Agreed, but you can still find fairly simple questions related to the domain they should know to weed out a lot of people. For applications that will use a lot of SQL back end, I will ask the person to describe what a Left Outer Join does (what will it produce). That question lets me know if you have done any SQL beyond a basic query or basic inner join.
I think the root of the issue I am getting backlash on is team work vs individual work. If you are using Agile as a process to just organize work then ignore all my comments. I am using Agile/Scrum as a way to build strong development teams (not just groups of individual developers).
For the locking sprints, that is a matter of protecting the developers from management and the customer. The product backlog can be moving target all day, but the sprint backlog needs to have some backbone so the developers have focus and are not pulled different directions every day. If the sprint backlog needs to change then the developers will come to me for help. Our history is from a very chaotic environment and the developers really like having some sanity/consistency with defining the sprint and holding it still. If the customer wants something else, then we can deal with that in the next sprint.
The sprint is two weeks long, if you finish your user stories in a week like OP, then is a full week of downtime ok? That will encourage everyone to sandbag the work to only need to work every other week. No one is talking about milliseconds or even hours, but I don't want the developers making up stuff to do like the OP mentioned or taking stuff off the backlog that the team did not agree to for the sprint. He used the word Sprint, so I assumed we were talking about a team and not just an individual, support your team, that's all.
I think this hold more true to the types of games I play, but a little less so to the types of games this developer makes. It sounds like he is targeting the D&D and retro gaming crowd.
This also holds more true to the generation being targeted. People that grew up on XBox/PlayStation will have a hard time with lesser graphics. People that grew up with Atari will be more open to lesser graphics.
I agree, I am assuming you know how we implemented Scrum.... We do point estimates very early to know if a story is too big and needs to be broken down and for rough release planning. The developer that volunteers for a user story will do an hours estimate when the user story is fairly well fleshed out.
We do not use estimates and actual's for any management metrics, this is for the developer to gauge their workload for the sprint. We know from our history that once a developer estimates about 40 hours of work for a two week sprint we don't allow them to take any more.
For us, estimates are the developers gauge to know when the sprint is full.
Examples are: The tester is always backed up (1 tester for 4 developers), so a developer can help test a user story they did not write. A developer can take on a user story that was originally assigned to someone else.
It depends. For me it's a 20% role, I focus more on the sprint flow. We have a System Engineer and they do most of the Product Owner cat wrangling that I would assume a lot of Scrum Master's have to handle.
The scrum team should be acting as a team and the developer should work with the team to figure out how he aligns. That is part of the "Self Forming" stuff. The Scrum Master is not their boss and does not weigh in on the project implementation. They are more of the advocate for the team and the advocate for Agile/Scrum. e.g. Dealing with the Product Owner when they try to add stuff to the current sprint or Management saying everything is top priority. Technically we call that coaching the Scrum process, but I'm going to make sure my team has steady/predictable work and are not going to burn out.
As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.
I would bet their thought process is more that there is less competition in the longer range market, so they will do better. There are lots of options now if you don't need much range.
Global changes like this are near impossible, but most of the work is for the local internal customer which is very possible and rewarding. Large projects are normally won or lost on the strength of the upper management, it is normally not a technical issue that fails large projects in large companies.
Something fun to start in might be GreasyMonkey kind of stuff were they can manipulate existing sites. That could introduce them into a lot of programming areas while still allowing small changes to have big results.
Let's ignore the SaaS security issues for a second. When IT says "No" it's not like the area asking is going to go away and not try to solve their problem. Organizations are going to find ways to solve their issues and IT can either help from the beginning or help clean up the mess later. I try to take the stance of offering the right solution and a lot of the times a now solution at the same time. There is no saying "No" in the long term, either help them now or get stuck with the shadow solution the magic macro guy cobbled together that became a critical business function.
Did you see their website posted for the merger? There will be 4 divisions/segments/??? 2 are from UTC and 2 from Raytheon, it does not seem like they are planning for a real integration.
Agreed, don't pick any random CC. Pick your final university and then find CCs that have agreements on transfer credits. I did 1.5 years at a CC in the same city as the university and on the sign up sheet for classes they would star the classes that could transfer and I had a list of classes I could take that would directly meet requirements for my future major at the university.
Granted, my son now wants toys based on this "new" show he was watching and is sad to find out that toys for this are no longer made and the only ones that exist are collectibles.
You don't need fresh on all the time, but for long trips I will switch to fresh for at least five minutes each hour. You just want to cycle the air in the cabin for less re-breathed air.
Depends on what you mean by older. You have less time because you chose to have less time. Let's ignore 40 hours for work and 56 hours for sleep, the rest is based on choices you made along the way. Could be kids or commitments or location demands or _____, but the scarcity of time does not change with age, it changes with the accumulation of decisions that consume that time.
This is commonly called the second mover advantage. If they do not have some special sauce that prevents an easy copy of their idea then it was going to happen sooner or later.
If you don't have a standing army then you better have treaties with ones that have standing armies. The small kid does not get picked on if he has the right friends.