6-week sprints? What a frigging LUXURY! Everywhere I’ve worked had us set for 2-week sprints. All the devs HATED it. we’d only get 5-6 days out of 2 weeks to work. The rest of the time was ramp-up, ramp-down, and meetings.
Early in my career, I was doing “SCM” which today has evolved into “DevOps", supporting 4 projects. I was basically thrown into this job because nobody else wanted it and I was the low man on the totem pole there at the time. I was handed a dozen pages of hand-written notes and a rack of slow computers to do builds on. Over that time, I had to build a bunch of my own tools and invent my own processes, just out of a pure survival instinct. It actually became quite fun. I did a ton of research and went to a couple of seminars on SCM and slowly got my head and hands wrapped around things. Within a 6 month, I reduced the time needed to build the biggest one of the projects from about 2 full days of someone sitting at that rack of machines all day flipping floppies in and out to the point where it only took a bunch of batch files running overnight to do the same thing. (They fired the assistant about that time who did that stuff, so I sort of dodged a bullet.) I finally got some more and faster hardware, built a distributed ‘make’ tool and used one machine to control builds on the other three, and that cut the build time down to about 7 hours. All four projects could be built one after the other, and would take 12-14 hours. It was really annoying when the four managers would stand at my door at 10AM Friday and insist I had to get ALL of their projects built by 3PM. I said I needed more hardware to provide that kind of turnaround time. They accused me of having a “bad attitude” and the Dept Mgr said I had all the hardware I was going to get for the next year, so I didn’t have much wiggle room, and I wasn’t going to lie to them. I documented everything and had a notebook exceeding 200 pages that I always kept current. That was just to keep ME from going crazy tracking everything. After 2 years, the company announced a layoff one morning and I was notified I was leaving at 10AM, and was gone by noon. Nobody got a head’s up and so all of the projects I supported had nobody to do their builds. Nonetheless, the Dept Mgr took particular pride in telling me I was being kicked to the curb because he was fed up hearing from the managers I supported that I was nothing but a “Little Hitler” who was strangling the life out of everything there. About a year later I ran into one of those managers at a social event and he came up to me and apologized. I thought it was just a “sorry to see you go” kind of thing, but he admitted that he was the main person who kept hammering at everybody that I was just a lazy-ass guy who was playing games all day and doing all I could to implement stupid policies just to make things complicated because of my “big ego”. But then he said they realized pretty quickly that none of the devs had any clue how to build their systems. The scripts they used on their teams did not produce the files that the company required for release; nothing they had could be automated (no tools); and every time they modified a file they’d have to distribute it manually to everybody else who needed it, and keeping track of it all was eating up one or two hours of their time DAILY. I said, “I left a 200 page manual that detailed everything from soup to nuts” and his reply was interesting. He said, “well, we had every one of the top guys go through that and none of them could figure it out. He said they all complained because it relied on a bunch of tools that nobody knew where they came from — I said, “I built them myself!” and his eyes kind of bugged out. Because of the chaos, two of the projects were cancelled and half of the remaining developers left to get jobs at Microsoft and elsewhere. And the Dept Mgr wasn’t able to release anything for 6 months and ended up transferring to a different role in another state. They were scheduled to release all of the things I was building for them within 6-9 months. Two were cancelled, and the other two took well over a year to be released. I was not particularly upset being laid off, just by the way they did it and how much glee they took in smashing something they had no understanding of at all, thinking it would work better the next day. I moved on to a job working on Unix and discovered I had reinvented over a dozen of the most common commands used in most *nix installations. As it happened, *nix came with over 100 and I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven! -David Schwartz > On Jul 4, 2025, at 4:49 PM, George Toft via PLUG-discuss > <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > > We have some code written by a pretty smart guy in 2017 on RHEL7. But he knew > MySQL RLIKE wasn't working properly, didn't document it, and coded around it. > When we upgraded to RHEL8, RLIKE worked differently. So I feel your pain > about OS upgrades. > > That same smart guy left us with "perfect code," which I now have a running > list of 12 known defects, some have been remediated, some won't be as it > introduces more risk than it resolves, and some were never documented - just > fixed with snarky comments in the code. > > My employer embraces CI/CD with 6 week sprints for the app developers. This > tells me they can plug in a new set of devs for the next sprint with minimum > ramp-up time. My team, on the other hand, does everything the old way. We're > not application developers - we maintain a configuration and write utilities > to assist the 3rd party product's operation. > > We're also getting a taste of what it takes to replace the two senior people. > It took me 3 years to really get the hang of this role and I've been training > my replacement for 5 years. He could probably take over, but it would hurt > the team, as we found out when I had Long COVID, with amnesia, twice, which > took me out of action for 2-3 months each time. I'm not feeling too bad - I > delivered my 10 year notice in 2017. They can't ask me how old I am, but they > can tell I'm getting up there. Yeah, I'll go past that because I'm a > money-grubbing bastard and I like my job. > > Regards, > > George Toft > > On 7/4/2025 2:30 PM, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote: >> Here’s one way to think of the impact that AI will have on the overall >> programming process. >> >> A while back I worked at a place that proudly liked to remind everybody that >> they had attained “CMMI Level 2 Certification” and they were working hard on >> Level 3. I’d never heard of that before, so I did some digging. If you’ve >> never heard of it, here’s a link to their main site: >> >> https://cmmiinstitute.com/ >> >> Reading over the various requirements, it seemed to me that the goal of this >> was to make programmers (people) as fungible (replaceable) as possible. >> >> Virtually every job involving software development and most IT jobs require >> some time to become familiar with the project’s history, leading up to and >> including its current state, before you start poking around making changes. >> >> Since turnover of personnel is always a big issue for companies, one of >> their biggest challenges is having sufficient documentation of past >> activities as well as current state of things. >> >> Reproducibility of work is a key concept, and my interpretation of CMMI >> goals was to minimize the amount of time needed to integrate a new worker >> into a team to the point where they can become productive. >> >> The last job I had told me they figured it would take me 6 months of >> learning to get to the point where I could start working on their main >> (legacy) software. Over that time, I was just supposed to study the code and >> investigate possible issue and repairs. >> >> At one point after a few months I found what I believed was a bug. I >> documented it and was able to duplicate it most of the time. But I was told >> flat out, “THERE ARE NO BUGS IN THAT SOFTWARE!” >> >> Well, yes there were. Because it had recently been migrated from Win 7 to >> Win server 2012 (effectively Win 10) and this had to do with how the OS >> seemed to be queueing up internal message requests. I did some research and >> found a very subtle change had been made to Win 10, and no matter what I >> said, these guys ignored me. Of course, nobody could explain the test data I >> had and even accused me of rigging up a fake problem. >> >> Anyway, this organizatin wasn’t interested in CMMI, but if they were, this >> would have posed a big problem for them. Because part of the purpose behind >> CMMI is to ensure that issues like this don’t come up. >> >> But the place I worked earlier that was aboard the CMMI train was going >> all-in to reach Level 3. That meant they put out policies like this: “Every >> line of code you change needs to tie back to a specific change request. Any >> that don’t will not be allowed to be pushed into a release.” >> >> The implication being, refactoring can get you fired. And finding bugs in >> the code yourself ... well, trying to fix some I found got me fired anyway. >> >> The refactoring part really pissed-off a lot of devs there because the code >> was already over a decade old and was written by people who weren’t very >> well-versed with OOD/OOP and was quite gnarly. So the common practice there >> was to fix up bits of code while you were fixing related code. This “no >> refactoring” rule didn’t fit the aesthetics of most of their developers. >> >> The VP of Engineering had been overheard saying something like, “I don’t >> trust software developers to do refactoring any farther than I can throw >> them, because it always leads to more errors!” He also didn’t trust us to >> write test suites, and refused to fully staff a QA team to do it. Go figure. >> >> Would you be surprised if I said this was the guy behind their CMMI >> initiatives? >> >> Anyway, I’m guessing these guys will be jumping onto the use of AI to help >> do their work, because it tends to write code that often looks like >> templates — IOW, it will write the same code to solve the same problem >> pretty much every time. (Just be sure you set the “temperature” setting to >> zero so it doesn’t start hallucinating.) >> >> It all gets back to “reproducibility”. AI can be relied upon to be highly >> reproducible in terms of the code it writes (quirks and all) far more of the >> time than human programmers. At the end of the day, I’m guessing that AI is >> going to help far more companies be appraised at CMMI Level 5 than has been >> possible in the past. >> >> And those that replace most of their human programmers with AI will probably >> have far fewer problems because nobody will be arguing about whether changes >> in the environment can cause bugs to arise or not, because AI will refactor >> the code, build tests to verify all of it, and fix it, while documenting the >> entire process fully, clearly, and unambiguously — far better than 90% of >> most developer can or do. >> >> >> -David Schwartz >> >> >> >> >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
