The Misanthropic Developer

It’s Possible to be TOO Good

June 19th, 2023

Growing up, we’re often taught that we should try to be the best at whatever it is that we do. Some parents take it so far as to be abusive with regard to that mindset – picking apart everything that their children do to find flaws in it or even withholding love when they don’t think that their child is “good enough”.

This can cause a positively huge amount of problems for a person during the course of their life, but the one we’re going to look at here is something that a lot of people wouldn’t even consider a “problem” – succeeding in spite of overwhelming odds (and often doing so consistently).

I can hear people now going “What’s wrong with succeeding against the odds?” After all, half of the movies that we watch are underdog characters who win despite it looking impossible, sometimes being literally bloody and barely able to stand when they win. We’re taught to idolize this shit (which is, in itself, part of the problem).

Yes, you can win in situations like that (sometimes), but the big question is – at what cost?

Any victory is going to have a cost, even if it’s just an opportunity cost (what could you have been doing instead that might have made you happier?). However, as the odds of your failure go up, the cost of that victory also goes up.

It can seriously get to the point where it can impact your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. I’ve not only seen it happen in others, I’ve seen it happen firsthand. And the “reward” for pulling it off is that the people above you in the org take the effort for granted (after all, you made it look easy and they weren’t the ones being broken by it), and they expect you to do it repeatedly.

Don’t fall for it.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, and, for whatever reason, you can’t simply walk away, be mindful of what’s happening and use it to your advantage.

Don’t run yourself into the ground for someone who won’t actually care (honestly, don’t run yourself into the ground for anyone, but that’s another blog post). Instead, document the hell out of that, use it to update your resume into something that will make other companies drool at the chance to have you join their org, work on how to package and sell those wins in a conversation, and then find a better place to be.

There are absolutely healthy and relatively sane workplaces out there who will value you as a person and the fact that you can get shit done while not expecting you to damage your physical or mental health to do it. And the hilarious part is that they usually pay a lot better than the ones who expect you to grind yourself into a paste on a regular basis.

You don’t owe loyalty to people who will take you for granted or who will expect you to suffer so that they can reap the rewards. Break the cycle of abuse and work to make your life better, because you only get one.

“The clever bird chooses the branch whereon to perch; the wise servant selects the master to serve. Seize the chance when it comes, for repentance ever comes too late.”

– Romance of the Three Kingdoms
It’s Okay to Outgrow a Mentor

May 24th, 2023

In your personal and professional life, you’ll probably have at least a few people that you look up to, learn from, ask for advice, and use as a sounding board or confidant. They’re people that will help you get father than you could have on your own.

Mentors are important. There’s no denying it. There is, however, one thing to keep in mind:

They’re also people. Just like you, they have hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations. And just like you, they change as they go through their lives.

Sometimes that changes brings us closer together. Other times that change creates distance between us (whether physical or personal). Occasionally it drives us apart. All of these things are okay, though they can be difficult to come to terms with.

I’ve had friends that have become mentors, and sometimes mentors that became friends. I’ve also had people who were mentors to me that it became unhealthy to be around.

One of them is someone I knew for years. We’d always had some differences (we’re people and that’s normal), but we got along well for the most part. I learned a lot from him and he may have even learned a thing or two from me

As time went on, however, we both changed enough that we really just weren’t a good fit for each other. I know it was difficult for me to end the relationship, and I would imagine that it wasn’t exactly easy for him either, but it was what was probably best for both of us.

Don’t go into a relationship with anyone using the mindset that one day you’ll part. That’s generally not healthy, but you shouldn’t hang on to things after they’ve become harmful for you either.

You only get one life. Make sure that you treat it well, and that includes being around people that help you be better even if you have to say goodbye to them later in your journey.
Making It Up As We Go

May 15th, 2023

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Some people may not want you to know this; others may wish that you knew it the whole time, but I’m going to say it out loud.

None of us really know what we’re doing. We all make this shit up as we go.

No joke.

It doesn’t matter who you’re talking about, the nearly universal truth is that they’re making this up as they go. The reason it doesn’t look like they are is usually because they’re both really good at faking it and they’re basing the things they’re doing on lessons they learned while doing other things (which is not the same as already knowing what you’re doing).

