Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 134: Boredom vs Money and Agile vs Long-Term Schedules

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

This episode is sponsored by Pluralsight. Pluralsight is hiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers. Check out the jobs at https://pluralsight.com/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m current doing nearly nothing at work (not by choice) and getting paid a king’s ransom for it, just to stay on the roster. I’ve never been in this situation before. Would I be foolish to give it all up just to not be miserably bored? I’m pretty sure this isn’t sustainable, and I’d get laid off in the next economic downturn before you guys might get to my question, but just curious what your insights are. How to deal with teams that are run as “Agile”, but management who want timelines and deadlines to steer the business? I’m at my second large software development company that’s following the agile/scrum ceremonies with weekly sprints that entail grooming/planning/retro meetings. Management keeps track of progress to align the efforts of multiple teams spread across the organization. I’ve noticed over the past year an increased desire for estimated timelines for when each team will be done with their portion of the project. This forces the team to groom and size stories months out ahead. These estimates end up becoming deadlines that need justification to be pushed back, which is common since as you get into the work you find more stories need to be added. I had a very similar experience at my last company. Both have 5-10k employees. I understand the needs of the business to plan ahead. So saying “it’ll be ready when it’s done” is not a good answer. However, it feels like we’re constantly falling behind arbitrary deadlines and in a constant frenzy to catch up. So….what do?

It takes more than making and then sadly deleting hundreds of backwards incompatible changes to be a great software engineer. This is episode 134 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your questions about the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development. It sounds like you've had a rough week. Sometimes I stay up late-ish and I just wonder like, what would it be like if I didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility?

and then i just go crazy and i look at my diff i'm like yeah that's a lot of lines deleted awesome and then i sadly get checkout no dash get reset dash dash hard yeah oh get reset dash dash tier you know there aren't enough feelings in command line interfaces that's true where's the input for how i feel when i run the command that's a different show though that's not this show yeah this episode is sponsored by pluralsight pluralsight is hiring software engineers data scientists and machine learning engineers in boston and salt lake city go to pluralsight.com slash soft skills to see what job openings are available do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons i absolutely do we would like to thank the following amazing individuals who

have contributed at the level where we say their names every single week thank you for your contribution they are matthew wotowicz the agile ventures charity zach grannon michael green david jackson nick kantar and sean clayton thank you for supporting the show if you'd like to support the show go to softskills.audio and click on the support us on patreon button even a dollar a month helps us to pay for editing and hosting costs which otherwise would bleed me dry not me they would do it all i am the financial backbone of this podcast let's dive into our questions i'm gonna just read it all right this is from an anonymous listener

i'm currently doing nearly nothing at work not by choice and getting paid a king's ransom for it just to stay on the roster i've never been in this situation before would i be foolish to give it all up just to not be so miserably bored i'm pretty sure this isn't sustainable and that i'd get laid off in the next economic downturn before you guys might get to my question but just curious what your insights are don't worry that there's i don't think we're ever going to have another economic downturn we've already had how many can there be i know there was only one great depression it can't be two of course that's what they said after the world war one which they didn't call world war one right yeah yeah if they call it the greatest depression then there would only be able

to be one but they didn't a pretty big depression pretty the greater depression is on the way also the subtitle for my journal the past week oh yeah interesting i'm i have a lot of questions that aren't going to get answered i'm just going to ask them to you dave and maybe you can make up the answer oh yeah for sure not by choice what does this mean why i'm currently doing nothing at work not by choice and getting paid a king's ransom is it like they're they keep getting moved off of projects before they ship is it like there's dependencies so they can't start work on their thing yet i i have a hard time understanding how you would have literally nothing to do maybe not by choice is actually a cry for help there's someone standing with a gun to his head oh this is

like a okay let me read between the lines and i will it looks all right i think i got it you're really hungry and i've ordered you some jimmy johns but no bun because it looks like from reading between the lines gluten-free okay i did i interpret the like coded ransom note message here they're crying for help i think that's the help they're looking for they're hungry i see i have no idea what you're talking about but i like it okay yeah i just don't understand how you could be in the situation of getting paid a lot of money and not i guess i could see where there's not a ton of external direction on what you do but then wouldn't you just find stuff to do not if the company is big enough this does seem like a big company thing you couldn't you couldn't

