Blatant disregard for preserving people’s hearing. Most of my coworkers are of the opinion that not wearing hearing protection while operating loud tools and equipment (chainsaws, pneumatic drills etc) is not a big deal. What’s worse they will often not bother to give a heads up to people working nearby that they are about to start. As a musician, and also someone with a family history of hearing loss, this kind of behavior pisses me off
Good questions. I own priorities, my team owns operation. Fixing this is on our list of priorities, not high enough to get the amount of attention needed to really fix it.
An absolute lack of consideration in regards to chat etiquette. Man now that I think about it, it’s chat threads/notification in particular.
People who carry on side conversations in threads. You’re giving everyone else who has participated in the thread the choice of “disable notifications for this thread and risk missing something relevant come back around, or get a notification for every single side message they’re sending”. Especially when someone is chiming in like 4 hours later. “Glad you guys got this sorted out”. Yes, all 12 of us on-call people in this thread needed to get that message direct to our phones at 3a.m. 4 hours after the outage has been resolved. Thanks for that. Very fucking helpful. High value communication.
People who will not use threads. I don’t need a new fucking notification every 20 seconds because you guys are deciding to have a chat about e-bikes. Make a goddamn thread or use a room made for chit chat, we’re all on the same team, we’re all in on-call positions. I’m paid to respond when this thing makes a noise. I am NOT comfortable muting the team channel.
It’s addressed elsewhere in these comments, but +1 to folks who just message you “hi”. Go get stabbed.
On the topic of notification fatigue:
<span style="color:#323232;">People who will just not finish a thought.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Before hitting their enter button.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">So they end up like doing this thing.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Where you get a notification every 15 seconds, because they are just absolutely addicted.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">To their enter key I mean.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">They are addicted to thier enter key.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">their*
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Oh.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I guess I could have just edited that message instead of sending the correction with the thing.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Asterisk? Asterisx? I forget what it's called.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">LOL.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Anyway, that thing.
</span>
Also, when I’m helping you I am 100% going to stop what I am doing every time I get a message and read the message. There’s no way for me to know whether or not you’re messaging me “Oh never mind, I had a typo” or “here is more relevant info to make your work easier”. That message may very well have immediate impact on what I’m doing, and affect the course I take. Of course I’m going to stop what I’m doing to read it. So maybe don’t wait 5 minutes to send me the message “k” after I kindly, thoughtfully provide you with the status update “I think it’s the fizzibob, let me verify in the logs real quick” of my own volition so that you are not only aware of what’s going on, but don’t have any question as to whether or not your question is still being looked at.
Not using threads is fucking driving me insane too.
Also when somebody just says “hi” and waits. Don’t you fucking dare to do that. Type in what you want so I can decide if I want to reveal that I’m currently actually there and want to deal with your bullshit. Sometimes I just don’t write back. And then 3 days later they ask me in the office whether I saw their message. And I say yes, saw that, I just thought that was all because you haven’t continued.
Also you don’t have to say “Hi Golem” every single time when you start to ask something on the same day. Sometimes even 5 times a day. Geez. Just say what you want and be done with it.
That we all accept that working our butts off for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with only around 2 weeks of vacation a year in the hopes that we can save just enough to retire at 65+ is normal. The social contract is broken, and everyone except the top 1% of earners is paying the price.
A lack of basic level manuals and work flows for basic job duties.
Holy shit folks, where is my picture book that lets me know how this 15 year old point of sale system out in a rural post office is supposed to do the things that I need it to do?
Having to relogin every two weeks with two-factor authentication. Everything is a MS Office document, in particular ridiculous spreadsheets. Everyone writes in acronyms that they assume everyone else knows. Even though there is always a lot of new staff, every email assumes everyone has been working there forever. (“It’s that time of the year again! You need to complete your GRD before week 5 of the COG and send it to the OSYN. Probably you are already an expert in completing these forms after so many years, but if you need instructions, please go to our IDRN and enter your ICRJ.”)
I have to re-auth with AWS every goddamn hour and enter a 2fa code for every. single. command. I run from the CLI. It drives me up a fucking wall even though I have it entirely scripted now. Another great example of how overly tight security leads to worse security as people try to bypass it.
Perfume and cologne. MAI GAD I hate it so much and it makes me sick, and they come to work drenched in it. One was wearing essential oils for a while, the fumes of which set off my asthma so badly I had to go see my respirologist for a stronger puffer, and I finally had to come out and tell her it made me sick.
Secondly, casual racism. I had one CW the other day tell me she didn’t care for Indians (by which she means indigenous people), and another who told me she hoped I wasn’t ‘getting Jewed’ out of something. I was quite horrified. I eat lunch alone for the most part and refuse to have social contact with them.
2 mandatory office days even for consultants. If you want to be at the office, fine. But don’t make everyone be because of some so-called fairness. Catering to some imaginary average person isn’t fair, it’s hurting everyone a little or a lot. Alas since I’m working via an agency, I got to follow client directives. Luckily I have good rapport with both my agency and my project team lead so I can kinda toe the line.
Also the inability or rather unwillingness of my fellow devs to follow protocol. Ticket not approved by business? You don’t touch it. Yet the geniuses I work with went total yolo mode on a project I’m not on. So I wasn’t there to remind them and now they’re upset they got told off they spent a week on tickets that they were asked to discuss with the business. And that they aren’t getting praise for their efficiency. It’s government work, not your hobby project. That’s a week of budget spent on work they may need to reverse because they didn’t even put it on a branch. Maybe when they hear it from higher up they’ll listen because I really get the impression when it comes from me it is seen as my personal opinion. No, I just figured out early how the office politics work and play the game I’m paid for. I voice my opinion plenty but here it actually aligns with the organisation expectations.