I’ve known people who have literally written the book on subjects that have admitted they felt just as lost as I did most of the time. This isn’t something that changes in your life – with the possible exception of when you do the same thing over and over again, but I would think that brings its own kind of hazards.

I’ve even known people who were literal pioneers in their fields and they’ve admitted that they don’t really know what they’re doing. In fact, nobody did until they figured it out (and that’s why they’re pioneers – because they’re the ones that figured out a new way of doing something).

I’ve been writing software professionally for something on the order of 20 years. I’ve been writing software in general for roughly 30 years now. I don’t think there’s been a day that I’ve done it where I’ve actually known what I was doing, and that’s okay.

You know why? Because I know that, even though I don’t know what I’m doing, if I try, I can generally find a way to get it to work. The biggest challenge is starting. After that, momentum takes over and I even tend to enjoy figuring things out.

Most of the other professionals I’ve known are the same way, and it doesn’t seem to matter what the profession is. The consensus seems to be “nobody knows anything. Starting is hard. Continuing when you have momentum is easy (relatively speaking)”

Get out there, impostor syndrome and all, and embrace the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing with the realization that you can figure it out. It may take time and experimentation, but you’ll get there.

You aren’t alone. You aren’t broken. And, if you need it, you can always ask for help.

I have faith in you.

To quote Better Off Dead:

“Go that way. REALLY fast. If something gets in your way… turn”
Make Friends – Help a Busy Person

May 2nd, 2023
One of the easiest ways to make friends and allies in business is to help people.

Seriously. It’s often that simple.

It doesn’t even have to be that big of an effort on your part. In fact, the busier the person you’re talking to, the smaller the assistance has to be a lot of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ll thank you for doing huge things for them as well (provided you do them properly), but the busier someone gets, the more small things pile up that need to be taken care of and the harder it is to get them off of their plate.

I say this both as someone who often is a very busy person as well as someone who helps others in order to further strategic goals (and sometimes just because it’s the right thing to do. You don’t always have to have an ulterior motive).

If you take something off of my plate and do it well, you’ll both get my attention and generally a public call out for it in the next group meeting. I’ll make sure that others know that you’re someone who helps out. A lot of the people I’ve worked with are the same way.

Let’s look at a real world example of this in action.

Part of my job is to put my team and the work that we do in a good light. One of the ways that we do this is to demo the work that we do to business stakeholders. These stakeholders can be anything from line managers to members of the C-suite depending on the situation. (No pressure, right?)

In order to do this well, you need to do some prep work. In this case, we were working with one of the business Subject Matter Experts so that we would present the technical aspects and they would speak to the business impact (as a pattern, it’s pretty effective).

This requires setting up meetings which, in a busy environment, can be a challenge because of everyone’s schedules.

Normally, this is something that our Scrum Master (a wonderful and incredibly busy person of whom I am quite fond) would help facilitate. However, since this is my team’s show (as it were), I put it on my list of things to do just to make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks.

I didn’t state that I was going to do it, I just did it because it needed to be done and I had the ability to get the ball rolling. From a practical standpoint it made sense and I have a good working relationship with all of the people who needed to be in the room for the dry run, so communicating with them isn’t a problem.

So, that morning, I set up a group chat to hash out the timing (if you’ve ever worked with a group of busy people, you’ll learn that their calendar in Outlook usually isn’t their real calendar). We get the whole thing set up in about 15 minutes, meeting invites go out, everyone’s happy, and the world keeps spinning.

The Scrum Master also made it a point to thank me for taking point on it because of how busy things were (in other news, water is wet and Wednesday ends in ‘y’).

By taking a tiny task off of the plate of another busy person I:
- Further cemented my business friendship with the Scrum Master (who I already get along well with, but this sort of thing never hurts)
- Helped the business Subject Matter Expert (yet another very busy person) save themselves time and headache by setting up the meeting and taking the lead of laying out roughly how we wanted to run the presentation.
- Helped the members of my team set themselves up for success (This is always a big deal for me).
- Added another item to the list that shows that I am a person who can both get things done and can easily take up leadership on items without being asked (never underestimate how much impact this can have on your business relationships and career).
Not bad for 15 minutes of work that I was planning on doing anyway. And the great news is that you can do it too and it often really is that simple.
Celebrate Others

April 25th, 2023
It costs you nothing to celebrate the success of other people.

