- # Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature? - Jokes For Jokers with Jesse Alford
1:30 - People tend to rail against something that is really shallow. Then showing how this applies to Scrum
3:15 - “And it’s kind of tedious, but it can also be fun. But, like, Scrum specifically, I’m going to say when the most virulent and common version of a thing is the shallow version of it, maybe that’s the thing. Like, there is a point at which the identity switches from being like, oh, yeah, there’s a real Scrum where people are doing it right and they’re having good experiences.
Those become the weirdos. And actual Scrum, I think, has to own the outcomes that it actually, to my eyes, reliably produces.”
“Scrum is the shallow version of Scrum.”
“The good ship Scrum has been sunk by its consequences”
10:45 - Reiterating a line from Patrick McKenzie - “I solve business problems — occasionally a computer is involved.”
Another Patrick McKenzie line about how businesses are fundamentally unserious about certain items such as hiring
From the above link:
- “All value is in the execution.”
- “Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances.”
- “The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates.”
- “Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.”
11:30 - “people are fundamentally unserious about a lot of the things that they’re doing. And when someone is fundamentally unserious about something, you kind of don’t want to update your opinion about that thing too much from it”
Hiring practices are falling into two categories - beacon protection where they’re big enough to have their internal management structure to deal with bad actors that get through.
And the rest are fundamentally unserious. The tiny fraction that are serious are “we have roles open and we need to find good fits for them because if we don’t find the right productive people for these, we will suffer negative consequences.”
14:00 - another Patrick McKenzie article got mentioned - Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
24:00 - exploring how pay bands, levels, and promotion expectations creates a system to create agency less agent - a line manager who has little to no ability to affect compensation and promotion.
01:37:00 - “I just paid a million dollars to teach you this lesson. I didn’t want to and it was not a good price. But I’m not about to let someone else benefit from my investment”
And how companies struggle to turn failure into success because someone can use their failure experience.
01:45:00 - “I’m really curious what the reputation of ops and DevOps and similar type roles will be in a few years, because the domain of doing things to production offers the type of pulse pounding feedback that tends to cause people to become really careful and thoughtful and iterate on their systems. And as a community and a practice and a discipline over the last decade, it has by and large been filled with people who are very good”
02:20:00 - A fantastic exploring how planning poker points can actually be useful - if they are not a shallow practice. If used as the start to a discussion, for nuance, and backed by team culture they can have value. Examples included complexity levels, unknowns, - so when there was a divide it would require a conversation of why folks thought it was more or less challenging or complex as appropriate.
“Looking at this as a practice that can be shallow or deep is a really interesting example because it has all these characteristics about being such bullshit and so on.
“Ultimately, pointing is in service of something. And the way to tell if you’re experiencing a very shallow version of it or a potentially useful version that you can get value out of is basically whether or not everyone wants to do it. At Pivotal, people would all have reasons for why they wanted to do this pointing, why they wanted to use a particular scale.”
“These are all deep practice reasons. These are all deep practice benefits. And everyone has to be realizing them.”
If you ask for the rationale behind a team’s pointing system “and “you get just sort of a ravel of contradictory reasons or of like, well, it’s just what we do, or for velocity or something else, okay, now you’ve got a shallow practice on your hand.”
02:31:00 - interesting point on avoiding shallow comments - don’t allow them because it destroys the ability for deep conversations.
Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature? - “Jokes For Jokers” with Jesse Alford
https://overcast.fm/+ABHj6YQshXE
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nik9125/episodes/Jokes-For-Jokers-with-Jesse-Alford-e2imrad