Working on an Island

[new-islander]

the duration of the daily “standup” meeting now exceeds one hour...

[new-islander]

How to motivate a developer

1. Create artificial high pressure. “We have to finish this now!” 2. When the developer exceeds expectations, award him: "You help testing, now - there’s a lot to do!"

[new-islander]

always blame the tester

1. annoy everyone by urging them to test and report bugs

2. when someone reports a bug, play it down. create obstacles for reporting it. 3. go to 1.

optional step 2a: when it turns out that a bug was not found early enough, blame the testers for doing bad work. do not provide dedicated time for testing.

[new-islander]

Teamwork.

A: "Are there any urgent tasks?" B: "I don't know. I have a lot to do."

[new-islander]

The colleague kept complaining that he had the on call phone for three weeks in a row.

He just forgot to mention the cause: He forgot it at home for days.

[new-islander]

how can one boss in one day 1. encourage and push the team to ask question and to question everything - and 2. when we finally start asking questions again reply "are you asking genuine questions or being difficult?"

[new-islander]

fact: our test manager creates test cases that consist of 1-6 words

[new-islander]

pm ... tech lead ... other companies work with that. we get a list of 100 tickets and are kindly asked to choose our tasks ourselves. great, because it gives freedom. but not great, if that freedom is limited by daily reminders to be “efficient”. I thought efficiency is achieved by specialisation, roles, and good management. not by a group of people from whom each is continuously reminded to be efficient.

[new-islander]

freedom without discipline is chaos. discipline without freedom is tyranny. we’re suggesting that you have your freedom, and you accept some discipline on the freedom to get the benefit of collaboration that exists when people come together for a common cause, which is your organisation’s mission.

The Tyranny of Unpublished Process - Part 2 - https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/10/tyranny-unpublished-processes-part-2

[new-islander]

Listening to a podcast about management. It’s good to see that the experienced managers who run the podcast recommend things that I’ve long learnt and had been applying for many years. Before I came to the island.

[new-islander]

two standups and a long sprint planning meeting per day, and in none of them is mentioned that boss and 1/3 of the team are not in the office next day.

[new-islander]

We have a new enterprise social network. I wanted to use it for information sharing what our team does. Web development is for most people a bit tricky to understand. Therefore, posts like "what do we do all day long", or about our current projects might be of value for the company as a whole. On Monday, I created a group and made it open for everyone to join. I created a beautiful, appropriate post and timed it for Friday afternoon. Eight hours later. My group's setting was changed to "closed". An admin, a person I never heard about before, sent me a message, that my group had been closed, because my posts would be on the company wide newsfeed, but they shouldn't.

I shortly expressed a slight disappointment and stated that I would like to inform other people about what we do. I got told that it would be about keeping everyone connected, but if everyone would keep the group "open", this would fill up the news feed.

Wow. I've been involved into launching corporate social networks for quite some years. All other companies have issues to get people posting. We block people from posting. Our news feed contains advertisements of the brand, information about current promotions, and some albums of one superenthusiastic person sharing weekend activities, where our logo appears every then and when.

[new-islander]

I spotted a weak point in our architecture and systems: If we modify the content of only one configuration file, the entire website is down. I consider weak points as something very important to know anything about. I therefore asked. But the colleague just told me that his solution is the best already. Sure. If that’s the case, I’ll stop asking. My apologies.

[new-islander]

Leading by Example

"Boss, my I leave at 4pm, today? - I have worked the hours in advance." - "There's a general meeting at 3-5, everyone is expected to attend." - "Okay."

2:00pm. Boss: "I need to leave at 2:45, today."

[new-islander]

We have a "central configuration management", where all parameters are configured for all environments.

Unfortunately, that system is technically limited. It is a bit like storing bash files with variables inside.

When a new environment is set up, selected lines of these files are copied and pasted into new files for the new environment, and then eventually someone goes through them and replaces the values, according to the new environment.

If a new parameter is needed, it is added manually to the environment where it is needed first. It is then eventually copied to other environments manually. If this gets forgotten, things do not work and have to be traced down manually.

It lacks reproducability, tracability, managability, monitoring, fault tolerance and discoverability at a place which is crucial to the wellbeing of the entire system. There is no documentation, no process for creating an environment or adding parameters, as well as no update process.

My colleague is not of my opinion. My colleague says, this is normal.

[new-islander]

The Chicken-Cage Management Concept

Hire people, mix them in a team, put some pressure on them. Hire replacements whenever anyone leaves. Call it “management”. Call yourself a “leader”.

[new-islander]

New colleague on boarding. Another colleague is “explaining” how to setup the laptop. Observations:

- I hear one person talking all the time. - I hear an often repeated “I do it for you” - I hear “don’t be afraid”, repeated very often

And then, proud like a golden fish to have ... well, “helped”.

What shall I say? Teaching is mainly listening, only very few talking. Teaching includes time for questions, especially critical ones. Teaching requires patience. And it needs time for repetition. Why does nobody understand that???