It doesn’t diminish the work you do. It doesn’t negate your own accomplishments. The world won’t end if you give kudos to someone else.

In fact, celebrating the success of others is one of the easiest ways to make allies in an organization or community. The person you’re celebrating will be glad that somebody is recognizing them and the people around you will generally see you as someone who wants to share the success rather than make everything about yourself.

This makes those people more likely to want to cooperate with you because they see that you will share the credit and that you play well with others.

People like to do well. They also like to be acknowledged for doing well. Go out of your way to celebrate the wins that other people have. It can pay dividends years later because those people will remember you and what you did for them (at literally not cost to yourself).

Years worth of upside for something that takes less than five minutes to do. And that’s not an exaggeration.

The greatest piece of personal marketing that you can have is people who speak well of you when you’re not in the room. The most likely people to say positive things about you in these situations fall into a couple of categories:
- People you’ve worked your butt off to make happy.
- People who you’ve helped put the spotlight on when they do something well.
One of these is a heck of a lot easier to pull off than the other. Both are worth doing at times, but making people feel good is much lower effort and much simpler to scale.

The irony is that the second group is, in my experience, actually more likely to say positive things about you. It seems weird, but in a lot of cases, feelings really do trump effort.

That’s not to say that you need to fawn over people (that creates its own problems). Just give credit where it’s due and do it publicly – especially in front of the people in the chain of command of the person or group that you’re praising.

If you do it consistently, you’ll all probably come out ahead. Plus, it’s just the right thing to do.
Don’t Obsess Over Hiring “The Best”

April 9th, 2023
A lot of companies boast that they only hire “the best.” Many of them even go so far to say that they only hire the top x percent (the top 10% seems to be the most common claim).

I’m certain that this sounds impressive to someone (probably their executive team), but there are two problems with it:
- It’s a meaningless claim and, frankly, bullshit.
- If it was true, you’d never want to work there.
It’s a Meaningless Claim

If all of the companies that claim to hire only the top 10% of developers were actually doing that, they’d all have one employee each (if they were lucky). Statistically, that would probably result in a situation where there were more companies than total developers that would be capable of meeting their criteria – not total candidates, total developers globally (the total candidates at any given time, for any given company/job are a tiny fraction of the total number of developers).

So maybe they mean the top 10% of people who apply to them? This sounds more reasonable, but it’s still bullshit.

Say you have 3 open positions and 5 people apply. After interviewing all five of them, you find that three of them would be an amazing fit for your company.

If you only hire the top 10%, that means you can only hire one of the three amazing candidates and the other two roles are going to have to go unfilled.

Actually, even that isn’t true. Technically you could only hire half of a developer because 1 out of 5 is 20%, and we can’t be having that. We have standards to maintain! Somebody get the chainsaw!

Okay, okay fine. We’ll make an exception just this once. We’ll hire you and you’ll get to keep your legs, but remember that you owe us for the consideration. It’s this sort of kindness that makes us a Best Place To Work. Welcome aboard, Bob.

You Wouldn’t Want To Work There

Now that we’ve debunked the absurdity that is the Top 10% nonsense, we can get serious again (at least for a minute or two. Past that, I make no promises).

It’s been my experience that a lot of the places that make the top 10% claim are places that you wouldn’t want to work (or at least I don’t). They’re filled with inflated egos and hero programmers who horde knowledge in order to maintain their position (because, let’s face it, that ego is generally a very thin mask over a great deal of fear).

Both of these are bad things.

They may not start that way, but the cultures almost always turn that direction in my experience. Once you get a few self-important “geniuses” in an org (especially if they make it into management or executive positions), they tend to bias toward hiring two kinds of people – people who “impress” them (more self-important “geniuses”) and people who won’t question them.

That’s a recipe for abuse, assholes who make everyone else’s lives miserable, and a metric boatload of overtime when things inevitably blow up because one of the “geniuses” didn’t think things through or cut corners to “save the day”.

Been there. Done that. I think I’ll pass on it from now on.

What to do Instead?

Stop worrying about hiring “the best” and, instead, hire people with decent skills and the potential to grow within your organization.

