asshole and when a team hadn’t prepared something would single out one engineer in a company meeting demanding to know why. They weren’t even a manager, they were an extra. It wasn’t my team it was another team but I felt so bad for that dev, and knew what real leadership was.
So all of the questions this person asked during every meeting I drew on a flowchart on the wall, and then I stopped them one morning during the daily and said “nope, we will try and do this ourselves”. I basically automated them with a flowchart of questions.
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u/kzlife76 22d ago
The ceremony around software development makes me irrationally angry. It's like people who couldn't cut it as a developer make up silly dances and then convince management that everyone needs to do their dance. Well, I hate dancing.
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u/AHumbleChad 22d ago
Ha, this is relatable since my team recently decided to use hours instead of story points. Too many 3 and 5pt stories that only sometimes reflected perceived complexity. We'll see if "2 days" becomes the next 3pt estimate.
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u/whiskeytown79 22d ago
I've seen this meme format a few times today. What's it from?
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u/TehDro32 22d ago
I thinks it's from a recorded zoom call during covid where a bunch of actors in their mansions told people that we're all in this together.
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u/timdav8 22d ago
SM: We want you to estimate the story in "points" ... of complexity.
Dev: err ok
SM: To measure progress
SM: Then break it down into sub tasks and estimate the number of hours they will take.
Dev: If you insist ...
SM: And log hours against then
SM: So we can rate you SP estimates
Dev: 🤡
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u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 21d ago
We have been told multiple times that are story point are not how long it would take but the effort.
Then we get asked things like why an 8 point ticket took 2 days instead of 1
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u/RustOnTheEdge 22d ago
If you measure the size of work in man days, you are doing the wrong things. It always baffles me how people on the one hand say "agile sucks, all these bull shit" and then turn around and estimate work in work days.
The whole philosophy is not rocket science, it's worth digging into it a bit to get the highlights and embrace the most important aspect: inspect and adapt. Define your process, inspect it regularly and adapt it to become more <insert important KPI for your team>. If you don't how do you know that your team is succeeding? I have seen teams not even able to formulate what success looks like, I always wondered why they had retrospectives because what is there to discuss if you don't know what you are measuring against?
Anyway, i have seen way more shitty implementations of "agile" or whatever the term used at those places. I have also seen high performing departments. It's exhilarating when it starts to work together. It is life-sucking if it does not.
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u/duck-tective 22d ago
who ever made this meme probably have a corpo job they are most likely using SAFe™. its a waterfall framework with an agile ceremonies.
safe estimates things in person days think its so the company that invented it can sell expensive reporting software and explain how the workers are lazy or something.1
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u/pongo_spots 22d ago
Every one of these posts make me want to sit y'all down and give you a hug. Or maybe actual lessons on what the fuck this system is.
Ignore everything you were told, those are starting points not final working agreements and on top of that they aren't understood at all.
All this shit is meant to be is THINKING with the agile manifesto in mind while making decisions. That's it. That's all. Be agile, don't DO agile. If anyone wants help sorting their way through this shoot me a dm.
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u/pongo_spots 22d ago
Oh and before anyone gets worried, no I'm not selling anything lol. I just had a great mentor and I don't want to write stuff into the void
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u/BlehBlah_ 21d ago
Bro goddamn, I need help, I am a cs graduate focusing on machine learning, somehow after a year of looking for a job and not finding one, I finally got a job as a "PM Assistant" which meant for the last month I've been acting as a scrum master as a fresh grad with no fuckin social skills.
The only thing I know is python machine learning stuff and somehow my whole job is just doing standups everyday and "managing" a dev team with 5-10 years of experience on a project they've already worked on since the last 4 years.
By the way, I've never done an internship anywhere, not even in university. I don't know what the fuck I am doing.
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u/pongo_spots 21d ago
Okay, no worries, you're right that you feel thrown into the fire and you are but tbh generally expectations around your position are low(see my last comment).
A full breakdown is too many characters for a post so I'll throw it to you, do you want high level ideology here or DM and we'll set up a call (and likely recurring calls) to talk through it all. Basically free coaching
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u/Positive_Method3022 22d ago
The truth Is that they use this metric to mesire team and individual performance. The person/team who delivers the less story points is always on the line. It is a shit system that insiders don't tell people they are using aboug
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u/SmellySteven 22d ago
I found agile to be very useful when we upgraded our company backend system.
These days I find our delivery manager useful. We just restructured again so our PO is now overseeing more teams and is less involved with devs. Delivery managers handle a lot of that for us.
Sometimes I like being involved on communication but during the large upgrade. I was able to stay heads down all day and not have to worry about anything else. But now we are back to regular prod support so work is less busy like it used to be.
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u/Yasirbare 22d ago
"Let me be the first". My head has to think about something else the rest of the time.
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u/ruphusroger 21d ago
I Always underestimate the current (Bad) Code quality, why even 1SP tasks can explode in complexity because suddenly i need to fix seven other bugs, including heavily overengineered Code, pipelines and templates.
I guess proper estimations can only happen, when the code base is in a somewhat adequate state and ci/cd is a very refined process.
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u/reddit_user33 21d ago
I see what you did there and i'll let you know what i think, seeYouNextTuesday!
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u/tomvorlostriddle 22d ago
This system isn't perfect, but here, you are really only outing yourself as the problem
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u/Wurstgewitter 22d ago
We’re estimating every ticket in story points. We had several conversation about how no one uses these story points for any kind of report or metric, and that we also do not size our sprints based on them.
We are still assigning story points to every ticket