Accurate programming movie

I have a friend who was a project manager. He took the time to learn every platform used by his team, but held no pretenses that he could actually develop anything without the team. His main goal was filter all the horseshit from the stakeholders and higher-ups so that they wouldn't overwhelm the team with minutia. By learning the platforms and observing the team developing, he could make accurate predictions on timeliness based on whatever arbitrary feature was being requested and he'd always answer "let me ask my team" before discussing deliverables if he wasn't sure.

The number of times that he explained in meetings that's the team's timeline didn't change, but that the stakeholders' expectations did and that introduced a new additional timeline was incredible. It's unsurprising that he only lasted a year or two before his bosses started pushing for a promotion. Seeing him work made mean bit jealous that I couldn't be on his team, but we work at different companies and I don't want to join the private sector if I can be of benefit to public education.

They're technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.

Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don't need them, but they sure as hell need me.

I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.

I've well over a decade in software project management. The number one thing we contribute to a project is saying to the client (internal or external) "Sure, we can add that feature but it will have an impact on the delivery timeline unless we deprioritise other features. Are you happy for us to extend the deadline? If not, let's talk about what we can cut from the existing scope in favour of your new feature."

They're supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.

In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren't at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.

Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team's direction and priorities.

Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).

I've had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery... he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to "do his best for the day" and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management... sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise "using AI" in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there's a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone's job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that's just a technical team lead's job.

They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.

sudo rm -rf ~/*

"Fuck y'all, I quit. Good luck with the crisis."

They all do things in their own way and argue over what is best, and often fail to see the bigger picture.

It sounds like your programming team is missing a senior engineer/director of engineering. You need an engineer who has the experience to see the big picture, architect solutions, and tell the team what's what.

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

On second thoughr.... Is this a world we wanna save?

Then again, the guy giving you that remark usually doesn't know the difference

I mean, Agile doesn't really demand that you do or don't use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

The last one hurt a bit.

Why won't you sprint the sprint so we can get more sprints in the sprint?

There's an alternative to creating too many tickets that only add overhead and then make it harder to get into the project. Creating a good amount of tickets.

I took the OP reference as demand for ticket creation when they don't make sense and only hinder development through unnecessary overhead. E.g. creating a ticket before a quick analysis, or creating individual tickets when one story/feature ticket would be enough. Or more specifically in this case, having to create one before fixing a critical blocker.

We're making the world a better place 🙏

If anybody here ever does make such an app: Please, please release it anonymously, because the people you're saving it from will be angry.

They really need to update that to twinks wearing programmer socks.

Also 1 overweight guy with a beard that diea at some point and 1 nerdy guy in glasses and a Star wars T-shirt...played by Glen Powell, or Chris Pratt.

The most important part of developing hacking tools is to have a UI that includes text scrolling really quickly with little beep, blip, and bloop noises.

It's practically a documentary

I was going to bring this one up. The least realistic part of Antitrust is how the antagonist is defeated, but the parts where somebody is impatiently waiting for javac to finish so that they can pack their .class files into a JAR, or typing in a list of IPv4 addresses one-by-one to see which one works, were painfully plausible.

https://youtu.be/M1D2zTJhIss

That's the one for me, from Spider-Man no way home. Keep adding more stuff to a complex working until reality itself breaks.