I’m being totally serious. Ignore the business magazines that try to sell you on the FAANG hiring methods du jour (those have changed a lot in recent years anyway) and hire people with decent skills (both technical and personal) who want to get better at what they do. Especially pay attention to people that don’t look like you.

I’d say that creating software is a team sport now, and while that’s true, it’s not the whole story. Creating a viable product and finding market fit for it is the team sport you’re probably actually playing (even if your products are internal to your company). Software is just part of the way that you get there.

You need people that act like, well, people. Yes, they may need to be able to write code, but they’ll also need to have the understanding, patience, and humility to work with others in order to understand problems that exist in areas outside of their current experience.

The other side of that coin is that you have to put the work in too. You can’t just hire people and turn them loose. Part of the exercise of hiring people who can grow is to put the effort in to help them grow.

Expose them to technologies that they may not have used before. Encourage them to take on challenges that can help grow their leadership skills. Involve them in the discovery process for business development (it’s amazing what a new set of eyes can spot).

Yes, that means that they won’t be “100% utilized” at doing what they’re (currently) best at, but you shouldn’t be trying to run them at the red line all of the time anyway. That’s a recipe for burnout and guarantees that they won’t improve while they’re with you (which, frankly, is something that should terrify you because, if they aren’t improving, your company isn’t improving either).

So get out there, hire decent people with decent skills, and work to build teams that actually work together and grow in order to meet the challenges that they face. You’ll all probably come out better for it.
There Is No Permanent Record

April 6th, 2023

While you were attending school as a child, you may have been threatened with things being put on your Permanent Record any time you did something that an authority figure didn’t like. It didn’t even have to be that you did anything wrong; just something that they didn’t like.

If you’re like most kids, that threat probably hit pretty hard. And it was designed to. In fact, I’d classify it as a type of abuse – instead of a teacher or other authority figure taking responsibility for working with you to help you understand why the behavior was unacceptable, they make a nebulous appeal to authority and essentially threaten to ruin the rest of your life.

That assumes that what you did even actually was unacceptable. Being accused of unacceptable behavior where it doesn’t exist is something that marginalized people especially have to deal with.

And they’re doing this to someone who has limited life experience to know any better and even less ability to defend themselves without the intervention of another authority figure (if they’re lucky enough to have an authority figure willing or able to fight for them).

Even worse, they were conditioning you to accept the vague threat of all of the actions that somebody didn’t like being held against you for the rest of your life. They were setting you up for a cycle of abuse that could be used by the people who sign your paycheck as an adult, and a lot of them knew that they were doing it.

That’s not education. It’s indoctrination. Notice that you never get told something good is going to go on your permanent record. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

You have my permission, and even my encouragement, to disregard every single time someone has told you that something would go on your permanent record. Pull the memories out, look at them for the attempts at abuse that they were, and try to work on moving past them. Seriously.

There is no permanent record. You might have had a file that followed you around in school (and even it likely didn’t contain all the things that your teachers were claiming it did), but even then, that shit ended when you walked across the stage at the end of your senior year.

At that moment, all of the power that they held over you evaporated and all of their threats suddenly ceased to have any influence on reality. Poof. Gone in one moment. What didn’t end, unfortunately, were the scars. Those will take time and work to get over.

Here’s a really neat extension to that fact – the same applies in large part when you leave a job. Your former bosses aren’t going to go around telling every place that you applied to that you’re a worthless asshole unless there is something severely wrong with them (and then you probably have legal recourse).

That isn’t to say that you should go around being a jerk to everyone with no care for the consequences of your own actions. It isn’t even saying that you can’t gain a reputation in your local or professional community if you go around being an absolute asshole to people on a regular basis.

If you consistently do decent things, people will probably tend to have a positive view of you and will probably tell other people that they should work with you. If you consistently do things to hurt people, people will probably talk quietly and you’ll end up worse off for it. However, nobody is writing this stuff down in a mystical, magical file folder that follows you around like an angry honey badger trying to turn your life into an exercise in never-ending misery.

There will be people that will like you. There will be people that will hate you (and some of them will do it no matter what you do). What there won’t be is some accounting of your supposed sins engraved on a stone tablet that people can take off of a shelf and look at whenever they feel like it.

