idostuff

> Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go.

I'm not opposed to planning but I'm opposed to the kind of meta-planning game that is wont when scrum is involved. I've been in meetings where the thing we're planning is literally to change one line of code and we say as much but the PO still insistently asks if it shouldn't be multiple stories. The whole thing eventually took man days in meetings even though we insisted it was extremely quick. Turns out the whole thing was sold upstream to management as a big feature so a single 1-point story wouldn't cut it.

As a contractor I can at least remind myself that I'm getting paid for sitting through all those meetings but as someone who likes to actually do things I feel like I slowly die inside.

Yeah, my first year as a freelancer was quite sweet actually. Then came the pandemic and me and my spouse got ourselves a vacation house as we couldn't travel any more. While this was a great relief for our mental health during the pandemic, it meant a much higher mortgage so I needed the more stable income.

I'm a European in my late forties and have been a freelancer for the last five years but I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to continue working. What really takes all joy out of working as a software engineer these days for me are the endless Scrum ceremonies almost all companies in my area have embraced.

In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands.

The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick.

While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience.

While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).