One place I worked had end of shift meetings every day for the transition between third and first shift. First shift was supposed to get there 15 minutes early, but hardly ever did. This was a stand-up meeting at the end of an 8 hour shift. Look assholes, I’m tired and I wanna go home.Your disrespect of my time isn’t helping my attitude toward this shit-hole company. Also, apparently, they didn’t need to do this for second shift, because, you know, first shift is tired and wants to leave on time. Imagine that. I ended up quitting when they tacked on extra hours for us to work at the last minute during the week of Thanksgiving, so that effectively we’d still end up working 40 hours. What’s the fucking point of holidays if you’re just going to make us work more hours anyway?
I deliver pIzza and all of our in-store routing software is tied to Google. It’s a good GPS but it gets so much wrong. During rushes it’s the job of the managers to route us on doubles or triples and I’ve gotten routed on badly-chosen doubles (i.e. 3 miles from each other) because Google thought the addresses were right next to each other. Sometimes it’s a customer issue, like a typo on the website but most of the time it’s Google being dumb.
You can submit corrections to Google and most of the time they accept them. When I delivered pizza in a rural area I had to do it multiple times a week and most were accepted. Helped fix mileage and stopped me from getting lost the next time.
people don’t realize how much their car is costing them. IRS rate is like $0.60 a mile. running errands for work all day? 45-minute commute? yeah you’re effectively making less than minimum wage now
May I ask why? This coming from the guy that has to facilitate them.
I’m especially curious about the stand-ups, since I have mixed feelings about retrospectives myself, they have their place and I think they play a part in a team’s growth, but at the same time I’d rather just cancel them if I don’t feel we’d get anything useful out of it and I don’t want to hold a retro just because the process says so.
LE: Gonna just edit this to say thank you to the people who replied, gave me some new perspectives to think about.
I think the value of standups depends a ton on the team’s composition and maturity.
On a team with a lot of junior or low-performing devs who don’t have the experience or the ability to keep themselves on track, or a team with a culture that discourages asking for help as needed, a daily standup can keep people from going down useless rabbit holes or unwittingly blocking one another or slacking off every day without anyone noticing.
On a team of mostly mid-level and senior devs who are experienced enough to work autonomously and who have a culture of communicating in real time as problems and updates come up, a daily standup is pure ceremony with no informational value. It breaks flow and reduces people’s schedule flexibility for no benefit.
When I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to advocate for or against daily standups on a team, one angle I look at is aggregate time. On a team of, say, 6 people, a 15-minute daily standup eats 7.5 hours of engineering time a week just on the meetings themselves. The interruption and loss of focus is harder to quantify, but in some cases I don’t even need to try to quantify it: when I ask myself, “Is the daily standup consistently saving us a full person-day of engineering time every week?” the answer is often such a clear “yes” or “no” that accounting for the cost of interruptions wouldn’t change it.
I’ve just had some unlucky jobs, I think. Think 30-45 minute stand-ups for a team of 4, because the team lead or PM or “Scrum Master” feel like they have to prove their worth or something when ultimately the standup provides little to no value after the first 4 minutes (if any).
For jobs with a single ADO or Jira board, just look at our ticket status and comments.
I had one job that had daily stand-ups, a single ADO board, a requirement to send EOD status update emails, and a requirement to copy those updates to individual ticket comments EOD as well. I rage quit that job after 2 months because, frankly, that’s absurd (it had other issues too).
My favorite standup at a job was one with 12-16 people and it took no more than ~6 minutes. It was no BS. The manager got his quick update notes across all supported clients (and separate ADO/Jira boards) and everyone got to go about their day. If you talked too long you’d get cut off.
But generally, daily stand-ups are just an interruption and a thing where I end up having to make up some BS to appease management. If my update is too long, team members hate it. If it’s too short, management thinks I’m not doing any work.
As for retrospectives, of 15+ jobs in my life, only 2-3 of them ever even did anything with the feedback. Thus, it typically felt like a waste of 1-3 hours (yes one job had 3 hour retrospectives every two weeks, it was brutal). If none of the bads or nexts are ever going to happen, then don’t pretend like we even have a voice.
If your stand-ups and retrospectives aren’t BS, provide understood value, and don’t waste time then I’m fine. But if all they exist for is to check a “we’re agile!” box and allow management to flex, then I’d say it’s doing the exact opposite of agile and merely annoying the engineers.
For stand-ups you really need at least one person that keeps it on track and limits the time each person has, cutting them off and telling them to talk after.
In my experience I feel like I’m basically talking to myself during the stand ups. No one is actually listening to anyone’s status except maybe the scrummaster. I’ve said things in the standup to have coworkers be surprised later on when they’re actually carried out.
I hear you, but given that my “lunchtime” could be anywhere between 11:00 and 15:00 (and that’s not even allowing for timezones), that’s pretty impractical.
In my last two jobs in two different countries the unwritten rule is to not schedule a meeting between 12-13. Not everyone has lunch at the same time, and everyone is free to have lunch whenever they want, but this guarantees that you will have some time to have lunch even if you are booked by meetings around noon. But it doesn’t really solve the timezone issue.