Don’t worry about nebulous authority figures and what they think. Live your life the best way that you can, try to do the right thing (both for yourself and those you care about), and tell the Permanent Record to take a long walk off of a short pier.

You’ll be better off for it.
Stop Using Acronyms

March 29th, 2023

One of the hardest problems in business (right along with all of the other hardest problems in business) is communication. Every industry, and honestly every business, has its own terminology that you need to be aware of.

You know what a lot of businesses also have (and often overuse)? Acronyms. And we need to reverse that trend.

Acronyms make life miserable for people who are new to your org because they have absolutely no idea what they mean. Experienced people often use them without a second thought because they’ve been conditioned to think that they save time (they don’t, really) and because “everybody else uses them” (fitting in with the group is often a survival mechanism).

On the extreme end, you have people who get offended if you ask what an acronym means (because that means you “don’t get it”) or if you suggest that they’re overusing them.

I once had a manager who insisted on shortening anything that he thought he could possibly turn into an acronym and would then whine when people asked him to explain himself. It made meetings miserable and take far longer than they should for the simple reason that nobody knew what was actually being said.

He was by far the worst person I’ve encountered with regard to that sort of thing, and that’s saying something considering that I’ve spent some time working for the Department of Defense (where it seems like everything is an acronym).

Don’t be like that. Language should be accessible. It’s literally created to allow people to communicate. In fact, the metric by which you judge the language you use in business should be how difficult it is for a new member of your team to understand what you’re saying.

Seriously. If you can’t explain what you’re speaking or writing about to someone brand new to your organization in such a way that they’re able to get 90% of what you’re trying to convey, you’re doing it wrong. And the other 10% should be due to things like domain specific knowledge requirements; not having to decode jargon.

Acronyms that are the name of a system are something of an exception, because they’re being used as the proper name for that thing, but when that happens, explain what it actually means to new people. Another possible exception is widely understood acronyms, though you’ll still want to list the meaning of those the first time in a written document and offer to explain them when you use them in conversation.

Other than that, leave the acronyms out of it when you can. The less cognitive load you place on people trying to understand a topic, the better off everyone generally is.
You Can’t Force Psychological Safety

March 12th, 2023

In recent years, a lot more emphasis has been placed on making spaces (particularly workplaces) into settings that have psychological safety. I consider this a fantastic trend (though a lot of people tend to disagree with me) because people who feel psychologically safe not only have a better quality of life, the results of their work tend to be better.

What sane, healthy business or leader doesn’t want to have happy employees who do great work?

The problem is that a lot of people have absolutely no idea how to foster this kind of environment (or, worse yet, say they want to foster it and then do everything they can to destroy that safety). Many of them seem to think that it’s as simple as saying “you’re safe. You can talk to me about anything.”

It doesn’t work like that.

The truth of the matter is that you can’t make someone else feel psychologically safe. You don’t have that power – only they do. There is no magic wand that you can wave and say “you’re psychologically safe!” (Especially since that’s usually followed by an unspoken “Now go do what I say”).

Real psychological safety happens when the other person feels that they have it. End of story.

So, if you can’t make someone else feel safe, how the heck do you get to a place where your team actually has psychological safety?

The answer is that it’s much like nurturing any other kind of relationship – you do things that help foster it and try to avoid things that harm it.

Things That Help Foster Psychological Safety

Treat people like people – I know I say this a lot, but the people around you are people. Not resources. Not human capital. They’re people, damnit. Treat them like it. You’re never going to have psychological safety in a group of people that you don’t treat like people.

Follow up on your commitments – Show the people around you that you do what you say you will. Every. Single. Day. People who consistently see that you do what you say are going to be more likely to open up.

Own your mistakes – Don’t bury mistakes that you make. Admit to them with your whole chest. Especially when they cause some harm (even small harm) to the people around you.

Apologize and make things right – After you’ve admitted to the mistake, apologize for it and see what can be done to make things right. Did you ever have moments as a kid when adults essentially told you to deal with it when they did something that hurt you? Did you like that? Did it make you feel safe? Yeah, well, it doesn’t make your peers or people who report to you feel safe either.

Realize that we all have bad days, even you. (Sometimes especially you) – Have some grace with people, including yourself. Sometimes we have an off day and things don’t come out right. As long as it’s not a pattern of behavior, that’s okay. Own it, apologize, and do better. The people around you will see you doing it and be more likely to model that behavior themselves.