be like one-fifth of the startup engineering team and just like do nothing well i can't start my work yet because the other four people are not done with their thing yeah i don't think so i hope no one notices i could see this happening at a big enough company especially after some kind of reorganization it's just happened and kind of the ink isn't really dry yet and not really clear how to efficiently run the team and you got you kind of slipped through the organizational cracks i could see it so okay i guess i'll just believe you that it can happen but what should you do because it does seem weird that you would be like hey i'm not doing anything are you okay with that yeah not the best conversation with your boss

so you know the past six months let me tell you all about the office or i don't know whatever you mind whatever tv show you dove into yeah you you just sit down and you're having this like really in-depth architectural discussion while you're flawlessly completing a mind sweeper level incredibly quickly how did you have time to do that you're like i don't know lots of practice four to eight hours every day for six months what's the what's the number of hours you need to achieve mastery 10 000 hours that's right it's like the groundhog day thing where he flings the cards into the hat oh yeah or learns to play the piano yeah how did you learn to play the piano well my dad was a

piano mover so what do you do i mean i i could see how it'd be unfulfilling if you're literally kept from doing fulfilling work for sure like for the rest of your life that could be pretty bad yeah but this strikes me as a highly temporary situation it will end for better or for worse yeah so i am the kind of person that goes insane if i'm bored at work which has only happened to me like maybe a few times for a few days is it good insane where you produce like really tortured art or you just bad insane no definitely bad insane more like tortured art is made out of poop

painted on the walls by hand yeah yeah uh yep more like that oh man but uh you know i just can't stand not contributing and it makes me start you know brushing up my resume looking for other jobs laboriously working through every exercise and cracking the coding interview sixth edition wait a minute that's the second week in a row that book has come up what about i mean i don't think i've been in this situation does it feel like you just have a blank check because you could do whatever you want could you just like find a team that is doing cool stuff and be like hey do you want free help that'd be cool i don't know how realistic that is though maybe it'd be worse to be doing something for a different team than to be doing

nothing i don't think so i think it'd be better well i mean better for you right but maybe like whatever shadowy organization is making this happen would be like you can't help that team you're supposed to be doing nothing for our team yeah who's gonna do nothing for our team if you're helping that team you never know we could be dealing with a really perverse incentive system here where you're supposed to be charging some contract by the hour and burning it down because otherwise uh your customer will lose their money for next year's budget or something so maybe you're trapped yeah but i i mean if you're trapped and it's unfulfilling i feel like the answer at the end of every parable or fable or storybook is always like and it turns out money wasn't the

most important thing doing what made you happy was and yeah so i guess if i believe all those people then maybe you just quit and get a job where the work is fulfilling well let me just tell you you don't go into a career of writing fables because you make a lot of money the famed wealthy person anonymous author yeah who wrote facebook quotes didn't become a millionaire so you're telling me i mean i went into fable writing for the money but i stayed around for the fulfillment all all the money gets gobbled up by big chicken soup for the soul that corporate entity the little guys writing the books don't get anything big chicken soup for the soul no wonder there's so many freaking spinoffs of that

franchise i don't know i i feel like if i were truly trapped i feel like it would you mentioned the coding the cracking the coding interview thing isn't this an opportunity to play with every random cool thing like well i i don't know serverless blockchain learning machines whatever crypto don't forget crypto yeah i feel like we've been making fun of crypto for long enough that there's got to be a new cutting edge thing yeah just yeah it'll come too behind the times to know object-oriented programming is new right make fun of that no one knows what it is so oh good point just get to make up a definition and then claim it's you've discovered the true meaning of it so if you spend your whole day like experimenting with new technologies and

teaching yourself new stuff how do you deal with the crippling guilt at night that's what i want to know that's a really good question you know that gif of that guy who's wiping his tears with money is that how you do it i think so don't you just buy stuff to make yourself temporarily happy you drive home in your tesla yeah yeah i could see the guilt being a thing especially if like i don't know maybe you're on a team and the team is kind of aware of it that would that would be hard for me i think actually if i felt like it was negatively affecting other people i i just don't I think I don't know enough about the situation to understand how this could be though. Well, who cares how it could be? You're stuck here and you're making a ton of money. You're

doing nothing. You're on the roster. And what do you do? I mean, I guess you either change it or don't make the most of it. Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess you, you boiled it down to the core but but you could try to move to something more productive in the company or try helping out other teams or whatever like working around the fact you're doing nothing or just go get a different job or you could use it as a little laboratory to learn and improve and grow you could get really good at meditation that is true isn't that yeah there's there's a lot of focus nothing there right eight hours a day of mindfulness i'm a professional mindfulness engineer this is the extreme form of hammock driven development it's just hammock driven

