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Comment by hnthrowaway0328 | Hacker News Reader

When most of the work is to figure out what the other party wants and what can I take, productivity and motivation practically go down to zero.

I need to get into some lower level programming job or a tool programming job.

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Same. I wish I got to actually write code. I spend a lot of time at my job knowing that there are programming tasks to be done, but they're not in the sprint, and scrum master will scold me if I work on them, so instead I sit on my hands waiting for the middleware team to do some task or other that would be totally unnecessary if they had followed my advice in the first place.

Just work on them anyway, save the code, and follow the ticket. Once it's in the sprint, copy+paste and commit.

That is one approach that I try to take sometimes. The real problem is more that having to report every morning on work I've done that is in the sprint puts a real damper on my ability to focus on the other stuff. And if effort spent overcoming that isn't even appreciated, why bother? It's just kind of demoralizing, especially after having spent a decade working at a job where I was able to get things done. Live and learn, then get demoted to a position where you can't apply any of it.

I guess if you have a tendency to automate yourself out of a job, it's inevitable that you'll end up somewhere so dysfunctional that it's impossible to do so.

> I guess if you have a tendency to automate yourself out of a job, it's inevitable that you'll end up somewhere so dysfunctional that it's impossible to do so.

think of a handyman that works so efficiently that he effectively has no margin.

Yeah it's difficult to handle especially if there are unknown unknowns. I prefer to find a coding job where my clients are programmers.

From an outside perspective it looks like you are saying you know what is best but can't convince anybody of it? Is everyone around you incompetent or is it possible there are different priorities?

I think it's not different priorities so much as an organization that has ossified around a particular way of doing things, and when problems are detected (like "why does it take 2 weeks to add a column to a table"), the solution is to cram more cooks into the kitchen. If I bring this up I am basically told "well we can't do anything about that." So I've learned to keep my mouth shut when the scrum leader asks if there's anything keeping me from doing my job rather than rattling off the latest of many organizational problems that have made my job 1000x harder than it needs to be.

I have worked at places where people are competent and have slightly different priorities than I do. This is very different.

>scrum master will scold me if I work on them, so instead I sit on my hands

Do the programming tasks anyway. I have found that being productive will not get you fired, even if it makes a power-junkie mad that you're not on their leash.

Even more meta, make food for a family?

Welcome to the software development world!

Software developing is so much more than web programming, oh boy!

I'm actually a DE but with this market it's difficult to transfer to anything else. I'll probably just switch jobs frequently and keep the freshness, grit for 10 years and get the hell of the indistry.

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