Reassure people – when they make mistakes (and they will), make it a point to help put things into perspective and reassure them that it’s okay to make a mistake. Then work with them to figure out how to make things right if something has to be made whole.

One of the ways I help calm people down when things go sideways is literally to say “If that’s the worst thing that happens today, we’ll be alright.” My team hears this fairly often. The thing is that you have to mean it and then you have to help them fix it.

Celebrate the wins – Don’t just focus on when things go wrong. Call out the things that go right, and do it frequently. Even if something seems like a small win, it’s still a win. Celebrating victory helps bring people together and reinforces social bonds. Those bonds help foster psychological safety.

Share the credit – You should be doing this anyway, but sharing the credit for those wins makes people feel like they’re not going to be used by you (because you’ve literally demonstrated that you aren’t just using them). It also helps a lot of people feel like part of a cohesive group, and that can help foster a sense of psychological safety.

Realize that, while you may be the one “in charge” on paper (or in the org chart), at the end of the day, you aren’t in charge of a damned thing. You’re responsible for the people in your care – I guarantee that every person who works with you can get a job somewhere else. If they want to be somewhere else, they aren’t going to have safety here. Even if the project isn’t great, you can help your team feel safe and even look forward to working together despite the challenges.

Things That Destroy Psychological Safety

The short answer is that the things that destroy psychological safety are pretty much the opposite of everything on the above list – berate people for mistakes, go out of your way to find flaws when they don’t really matter, be “The Boss”, and don’t admit when you make mistakes.

People will see those things and they will instinctively know that they can’t trust you. If they don’t trust you, they aren’t going to feel safe. Period.

This is sometimes a lot harder than it sounds. Remember that you’re a person too and sometimes you don’t feel secure in your own position due to pressures that you are facing, causing you to revert to closed off behavior. Those are the times that leadership can feel lonely, but realize that you aren’t actually alone.

The people that work with you (and especially the people that report to you) want to see you succeed and to feel secure because they themselves want to succeed and feel secure. If you put effort into it, unless you’re in a situation where no reasonable person could ever feel safe, they should at least start to feel like they’re safe in the space that you’ve created as a group.

Again, remember that power is with them, not with you. You can’t force it, but you can help it grow.

Also keep in mind that, while psychological safety can be hard to build, it’s incredibly easy to destroy. It’s something you will have to work to encourage every day, but it’s worth it – both for you and for those around you.
Becoming Agile – How Transformations Go Wrong and How To Start Doing It Better

March 8th, 2023

If you’ve been in tech long enough, you’ve either been through an “Agile Transformation” or you’ve seen the result of one. Usually what happens is the company brings in a consultant for a short period of time (sometimes a day, sometimes several weeks) and they introduce you to a bunch of Ceremonies that you basically follow by rote description and then they leave.

Congratulations! You’re Agile now! Go off and do the thing!

The problem is that these almost never work. Fortunately, there is a reason why they don’t work and it’s fairly straightforward – each group of people works differently. They all have different needs, and this means that they all have different paths to become “agile”, but almost every agile consultant comes in with a set playbook and either drops it in your lap before leaving or tries to mold your group into what they were taught and got certified for.

Agile consultants often describe their practices as being things that you have to do in order to speed up, but every team will have different things that cause them to speed up (and “speeding up” is the wrong way to look at it anyway).

Becoming “agile” isn’t having a standup, putting “points” on poorly defined “stories”, having a meeting where people say things that went wrong but nobody will ever change, or forcing your team to “commit” to shipping a certain number of points in a “sprint”.

In fact, it isn’t an end point or some finished state that your team reaches – it’s a journey that lets your team discover ways that work better for them. You’ll never “complete” an “Agile Transformation” because you will always find ways to improve.

At its core, an agile team responds well to change and works at a sustainable pace in order to provide value in a timely manner.

Seriously. That’s the secret. Responds well to change and works at a sustainable pace (and the definition of sustainable is not a fixed number of points) while providing value in a timely manner.

Sounds great in theory, right? The question is “how do we get there?”

The first part of the answer is that you need to realize that creating a product is a team activity. It’s not something that you compartmentalize by having someone write a bunch of requirements, hand that off to people who write software, have those people hand the software off to a group of people who do testing, etc.

