Don’t go chasin’ “Waterfall”

In any form change is difficult and different people handle it differently. Some embrace change and want to learn something new. Others will go into it kicking and screaming, fighting all the way but will eventually accept this is the way things are now. Then there are the ones who just out and out refuse change PERIOD! Something new will be rolled out to the team and they will just go about their day as if nothing ever happened. They will continue doing the same thing they’ve done for decades the same way they have done it day in and day out. These “legacy employees” are the biggest hurdle when trying to implement any new methodology.

I’ve been certified in the Agile/SCRUM methodology three different times at three different companies. One of them was an early adopter of Agile/SCRUM but the other two were late comers to the party. Those who brushed Agile/SCRUM off as a “fad” and refused to turn away from Waterfall quickly learned their competition who did take on this new method were beating them in a development speed race. They usually thought they could slide by on name recognition alone so in their collective small minds thought, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Never suspecting Waterfall was drowning them. But then the smaller more “agile” companies began biting at their heels. So they would reluctantly make the change. Granted not all companies have woken up from the “Kool-Aid dream” that they’re the hottest shit in town.

A prime example of this was the last company I worked for. They STILL have not adopted Agile/SCRUM even though they’ve been trying to implement it for about three and a half years. Which is not surprising because they had just switched over from Lotus Notes to Outlook the year before (but they still used Lotus for production tickets.) Waterfall was the only bit of security blanket they had left. People would ask me what it was like working there versus past companies and I would tell them it was like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. As soon as you walked into the place you could feel the passive aggressive wave wash over you as if you just walked into a banquet thrown by Al Capone minutes before he bashed someone’s skull in with a baseball bat. It wasn’t an outward defiance to Agile/SCRUM. Everyone smiled, nodded, sang the praises of Agile/SCRUM and were “excited” to try something new. But you could tell if you tried to shake up the status quo your future was in question at the company. Which is probably why I don’t work there anymore. There was one interaction I had with a manager which solidified the delusion most of these people were under. We were discussing the project I was working on and why it was almost a YEAR behind its release date. The manager had a hard time wrapping their head around why the company’s competitors were able to release things to production quicker than they were. I nearly bit clean through my tongue. Then they swung around to show me an online article showing the company ranked first and third in the marketplace. I think that says it all.

These are the people that are holding most of the legacy companies in the industry back. They exist in these industries from the top down, and they are an almost immovable entity. Almost. A previous company I was at where I was certified in Agile/SCRUM for the second time was able to move that entity. When they hired a new CTO, he had one initiative in mind when he started. The IT department was going to move to the Agile/SCRUM methodology immediately. With that announcement he gave a warning (mainly for those legacy employees) basically saying, “Get on board or get out of the way.” Of course, none of them heeded that warning. The guys in Dev Ops were the first to go less than a month after the warning was given. A quarter of the department paid the price for their outward disdain for the change. One day a whole row of Business Analysts was walked out. Over the next few weeks one by one developers, testers, project managers etc. disappeared. The CTO was cleaning house! He knew what he had to do to move the company forward into the future. By the way, the other “Flintstone” company I worked for is currently on life support. Although they think they’re doing GREAT!

On Call

When you’re on-call your phone magically transforms into a grenade with the pin pulled out and you spend the duration waiting for it to go off. That’s how I felt whenever it was my rotation on-call for whatever production issues may crop up.

For the week’s rotation I was on-call I may have gotten 3 hours sleep tops. Between the anxiety of not really knowing what I was doing and praying I would not get a call while I was on to waiting for that 3am call how could I sleep. The days were no better than the nights where your life is essentially put on hold. Your choices on-call were either to be tethered to your home for an entire week never too far away from any Wi-Fi connection or lugging your laptop everywhere you went in case you got “the call”. Holidays were even worse. At any moment your family time, cooking, gift giving, football game or especially drinking could be interrupted by your mobile going off like a little cheer destroying timebomb. When you have pardon yourself from whatever fun you were having (or sober up) in order to TRY and fix something which wasn’t your fault in the first place!

I got off pretty easy when I was on-call. It was 11pm on a Friday and I happened to still be up when the “bat phone” went off. The developer who was also on-call described the issue we were having. Apparently, one of automated jobs was failing because of duplicates of the entry in the table where it was sucking data from. We ran a quick query and found the duplicates but there was no indication which was the correct entry (shocker, right?) To be fair the dev I was working with didn’t know anymore than I did about the job that was supposed to run but decided to ask me, “Which one do you think it is?” Well, how the hell should I know?? At that point I made an educated guess. When I say “educated guess” I really meant do I cut the red wire or the blue wire. I told the developer to delete the bottom entry and rerun the job. My logic was the bottom entry was older assuming the top entry was newer and causing the job to fail. I had a 50/50 shot at being right or bringing the whole system down. Luckily, we cut the right wire, and the job ran successfully.

Needless to say, a few short weeks later I was looking for a new job. I was not cut out to be part of the “digital bomb squad”. I’ll leave the wire cutting to the professionals.

“There’s the door.”

