FullDuplex.org provides us with a funny list of things to do to “look busy”.
Here’s a few tips I’ve learned in my short time on this earth that have kept me from getting too much accomplished.
fullduplex.org » How to Do Nothing at Work, and Get Away With It
He goes on to explain his “tips”.
It left me thinking two things. First, I’m very glad he’s not on my team, second, the value of scrum and agile methodologies to get rid of the dead weight. Here’s my response to it:
I’m a lead in a web development team, and I manage and assign work for web developers. This is the behavior that gets you fired from my team.
Let’s analyze it shall we?
Look Busy/Look Stressed: We’re a Scrum team, we meet every day to talk about what we did the day before, what we will do today, and what roadblocks we have in our way. So why aren’t you asking for help? I have no use for web devs with such little people skills that they won’t even ask other members of their peer group for help. If you can’t be on a team, maybe you should go independent and not work on a team.
Speak Quickly/Hide/Break Limb/Make Excuses/Never Leave your office/rearrange furniture,etc: The only thing here that may work is breaking a limb. And even then if that happened to you it would make you a prime candidate for pairing with another developer. All the others, your non-activity would show up on the cvs commit log. In my team we have a great cvs mailer that shows colored differences of what you did, and I check it daily.
Choose a Profession people don’t understand: Your manager is probably not a techie, or he’s as lazy as you are about checking your work. You’re a perfect example why only techies can manage techies, and techie managers need to code at least 20% of their time on the current project so they can keep their skills. Also following the cvsspam list helps understand the issues.
So you see, using Scrum or other Agile methodologies underscores the lack of value of these people and will make it obvious who needs to drop off your team. Either that or they’ll shape up via peer pressure, which in the long run will make the ex-lazy team member happier as well.
technorati tags:agile, scrum, lazy, development
Hmmm… How about getting a sense of humor? The original article was supposed to be FUNNY, get it?
Sadly pedantic, pompous, and self important.
Still, you posted at a time that normal techies have been hard at work for at least three quarters of an hour so there may be a glimmer of hope for you, shirker.
Yes, I realize it’s meant as a joke, but I’m sure your comedic material comes from somewhere. I thought it relevant to make an agile methods comment if it will drive the point to digg-reading techies and managers that they’d be happier in an agile team if this joke reminds them of someone.
In his fury (4 name-callings in two paragraphs – had your coffee yet?), Pete seems to be confusing time spent on digg with results. That’s what a manager who doesn’t know how tech works would do. I never care what’s on the screen of a techie as long as he’s producing results.
Talk about a lack of sense of humor 😉