Comment by bartread
21 days ago
> I think there are more places like that in the world.
There are but not as many as we might like.
I’d say I’ve learned to be decent on the soft skills side but it comes at a cost and the need to overutilise them can be incredibly draining.
So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way.
One of my pet peeves is how bad people are at, or perhaps how unwilling they are to embrace, asynchronous communication. Again, this favours the extroverts.
And then one key advantage of written communication nowadays is I can ask an LLM to help me with it so my message lands better. More than once, when dealing with particularly frustrating situations, I’ve asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email for me “so that I come across as a reasonable human being rather than a deranged psychopath”. It works.
>So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way.
Interesting. I'm very introverted too, but I worked at one Agile place, and it was like a dream for me. Maybe it was just the way they implemented it. What I liked was that I didn't need to talk to people much, outside of the bi-weekly planning meetings (which were large enough that I didn't have to actually speak up much). Instead, we used Jira to track everything: tasks were broken down into tickets, and I could see at a glance what everyone on the team was working on at the time, what work remained to be done, etc. When I finished a task and put it up for review, I could just go find another unassigned ticket and grab that and start working on it, instead of having to talk to anyone (like the boss). We did a lot of code review too, but here again, it was all through Jira/Gitlab/etc., not in person. So I could spend time reviewing other people's merge requests, writing my comments, etc.
The only time I really needed to talk to team members was 1) during the morning stand-up, which was quick, 2) during the bi-weekly sprint review and sprint planning meetings, and 3) if someone was stuck and wanted to work together in-person on a problem (not often).
By contrast, I'm now stuck in a poorly-run place doing waterfall development, and it's awful. I don't know what anyone is working on usually, because everything is verbal (we do use Jira, but I can only see my own pre-assigned tasks), I don't have a good idea of what the group is doing, the timeline for anything, how anything is progressing, if there's other things I could help with or add input to before someone goes the wrong direction, etc. The manager just runs thing in a completely authoritarian manner. I wish I could just go back to my old Agile workplace.