when I am supposed to fix tech debt? if every week there is another functionality going out that needs to be done yesterday? Do you think that I have to do it in my free time? Why should I even bother existing
On a mature project in a small team, the only tickets left were hard bugs that nobody wanted. The kind of bugs where you can invest days and have nothing really to show for it except crossing out some suspicions. Or maybe incorrectly crossing one out and then going on a wild goose chase until you circle back to it in a week, flustered.
You're expected to commit all of your mental energy to these tickets day after day, and then once you finally triumph and solve the bug after coffee or amphetamine binges, you turn in the code, close the ticket, and you're expected to immediately work on the next ticket.
You don't get a real break. But you can mentally rest at the start of the next ticket since nobody expects instant results. But now it's been a couple days and people are asking you what you've been doing so far—you must be blocked, right?—but you've barely started and you're pressured to invent small lies and excuses about why you're behind, each one risking yet another slip of the mask.
And when you need some time off the most, it's when you're the most behind of all and people have begun to notice, so taking the time off doesn't even seem like an option.
What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race?
[Audience reply: Sprinter]
Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
[Audience laughter]
But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
And even within frameworks like Scrum, I don't think that "sprint" was ever intended to mean that programmers are supposed to be in permanent crunch mode.
Why call it a sprint if it's not supposed to be anything sprinting? We can literally call it anything we want, so why not pick a better metaphor?
I think that many developers who say they dislike Agile really mean they dislike Scrum. I mean, a rugby scrum is pretty violent, and sprinting non-stop is a good way of dying of exhaustion.
Come to think of it, some managers do seem to want the workplace to be a ruthless battleground with worker pitted against worker in a relentless flat-out sprint to seen as a "high performer".
In XP, there was very much the idea of spending time to prepare for a sprint. Get requirements and preconditions worked out, clear out possible distractions.. Then you'd use a 1 - 2 week long sprint (aka actual crunch time) to knock out 80 - 90% of a feature with everyone on the team under high pressure and positive, constructive stress. And then you'd have some time after the sprint to work with low pressure, clean up technical debt, consolidate and build up for the next sprint.
And honestly, that's a pretty effective way to work if you plan and gear up for it.