We're a foolish species most of the time.
I was involved in meetings some time back where the aim was to try and organize a support board in Jira.
The lanes were fine I thought, but we also had priority / severity that users could set themselves. My perspective was that this is useless, that people will always set stuff to the highest priority because to them, it probably is. Instead, we should either do away with this altogether and just have the priority be: whatever is on top, and don't let "regular" users change this – or – we have a priority master, a single person responsible for owning these priorities to have a consistent opinion. It doesn't much matter if it's "right" so long as it's consistent, because it is an opinion, not a natural fact.
Of course this was shot down and the next several weeks were spent discussing the priority levels. Looking at the board this morning I see all tickets are at the highest priority – shocker! No one cares of course and the point isn't so much whether or not I was right, but the fact that this is what people do for a living makes me less anxious about the impending automation doom. We'll figure out useless jobs for everyone I'm sure!
"How much time will this take?" (Very demanding Asian boss in Australia Post)
"No idea, might be quick, might be complex, I don't know your environment."
"Well, developers have said 8 points. How much time is that??"
"I don't know".
His response: "Stay behind after the meeting, I need to talk to you about respect for authority".
Fun times.
If you're not agile, stop lying about it. I saw a job on Seek the other day advertising a DevOps roles - turns out they want a helpdesk operator. Stop lying in job ads, and stop drinking the kool aid.
None of it helps.
- we're literally dying
- we're actively losing money
- we're not earning enough
- we're just being annoying
no thanks.