relaxation yeah have you heard of hammock driven development i think so is this is this where i was gonna i'm okay i'm just gonna make myself look stupid what is it oh well we'll just edit all that part out no no it's cool i don't mind i first heard it from a rich hickey talk i don't know if he invented it but it's basically the all of the stuff all the thinking parts of your job that don't happen while you're sitting at a computer typing out the answer that you thought of so your your brain is like churning away on problems and kind of like the shower thoughts and the i was gonna say i do that in the shower yeah like the idle background processing that somehow figure stuff out you're just on a tear of hammock driven development by the way when i said i did

that in the shower what i meant was i have my hammock in the shower not sure if that was clear there's a suction cup to the wall yeah okay i have some serious advice here but i'm actually super reluctant to give it okay and i don't know don't judge me world for this but i'm gonna say you have your whole career to be frantic and busy and constantly up against the wall of a deadline or pressure with too much to do and 30 items on your to-do list why not just take advantage of this opportunity for just i don't know maybe a few weeks and then see what happens you know just like give yourself a pass for a few weeks maybe a couple months and then and then deal with this i mean obviously if this goes on for a couple of years you're going to be

guilt-ridden miserable and you're going to start deteriorating as an engineer because your skills will rot right yeah unless you're working through cracking the coding interview full time for two years, in which case you'll be the best interviewer of all time. Yeah. Which means you will be the best employee of all time. That's right. That's right. Right. Companies. That is an interesting appeal to extremes, isn't it? Yeah. Like, would you really want to hire someone who is so good at interviewing? I would kind of embrace it. I think I would lean into this and just relax, take a load off and, you know, do what this company is asking you to do, which in this case is very little and see where it leads and and just remember you've got your whole life to be a

frantic you know behind the curve engineer constantly trying to meet the next deadline yeah that seems valuable in other words you won the lottery you know yeah and yet i hate myself for saying this don't i i mean this oh it's so bad it feels bad but i think it's right does it feel bad because you feel like you're taking advantage of this company exactly or because you're not being you're not producing for yourself no just the first thing and you're getting paid the presumably the company thinks they're getting value out of you but you're not really delivering value you know unless there's some implicit thing here like oh by the way i am uh guido who invented python and the company just wants to employ me you know yeah so i don't go to my competitor

the competitors i don't know something like that that's different but i think in this case it's probably an organizational accident that you are doing nothing and getting paid for it yeah i i think this is some people's well some people's dream in a couple ways one there are definitely people's dream is to do nothing and get paid for it but also you just have a lot of freedom you can do you can do nothing but there's got to be something you could do you can just figure out how to provide value without anyone telling you what to do and that seems like an interesting experiment i have a few ideas okay are you interested in mailing out podcast stickers it sounds like you're offering free labor

we have some tasks we evaluate zero dollars what a coincidence it's the perfect marketplace no but i mean there's got to be some like wacky project or some some moonshot thing that you think would be cool or something that you feel like it'd be hard to get like approvals for dedicated teams for but would make people's lives better some some dev tools thing or i don't know there's you could you could use that as a challenge to see because i agree with you dave it seems unlikely this will last forever i don't think you're necessarily doing anything morally wrong especially if you're using it as a chance to say like well no one's telling me to do anything

useful so i'll just do something i think is useful feels borderline morally wrong really yeah i don't know i well i mean i just my guilt would be off the charts yeah i feel like this would this would assuage my guilt if i could convince myself that they're telling me not to do this other work but i'm gonna do this thing that i think is important and will help the team that no one is telling me to do yeah they can't they can't just say like literally do nothing and i think i as part of that there's probably a little bit of risk that you might stir up enough that people might notice me like wait you're working on what why are you working on that oh you don't have anything to work on and then it'll crush your little bubble exactly like let's say

you spend the next six months building this thing and someone you demo it and someone you know some leadership person is like wait this must have taken you at least six months to build full time how how is that worse than if you do nothing for six months though that's it seems like it could only be better that you that you have something to show for it instead of back to back to back through cracking the coding interview yeah good which is a fine book we do we're not ripping on the book it is a fine book it's actually very good yeah all right i feel like we've we've argued ourselves in circles all right where are you landing on this one then just my idea is clearly the best one because i thought of it i agree anytime you think of stuff it's good so you're

