Why not post the range and say what you just said?
Concern was that it still turns down too many, maybe we were too careful.
We have another vacant position soon, I might try it.
Readit Newscygned commented on Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges · Posted by u/Carrok
cygned commented on Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges · Posted by u/Carrok
We don’t post salary ranges right now. We are a small firm and cannot keep up with the salaries from enterprises in our area. We are looking for (and finding) candidates that are willing to sacrifice parts of their salary for 100% remote, flexible work time, PTO and others.
We decided to screen applicants in an informal phone call and discuss salary options at the end, after they had a first impression of how we are as a firm.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
> I am not sure how that necessarily clashes with social structures inside the Scrum Team or micro manages its members.
I would expect emergent behavior from said team (which I consider a team; not a SCRUM team; a human team working on software) to be a better representation of who they are as humans and of how they best think they should organize in order to attain the company goals.
As for the micromanagement, I would love to hear an explanation of how SCRUM is *not* micromanagement when every day, a guy (which in my decade long experience has always been either a manager-role or someone wanting to be a manager) comes and gets the report on the tasks that you work to the granularity of one hour (sometimes even 30 minutes for properly crazy SCRUM masters) and intervenes afterwards if he considers it needed.
> Aren’t these interactions put in place to create transparency across the team regarding progress and purpose as well as empirical validation?
Depends on how big you think the team is... If we're talking about a small cross-functional team, I've never had as much transparency and signal over noise over progress, purpose as well as empirical validation, than I had working with a bunch of great people (healthy mix of junior, middle and senior), going out eating every day for lunch (usually more than one hour :o) and discussing. If we're talking about the organization as a team, then yeah, clearly more transparency regarding progress for them because before this whole SCRUM thing they didn't have a load & run way of creating an analytics pipeline for their software projects.
Look, you're clearly in the SCRUM side of the stadium and I'm squarely in the emergent-process side, and it's been a discussion for aeons of which I am tired. What I am arguing is not pro / anti SCRUM, what I am arguing is that SCRUM as most enforced things "micromanage and/or ignore human psychology".
> what I am arguing is that SCRUM as most enforced things "micromanage and/or ignore human psychology".
I think you are arguing Scrum can lead to these situations - which you cover in your other thoughts. And I agree, I have seen that often, however, I’d still don’t say it’s inherent to Scrum itself.
> how SCRUM is not micromanagement when every day, a guy (which in my decade long experience has always been either a manager-role or someone wanting to be a manager) comes and gets the report on the tasks that you work to the granularity of one hour (sometimes even 30 minutes for properly crazy SCRUM masters) and intervenes afterwards if he considers it needed.
Yeah that’s awful micro management. I know it’s easy to dismiss that way, but what you are describing is not Scrum, that’s just saying Scrum and making people miserable.
In the end, I do not want to argue for Scrum as the solution for everything. It’s really hard to do it right. On one of the teams I am consulting right now, we went away from Scrum because it didn’t work - fascinatingly due to different reasons as you mention, different mindset in terms of what management does and how control is exercised.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
I don't know if the author is being sarcastic but:
> To that, I propose base-2 exponentiation based on the scale you care about in the first place, time.
> 1, 2, 4, 8. Hours, days or weeks.
I think this is actually a pretty good system. The point being that estimates get less fine grained as the size of the task increases, which is pretty sensible.
Isn’t that why many teams opt to use Fibonacci sequence?
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
It establishes a set of steps that need to be followed (often time daily) and interactions to be had regardless of the nature of the work and the psychology of evolving unique set of relationships inside a social group? How does it not?
Aren’t these interactions put in place to create transparency across the team regarding progress and purpose as well as empirical validation? I am not sure how that necessarily clashes with social structures inside the Scrum Team or micro manages its members.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
Micromanagement - there is literally ability to make own decisions. You have to accountability either. Every single tiny aspect of work is dictated by somebody else, commitee or some kind of process.
Personal guess: groups full of people with high interest in people and great social skills won't produce something like scrum. It exists only because tech can give decision power to people who don't have those.
Human psychology: to large extend the above. It leads to absurd conflicts and power struggles over nonsense. Then it blames people who actually reacted in predictable way. It creates unnecessary hard social situations.
It is also massively demotivating. In fact, the components of motivations in pretty much any other fields are autonomy, mastery, accountability. Scrum lacks all three.
> Every single tiny aspect of work is dictated by somebody else, commitee or some kind of process.
That is not the way Scrum is meant to be implemented. The goal is to have a cross-functional, empowered team with the ability to make their own decision. The Product Owner - as part of that team - makes ultimate decisions as to what the product will be.
> It creates unnecessary hard social situations
Yes, social conflicts in team can be tough. Following the values of Scrum, respect and openness in particular, helps teams sort these things out. I know that in practice, it involves a lot of skill to guide a team through those phases.
> the components of motivations in pretty much any other fields are autonomy, mastery, accountability
You are absolutely right. If you read through the Scrum guide, you will find all those aspects in there. I think what you are describing, though, is how Scrum is "lived" in many organizations, which have difficulties empowering teams and provide the environment necessary to do Scrum.
In these situations, the answer is often that Scrum simply don't work, it's clashing with your culture and structure. Many teams opt to implement parts of Scrum - which is fine and might work exceptionally well, but it's not Scrum.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
Whenever I come across teams with situations outlined as in this article and I talk to the people involved, it becomes apparent that Scrum was implemented for the sake of implementing Scrum without understanding. The values and the concept of empiricism are important to grasp in order to effectively leverage Scrum - that is why you have a Scrum Master, not as a manager of any kind, but as a coach and facilitator.
The main challenge I see people having is that Scrum was designed in a way that it screams in your face when you screw up and many organizations fight that instead of inspecting and adapting their way of working.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
A link to DHH seems like an appeal to a pretty faulty authority who has a closet full of strawmen. Honestly, a link like that makes me take scrum more seriously.
Just my opinion, mind you, but your methodology might backfire.
Despite him not saying "Scrum", the structure he's describing is not Scrum anyway. It might be close to what some people understand when they say "Scrum", but it is not Scrum.
cygned commented on Leave Scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done (2020) wagslane.dev/posts/leave-... · Posted by u/wagslane
You can coordinate and report without heavy duty micromanaging process like scrum. And you can achieve much better relationships between people then scrum generates too.
The one thing scrum ignores is human psychology.
The fact that defense of scrum is so often manipulative, attacking critics personally or twisting what other people said is not good reflection of that system.
How does Scrum micromanage and/or ignore human psychology?
Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email.
I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.