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by ai_ja_nai 3122 days ago
I agree that the link with SWE is not so apparent, but there is and it's a subtle one:

as software engineering, we take pride in researching and leveraging the best and latest to solve our challenges. Time management included. And yet we systematically end up working in overburdened teams and overdue projects.

We surrounded ourselves of IDEs, instant messaging platforms, calendars with reminders, automation and all sort of stuff to be more productive.

And the agile methodologies! The holy Scrum/Kanban! How much time we dedicated to People Management, Release Management, Sprint Planning and the like.

Our schedules should be bulletproof.

And, yet, we work at least 50 hours per week with continuous surprises from the managerial perspective due to disorganization. And we tolerate all of this because we have been told it's heroic, instead of beheading the profitering gluttons that come up with the usual "goodmorning, this unannounced thing must be delivered tomorrow".

This is the bullshit. The cultural hysteria that sacrificing our health and free time is necessary due to some kind of higher purpose

1 comments

> And the agile methodologies! The holy Scrum/Kanban! How much time we dedicated to People Management, Release Management, Sprint Planning and the like.

The problem is, you need to do some planning. The question is, what's the way of doing planning that takes the least amount of time and effort, and still gets done what needs done?

The metodologies and all of the aforementioned tools are fine. But instead of using them to stay in the schedules with less, we used them to make more in the same amount of time. We pursued efficiency ("more with less") and profit instead of keeping the profits constant and give more free time to people. In other words, economic growth demand eroded the margin that we gained through these efficiencies.