Re:Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
by matwood on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @09:47AM
(#26166826)
Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time at the end of every iteration to do some problem/design/idea exploration.
As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon.
I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits".
If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting.
The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..