saying get a project that benefits the company in some way and do it throw yourself into it take this as an opportunity to do something that you could never get approval to do and then see what happens yeah i think so if if it feels transient anyways um you can try and make the most of it that that's that's assuming you're not trying to just like milk it for all it's worth though yeah i don't know i don't really know what to do in that i don't know that would feel bad but yeah that would feel bad yeah this feels like kind of a blank check to try cool stuff so i think yeah i think this is a gift i mean look at you most people have to toil and suffer to earn a lot less than you probably do so yeah all right question answered oh wait wait what if you're not

interested in mailing podcast stickers you could just to offset your guilt you could head on over to patreon and just make a really big donation and then and then we would forgive you for not mailing the stickers what are those things that uh the catholic church did in the middle ages oh i know indulgences yeah that's what they were yeah all right so we're that's basically what you're saying we're offering yeah okay cool i mean you're the financial brains behind this podcast so all. I'll let you handle that part. All right. Good luck. Question answered. We would like to bring you a message from our sponsor for this show, Pluralsight. I knew that I was not great with CSS, but thanks to Pluralsight, I got to learn exactly

how not great I am with one of their skill IQ skill assessments. I was not surprised to learn that 50% of engineers are better than me at CSS. Listen, Dave, I've got some bigger numbers. 71 percent of engineers are better than me at css according to this assessment So there's some nifty stuff going on when you take it besides the shaming it did to me the algorithm adapts the difficulty of the assessment to how you respond so if it If it's too tricky if you get a lot of answers wrong Then it makes the questions easier and vice versa too and they're using item response theory bayesian stats machine learning data science That kind of stuff. No, I could tell it was dumbing the test down for me the more I took it

So we're talking about this, first of all, because it's kind of cool to learn where you are lacking. But also Pluralsight is hiring to work on this kind of thing. They're hiring folks to work on machine learning, data science, and engineering. That's right. So I actually know a few people who work at Pluralsight, and they say that it's a really great place to work. They have openings in Salt Lake City and Boston, and Pluralsight was voted the 18th best company to work for in the U.S. by Fortune magazine. If you want to check out the open jobs, go to pluralsight.com slash softskills.

That'll take you to a special page just for Soft Skills Engineering podcast listeners. That's P-L-U-R-A-L-S-I-G-H-T dot com slash softskills. Check it out. Thank you, Pluralsight. Do you want to read the next question, Dave? Sure. This comes from a listener named Jerry who says,

How do I deal with teams that are run as, air quotes, agile, but management who wants timelines and deadlines to steer the business. I'm at my second large software development company that's following the Agile and Scrum ceremonies. Oh, I like that word. That's a good one. Agile and Scrum ceremonies with weekly sprints

that entail grooming and planning and retro meetings. But management keeps track of progress to align the efforts of multiple teams spread across the organization. I've noticed over the past year an increased desire to estimate timelines for when each team will be done with their portion of the project.

This forces the teams to groom and size stories months out ahead. these estimates end up becoming deadlines that need justification to be pushed at back which is common since as you get into the work you find more stories that need to be added i had a very similar experience in my last company both have between five and ten thousand employees i understand the needs of the business to plan ahead so saying it'll be ready when it's done is not a good answer however it feels like we're constantly falling behind arbitrary deadlines and in a constant frenzy to catch up so what to do i have a meta answer which is that this will never

not be a problem ever like from the very beginning of software they immediately were like huh everything takes way longer than we thought it would what are we going to do about it let's have a conference to solve it today and then they realized it was hard but i like yeah yeah i like the word ceremonies too it feels like we need more fanfare at the beginning of our agile meetings little trumpets announcers not announcers they have fancier names than that yeah calling this meeting to order hear ye hear ye yeah her excellency the scrum mistress the scrum mistress yeah i think more ceremony would spice it up a little bit so it turns out if you only think of what you're going to do a week in advance you can't answer

the question, when is this thing that's going to take two years going to be done? I feel like there's, I understand this tension between like focus on tight iteration and like longer term goals, but I don't, I wonder how this happens where estimates turn into deadlines. Cause I do see it all the time as well. It's definitely not only you. And it, it, it seems like someone somewhere asks, Hey, what's your team going to do? And then someone has to be like, well, we're going to do x y and z and then they're like okay cool when's that going to be done and then you say like three months and then three months later like hey how about that thing that you said you're going to get done so i don't know that it is always necessarily meant to be a

