It’s April Fool’s Day tomorrow, so I decided to prepare a less technical post. I asked my friends who are programmers what annoyed them. Please don’t take it as a complaint, but rather as an opportunity to change.
Unclear tasks
The fundamental problem at daily work is the tasks. However, not the tasks themselves are the problem, but their imprecision. You can get a ”login” task without any details. When we ask stakeholders about their expectations, it turns into much more than we initially expected.
Unclear acceptance criteria or reproductive paths are also a common problem. In one of the companies, we even ranked the worst-described tasks and gave their creators something like Golden Raspberry Award. It was funny 😂.
Underestimating tasks
Most tasks are generally estimated how much they can take. Nothing wrong with that. While the developer ratings influence the evaluation.
However, it often turns out that a product manager or other leader has their own evaluation. The team can estimate less, but never more than that. One of my friends once showed me how their planning looked like. They had an estimation, and the whole team was forced to show that it could be prepared faster.
Tasks take a long time to start. Often the person who valued them did not share why they gave such value. Also, the requirements or the environment may have changed.
Aversion to follow conventions
Each project is different. However, to make it easier to switch between projects or introduce new developers, most projects follow certain conventions. One of the things that can be annoying is the person in the team who always does his own thing, in his own way.
The same problem is when there is a ”guru” in the team who accepts every change. Of course, only (s)he has a monopoly on the right decisions and good ideas.
Ignoring team feedback
A team working daily with a project can understand its limitations much better than someone from the outside. There is probably nothing more upset than ignoring the team’s voice. In the case of critical errors, this can have an objectionable effect.
Adding tasks to your team (without consulting) and expecting immediate execution can also be frustrating. During one of the sprints, I had such a situation. I received assignments at the speed of a machine gun, each subsequent one even more critical. In the end, nothing was ready, and the sprint was wasted.
Poor value meetings
Depending on your position and experience, you can attend meetings or a large number of meetings. You often have to be because, as a leader, you are responsible for specific functionalities. How easy is it to annoy a programmer? Exactly! Schedule a meeting that could be solved by collaborating on the document.
In the productivity post, I indicated the calendar topic. Blocking hours may be the only opportunity to be able to work and deliver value that others expect. Many thanks to Piotr for the suggestion.
Strange recruitment offers
Finally, I left a topic which can be an IT legend. Some of the offers you can receive on LinkedIn are sent by scripts. A funny situation happened once. A colleague uses an emoji as a first name and first name + last name in the last name field. One of the recruiters just greeted him using emoji instead of name!
Summary
You might think that programmers are special people, and their uniqueness blinds them. Nothing could be more wrong. A software developer is a person like any other. Daily work, however, provides many situations to upset, surprise, and even laugh. The most important thing is to remain human and be able to cope with the world around us.