In a former job of mine I attended an IT All Hands meeting where they announced starting at the beginning of the new year the whole department will be on an on-call rotation. Immediately hands went up with a myriad of questions. Will be trained on the products we’ll be supporting? No. Will we be compensated for our time after hours? No. Will we get a company phone to use for on-call? No. Where does it say in our job descriptions that we have to be on-call? Right here (pointing at a vague one sentence in all our job descriptions.) After all our questions were NOT answered the manager presenting this new burden to our jobs ended with this, “If you don’t like it? There’s the door.” In the weeks to come we lost 25% of the personnel in our department.

There was a time where “There’s the door” was a threat. During that era workers were limited in their options and I they chose the door they could wind up unemployed indefinitely. But now a days this is an idle threat by a boss who doesn’t realize if the employee chooses the door it opens to the entire world. Remote work has opened an enormous number of opportunities for workers. These doors are not just open to digital workers either. Manual labor, service industry etc. all have positions to fill and are more than willing to take on more help. No longer do workers have to stay in a job with long hours, horrible bosses, lousy work environments and poor wages. They can pretty much go wherever they want, and its high time bosses get on board with that notion!

Recently our team hired a couple of VERY junior developers right out of school. These kids have no job experience at all, and chances are never had to deal with real world consequences for not getting your work done. Being GREEN developers, they were still ramping up and completed minimal work in their first sprint. I can only imagine being new at the job they didn’t want to screw up or tell anyone they didn’t know something. Especially our lead developer who just assumes anyone is stupid right out of the gate then treats them as such or our boss who has all the warmth of a frozen fish stick. Needless to say, our retrospective didn’t go well where our boss put up a general warning, “If you’d rather not participate on the team, we can have a conversation about that.” Which was basically a watered-down version of “…there’s the door.”  One of our junior developers quit that afternoon and the other was on the edge of leaving. I understood where my boss was coming from, work wasn’t getting done and he would have to explain to his boss the two people HE HIRED weren’t up for the challenge yet. But he also shouldn’t have been surprised when one of his junior developers whom he hired quit after his little ultimatum. It’s time for management to realize it’s a whole new world out there. Your intimidation and measly threats of forcing people into the office, monitoring their laptops to see how productive they are or telling people, “If you don’t like it…” You’ll be left in an empty office with no one to push around anymore. It gets lonely in the high tower.

Silos: Not just for nuclear warheads anymore.

The other night I was having dinner with some friends I used to work with in IT at another company a while back. Among the talk of kids, mortgages, prostates, and retirement one of them confesses he had been recently laid off. The news threw most of us for a loop because he’s a good guy and was very competent at what he did. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for the new company he had recently started at because on his annual review basically the only feedback he received was, “be better.” Unfortunately, my friend wasn’t given much of a chance to “be better” at his new job because he had been so siloed at his old job.

In the corporate world that’s known as being “siloed”. It’s pretty much a career killer in any industry but especially IT where you can only hope that point to retire from that company or get laid off with a nice severance and a stipend for retraining. In IT the expiration date for staying at any one job is 3-5 years then you need to move on. Any longer than that you’re not learning anything new (unless your company is technologically progressive, most aren’t) or you become stuck in a rut knowing one thing for one company but they keep throwing money at you so you can’t leave. Usually if you’ve been at a company that long any move will seem like a step down financially. Unfortunately, this is a trap we all fall into at one point in our careers.

I’ve seen this happen to people in IT or any sort of tech job where they become so good at one thing as time goes on, that’s all they know how to do. A shining example of this was when I worked for a company (we’ll call it the “Big Yellow Box”) where generation after generation learned how to do one thing, do it well and for this one company. But as we know the world only spins forward, not backwards and the “Big Yellow Box” was not keeping up with the times. Soon those generations who became good at one thing for one company found themselves out of a job. Some of the laid off got lucky and continued doing the same thing they had done for years but for a different company. That generation shift their knowledge and skills from the “Big Yellow Box” to their overseas competitor the “Little Green Box”.  Others were not so lucky. Many remained unemployed for quite a while until some bottom feeding corporation came along offering them new jobs, training for half their old salaries and vacations promising them they would not be laid off. These poor souls had no choice. Anything looks good when you’re desperate.

Recently I avoided being “siloed” by a company (not so much a bottom feeder but close) I was working for a contractor. This company not only seem to embrace the concept of siloing but also seemed stuck in 1989. They had surfed their name in the industry for years, so they never felt the need to change or were just afraid. They gave the illusion of “progression” with a ping pong table in the cafeteria and business casual. But they still weren’t on board working in Agile/SCRUM and as a contractor I wasn’t allowed to sit with the general populus. My “desk” was basically a card table stuck at the end of the row where the REAL employees got to sit. Despite my peasant-like surroundings, I still did my job. Eventually my boss took notice and encouraged me to apply for a full-time opening they had. After careful consideration, I quickly declined her offer. For the past year I had been working at an office throw away table in Siberia forced to use Waterfall and QA web pages which looked like they developed on a Mac SE in Koala. I recognized the signs of “siloing” and ejected before I fell in. Not everyone is as lucky and unfortunately, they fall deeper into the silo.

A friendly warning to those out there who are comfortable in their jobs right now. GET OUT! We are not living in 1956, loyalty has gone the way of the dinosaur and get use to the idea you are going to retire from the same company you started at. In the immortal words of Dory, “Just keep swimming.”