deadline but it always gets attached to time somehow oh yeah and i don't know if there's a way to totally detach time from delivering anything i don't know that that's possible like especially if you have teams that depend on each other and you need to coordinate between them where this thing needs to happen first and this other team's working on it and i know how to do it how i have all the answers okay where were you in the 50s when they started having these conferences well okay you know those space movies where they put the passengers into hypersleep for like months yeah okay yeah so you get your like put your executives in hypersleep see the problem the problem here is that the the people who are you know holding you to these

timelines and who need to give approval when you want to change them the problem is they're all awake if you said okay in six months we're going to deliver this and then you put all the management management people to sleep for those six months and then woke them up in six months and they would just say oh you did or you didn't deliver it then you could have six months of really productive time and that's that that's my whole answer and why and why jameson to answer your sassy question where was i in the 50s hypersleep hadn't been invented yet rip van winkle's prior art for that though oh darn it okay so just like knock them out somehow i yeah it feels like i i mean the core answer of how you get a thing done at a fixed time is

usually cut scope it's very trite but that's kind of the only thing you can do if if you can't control the deadline you can control like it's done yep so i've i've seen that work successfully where you have either real or arbitrarily imposed deadlines that you need to hit you just say okay we can do anything we want as long as it's done by this date and that's that's the fixed part and here's the broad thing that we'd like to get done and we'll have something done by then yep the part that sounds pretty dysfunctional here is all the effort into months ahead of time estimation of individual stories that that seems like it would only slow you down why is that why would it slow you down just the time spent estimating yeah the time spent on this work

that's not going to be useful because it's so far away that it feels like your work estimating it is is more likely to be thrown out by the time you actually get to working on that Or that that thing won't even be important by the time you get to that point. I don't know. Maybe I'm just bad at project management, but it feels like you have to have a vague, broad vision, and then you cut the specifics to hit deadlines, and you just kind of work as much as you can. It doesn't feel very satisfying, and it's hard to sell consulting and books and stuff on that. And cutting scope only works to a point. What we have here is a dependency system where you've got teams that are depending on one another to deliver components that they need, and you can cut scope, but if you cut scope beyond what the other team needs in order to deliver their stuff, then they have to cut scope, and then, I mean, I guess it's just scope cuts all the way down, but, you know, I don't know.

I mean, my mind has changed on this so much over the last five or six years. I was just a staunch, it'll be done when it's done, engineer at my last company. And we planned, we basically made commitments to the rest of the business of, like, we did two-week sprints, and I think we committed, what did we do? 30 days or 60, no, 60 days. I think we did 60 days of commitments, and we never, ever went beyond 60 days. And it worked okay. It worked okay. But sometimes reality required more than a 60-day commitment for something that was either big or we had some other external deadline that was pressuring something or some other customer that needed some commitment in order to sign a really big contract or something.

So these aspirational desires to keep the schedule within a bound that you can be confident about, they always fail eventually for reasons of reality. Yeah. And then I went to a company that does much more aggressive planning with hugely complex inter-team dependencies. And what I found was that what makes it all work is an army of people whose job is to manage the interdependency and manage the schedules and alert teams when things are slipping or changing. And then just deal with the fallout of schedule slipping. And because I think change is inevitable. And so, you know, yeah, you get pushback when things need to change. But what you really need is a mechanism in place that is designed to respond to the change and allow the business to keep functioning. it sounds like you're saying that you need to encourage that communication of of what the reality is going to be for timelines for sure instead of the the impression i'm getting is

it's it's not okay to say hey i don't know if we're gonna get this thing done in this time and that seems like it only makes things worse yeah i think it's not gonna i think there's a healthy balance of like pressure rare that you're like i'm pretty sure we're gonna be behind six months into the project and then a year and you're like oh turns out i was wrong and we were ahead It all worked out. If you have an early inkling that stuff is going to slip, it seems like that's kind of... I don't know how to put it. That feels pretty real to me. It's predictive. So you're saying that there are people mining that information and aggressively communicating

it out instead of this feeling of like, you better not tell me it's going to slip. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. And I think the more important thing is that there's a process in place to respond to and manage schedule change and that means people who are tasked with staying on top of all the schedules understanding the dependencies understanding what the ripple effects are when schedules need to change and then managing that change so that the right people get informed and the teams are able to adapt and and move around as needed to to deal with it yeah the first step of that seems to be acknowledging that it's going to happen though where it feels like a style on like we're going to get everything done no matter what at the times that we set yeah and