For the more nuts and bolts answer, it depends on where you are right now. The best way to figure that out is to communicate openly and honestly. This can be done in three basic places – before work starts, while work is being done, and after the work is completed. You should communicate openly and honestly during all three.

Remember those Ceremonies I mentioned and that you’ve probably encountered? Some of them are actually good ideas if you do them in a way that works for your team instead of just using them to check a box. The trick is to do them for a reason that makes sense to your team.

Communication Before The Work Happens – User Story Refinement

At its core, a user story is a placeholder for a conversation. If you’ve been using a user story as a set of requirements that you hand off to the people writing the code and never think about again, you’re doing it wrong because no amount of specificity in a written document can cover all of the edge cases and questions that will arise when something is being worked on.

I’ve seen business analysts and product owners get upset when developers want to discuss the finer points of written requirements because “that’s not my job” (or even worse, saying that it isn’t the place of the developer to question anything). This is a team effort and you’re on the team. Expect to discuss the details of what the business is trying to accomplish and even question if the way you envision doing it is the correct one.

It’s easier and cheaper to fix problems early – ideally before they happen.

Communication While The Work Happens – Standup

If I can make one point about standup meetings it’s this – Standup isn’t a status report. It does not exist for your manager to get a daily update on who is working on what card. It is not everyone going around in a circle and saying “Working on card 123456. Making progress. No blockers”. And it is not a meeting that requires the presence of a Scrum Master in order to happen – the Scrum Master, if you have one, is a facilitator; nothing more and nothing less.

Your team is perfectly capable of speaking among themselves with one of them helping guide the meeting – take turns doing it. It will give the members of your team ownership over their own processes and will help them grow as communicators and leaders.

The purpose you should be pursuing in standup is twofold – to get your team on the same page and to surface any problems as soon as possible so you can work together to solve them. Here’s an example.

Joe: “I’m currently working on the authentication for the app, but I’m having a problem getting the company-provided auth library to work. It just sort of hangs after I send the request. I’ve tried reaching out to the team that maintains it, but nobody’s responded.”

Tomoko: “I’ve had to get that working with another one of our products. Let’s take a look at it after standup.”

Notice that at no time during that exchange was a Jira card number mentioned and that the conversation contained actual information that could make sense to the people on the team. As an added bonus, Joe even helped limit the solution space by saying that he’s already tried getting an answer from the other team.

You might also have noticed that this exchanged surfaced two problems – that Joe was having problems getting a company provided library to work (which may indicate that it is poorly documented or buggy) and that he was unable to get a response from the team that was responsible for maintaining it. Both of these things are important to be aware of because they make the team less able to provide value in a timely manner.

Fortunately, it seems that the immediate problem of getting the library working will be resolved by two of our teammates collaborating and sharing knowledge. This is a great sign and one that you want to see happen as often as necessary.

Communication After The Work Happens – Retrospective

It’s a good idea to get together as a team periodically to discuss how things went. Once every week or two is probably optimal because it’s often enough that things are still fresh in your mind and of a manageable size to consider and discuss but not so often that it becomes a burden.

This is literally just a discussion. Talk about what went well and what you can do to keep doing that thing, the things that didn’t go well and whether you can do anything to improve them, and the things that went okay but might be better with a little work. Celebrate your wins and come together as a team.

Some of you are probably (quite understandably) wondering how I started off saying that the Ceremonies don’t matter and then advocating for using a bunch of them anyway. The truth is that the Ceremonies don’t matter – what matters is that your team start to come together as a group and have meaningful conversations.

You don’t need pre-set meetings for that, though they can be helpful. If part of a framework doesn’t produce value for your team, don’t use it. Sometimes it’s not a good fit for your team; other times it’s not a good fit yet. Let your team come together and figure out what the next step is to make them be able to work at a sustainable pace while being responsive to change and providing value in a timely manner.

It’s a Meaningless Claim

You Wouldn’t Want To Work There

What to do Instead?

Things That Help Foster Psychological Safety

Things That Destroy Psychological Safety

Communication Before The Work Happens – User Story Refinement

Communication While The Work Happens – Standup

Communication After The Work Happens – Retrospective