found in my archives
I’d say I feel seen, but it’s really dark in here.
Product Manager: Make a step by step guide of how they think the lightbulb is going to be fixed without explicitly mentioning the broken lightbulb.
Woah there buddy, you can’t just jump straight into the (non-)solution like that! You skipped the planning refinement! And the planning pre-refinement! And the pre-planning pre-refinement! And we’ll still discuss all of this in the post-planning refinement!
(Yes, every one of these are real, distinct meetings, lasting at minimum one hour but sometimes two or more. EVERY WEEK. Kill me now please? 🥺)
And after all that it is discovered that it was the wrong solution all along because the requirements were poorly specified, so the process must be started all over again
The circular justification of a PM’s job, see how much value they add!?
So something I don’t understand is the logic behind my job. I’m a software engineer, that effort makes sense to me to develop and solution and configure.
But I’ve been given a product owner role. And then I have a product manager I work with who isn’t technical.
I really don’t feel like I do much other than stress out
Tbf that seems like the proper response to me.:-)
Normal human ways of thinking go like: however you do it, so long as the job gets done it’s fine! ☺️
PM thinking: even if nothing ever gets done, so long as
I collect a salarywe continue to have 3 hours of meetings most days every week, it’s all good! 🤔🤯Also, afaik, the conflict between the PO and PM roles is somehow literally the point? You get blamed if the tasks don’t get done, while the PM ensures that endless reports get generated - I doubt the vast most of which are ever read, and I know that I for one can never find one of those later, in part bc there are so many of them and they encompass everything else into them as well (Jira tickets, Slack messages, hundreds of emails per day mostly saying “this Jira ticket or that Confluence page has been edited”, the former of which for the life of me I cannot figure out how to turn off!).
So… not only I but we all feel your pain! Otoh, that seems one of the first job roles that will soon be replaced by AI?
I have a feeling AI won’t take my role, AI will force me to take ownership of more products. I worry greatly about that.
Yes, this is greatly to be feared:-). But at least you will have a job, other than “factory worker” like everyone else seems to be geared into becoming (either that or soilent green / food - I wish I were joking, though possibly the person in charge who put forth that idea was joking at least? I mean… unless we are into it? No? Okay we can wait on that one…).
You will just have to manage all of the products that the company can force upon you, while they do the “real” work - of golfing, ofc! 😉
Also I now realize that my above messages were slightly incorrect - they were for the “Project Manager” role, which is distinct from your role as “Product Owner”, and then “Product Manager” is a whole other thing… I guess, but I have no idea what the latter is supposed to do, really.
Fuck me am I glad I’m out of the corporate world
I keep trying to escape, but I do need a paycheck so… [rolls up sleeves] back into the fray I go, once more! :-|
And then complain that the light bulb wasn’t fixed in the time that a different team projected on the L1 from 3 years ago.
Exactly. Also, prediction they’re referencing from 3 years ago was to build a lemonade stand.
Climate Scientists:
- The lightbulb is broken, and there’s reason to believe that the ceiling might cave in
- Offers advice on how to fix the contacts, or to replace the bulb entirely, or put up struts to support the ceiling in an impassioned plea to the higher ups.
- CTO is committed already to candles, CFO wants to wait and see what happens, and CEO labels it as a marketing problem.
I came here to laugh, not to cry!
honestly huge respect to ops
The ops guy drew up multiple plans for a redundant light source and plans to train staff on light bulb replacement protocols, but was overruled by management who found this to be too costly. Maybe next year tho.
I know so many ops people who are practically functional alcoholics and I’m not surprised at all
SRE:
- Receives a slack message that lighbulb is broken
- Realizes that they never got an alert when the light went out
- Fixes their monitoring thresholds
- Routes all broken lightbulb alerts to a slack channel nobody reads
Dwh:
- the light bulb is broken.
- asks marketing what kind they want, after a week they answer halogen.
- dwh then asks backend who says halogen is deprecated, and says only LED is available, due to fire risks.
- in the meantime, marketing got tired of waiting, orders a halogen bulb and doesn’t tell dwh, and manages to install it, even though it’s the wrong socket.
- The light flickers and could break any second, but marketing is happy
Today I broke a colleague’s app, because I repurposed an unused app registration on azure, or at least I thought it was unused. I thought that would be faster than asking the admins for a new registration on a Friday afternoon. But I forgot that I had used that registration for my colleague 's application.
So when he came complaining that it didn’t work, I just told him he had done something wrong and that he should just restart his computer.
Moths: we’ll see ourselves out, there’s
greener pasturesbrighter lightbulbs out there.