everything less than that is a failure that you'll get in trouble for right and i and i think you have to be really careful to put too much trust like you have to put the right amount of trust in a delivery schedule based on the number of dependencies that are uh that compose that schedule so like for example if you want to deliver feature x but you know that there's like a three team deep hierarchy of dependencies behind that feature um like that clearly is a riskier proposition than a feature that only has one team that's going to work on it exclusively and ship it and so yeah your leadership just needs to know that yeah i've yeah i've definitely seen that in my own work over the last year or so that it's way easier to get stuff done that our team owns

than stuff even if it's just one other team it just like quadruples yeah the time it takes yeah i wonder i wonder if there's like what was the the book people wear i wonder if there's like a new iteration in that style that has to do now with like inter-team dependency risk instead of you know the mythical man no i'm thinking mythical man month that's what i'm thinking of is that book i wonder if there's a new book that could be written now based on like microservices and these organizations that kind of look like microservices you know yeah it sounds like you should write it oh man i'd read it okay so what's i think you're right that's my conclusion from this one i got to be right last time i think you're right this time all right well is that

a reasonable solution to put on this person just like your organization should have people whose job it is to manage these dependencies and then probably not jerry's like yeah it should yeah we should well back to work our work here is done wasn't that easy yeah maybe just bubbling up that it's a problem it feels like the kind of thing that everybody kind of just knows is a problem and maybe if you articulate it it i don't know it doesn't it can't be a surprise to anybody that it is painful in this way yeah i'm trying to think of the right words like when you provide an estimate i'm trying to think of the right words to qualify that estimate you know it doesn't matter what they are it's gonna bubble up five layers and each layer will remove an order of magnitude

of sentences yep by the end it'll just be a grunt of like whoa that means a certain number of weeks i love it don't you love it though when like you i've seen this before where a team gives an estimate and it's like it's like seven months away and they've picked a specific day of the month that they're gonna deliver something and you're like yeah right we're gonna deliver this on july 7th at 3 15 p.m would you feel any more confident if it was like a longer but longer further away but more specific time or is it just the fact that it's so specific that makes you be like whatever like if it was two years from now july 14th or whatever yeah would you be like okay

that's long enough maybe they can arrange it to hit that date no no i mean i think like why did you give me that level of specificity like if they were saying it's next week on tuesday at 3 15 p.m i'd be like oh they probably have their crap together but if they said it's two years out at 3 15 p.m i'd be like you guys are just making stuff up yeah that's what i would that's what i would think that kind of gets into the idea of planning of sizing things based on uncertainty to you not just on like how many calendar days it will take you to do a thing where the fuzzier it is the bigger the estimate is because it's you're extrapolating based on a little tiny amount of data and the further your extrapolation has to go the less accurate it's going to be i like to see

schedules that uh decrease the precision as the um time horizon moves out so like yeah if you're talking about next week you can say a day of the week if you're talking about next month you can say maybe what week in the month you plan to deliver but if you're talking about next year you're talking quarters now like and and i think it's totally appropriate for a team to lay out a year's worth of quarters and say you know in q1 we're going to ship this in q2 we're going to ship this and then every quarter that whole schedule changes based on what you learned this quarter you know but yeah there's this uh there's this concept called continuous planning too i don't know much about it besides the name sounds pretty good

okay yeah that i like that idea of of scoping the accuracy of your estimate to the the distance from current time yeah like it should be again it should be basically you know verboten to get to say like a date that's more than 12 months out you should be targeting a quarter or a month yeah this is all assuming there isn't like i don't know the irs has a date that's 12 months out there isn't some hard external deadline it's just like when is your project going to be delivered yeah exactly okay have we helped jerry poor jerry yep i think we solved all of jerry's problems yeah good news we've solved it all the work that's gone on in the past decades has been leading up to now and we did it we finally

figured it all out when i say we i mean dave i do just want to acknowledge though this tension When you're working on an Agile team, it's actually totally normal to have a tension between long-term business objectives and the nature of Agile planning, which is only plan what you can deliver in the next sprint, right? Yeah. Well, what used to be the tension until we solved it. Until hypersleep made everything right. All right.

Where can people go if they want their own previously unsolved questions to be solved? Go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question. thank you so much to everyone who's been asking questions we as usual we have way too many questions to answer but you are the lifeblood of the show so keep them coming and a little tip try to keep them as brief as possible share any relevant detail but uh the shorter the sweeter it's that same tension give us all the detail but please keep them short yep it's a theme in life uh yeah thank you very much for listening and we will catch you next week