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Search - "bad estimates"
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This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
- Premature optimization is bad and wastes your time
- You need to see the big picture
- Always add extra hours to your estimates
- Test your feature like a QA engineer; look for the edge cases2 -
Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.
*My morning so far, 2 hours in*
Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?
Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.
Remote dev: cool thanks.
Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.
Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.
==========
Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.
Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?
Remote dev: Correct!
*debugging for 5 mins*
Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.
Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.
Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.
Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.
Me: ... and BE team.
Remote dev: why?
Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.
Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.
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Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?
Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?
Product: correct.
Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X
Product: What do you mean the screen?
Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature
Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.
Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.
Product: No this is a must have.
Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.
Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.
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Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.
==========
... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere -
There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:
1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.
It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!
2. Not being asked about estimates.
Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).
3. Being the last part of the product development process.
Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.
This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?
I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.6 -
Everyone's crying about big bad companies using innocent graduates by offering them a few non-paid internships. But when it comes to mgmt manipulating devs into non-paid overtime by questioning their estimates, noone sees a problem.
For fuck's sake, you are the devs, YOU and ONLY YOU can do tech estimates, not the mgmt. You are nothing close to a developer if you allow them to manipulate you like that. Just a dummy coder at best. A puppet with no backbone. An amoeba. You are DISGUSTING and a disgrace to developers' proffession.
Start acting proffessionally for once!!10 -
Why am I so fucking bad with estimates? I am literally 20 hours over on this one thing because it’s so goddamn annoying to deal with.9
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Im bad at estimates so I created a Formula to calculate it:
Number of identities in database * 2 * pi / amount of free coffee in liters * expected uichanges from customer / (7 /rainy days in the week)
It is pretty rough but it gets the job done most of the time2 -
I suck at making estimates on my tasks. I recently estimated a task for 2 weaks but finished it in 12 hours...2
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Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.
Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.
Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.
Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.
Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.
Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.
Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.
Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.
I think it's time to say goodbye 😔3 -
I don't want to answer my manager. Each SCRUM, each SPRINT retrospective is becoming so long. Everyone in my team works on different projects, it's no use listening to all that and wait for your turn and on top of that your manager bombards you with the questions that you really know the answers to but he always questions again like give me estimates, like if I haven't ever worked on something how am I supposed to give you the estimates.
My english is just lowering it's standard day by day, I try to think smarter words but no it is sucking bad.
I am not frustrated as I am learning how to see all this as a part of my learning. I am a good developer I know but I haven't worked on code for like 3 months, everything needs to be investigated, contacting the other teams etc. I am just thinking to close on the projects that I have right now and leave.
In 1:1s my manager said something else but in team meeting asked me to do something else.
I haven't coded in more than 2 months even before that it was at least 3 months gap. I want to take leave for a week and work on the code. But fuck it, open source is not allowed in my company. WTH WTH WTH!!!
I switched the company for growth and I definitely did not have any technical growth.1 -
Way to go ruin a collaboration. I wanted to have fun some making a game with one of my friends, but turns out being friends doesn't correlate to making a good team. Some of you probably know this, but I've never had such an experience, not even to almost strangers
Some tips on how to kill off any motivation to work with you:
* Casually insult other peoples ideas
* Don't consider other people's point of view
* Try to talk people out of prototyping/experimenting with their OWN ideas on their OWN time
* Completely undermine their skill even though you have no basis to go on
* Never worked with this person before
* less experienced
* don't have to give estimates on a daily basis
* don't consider the fact that there are libraries that can be used to speed up things)
* Victimize yourself, because someone is "forcing you" to become the bad guy
I don't know if that person is on here and I don't care if they happen to read this. I tried to treat you with the most respect, but if you don't do the same then just fuck off.
Anyways, there goes the idea of a "no stress, no problems" game dev project, because I wanted to see if isometric view would work better than top down.
My idea to have another person to work on a project with, to keep the motivation up backfired a by lot.
Someone within european timezones up for some hobby game dev?3