Absolutely matching the gut feel I've had lately. We've always been pretty good at producing bad code very fast. All of the other stuff - dependency management, learning what's valuable, ownership & boundaries, context switching costs, etc... have always been the bottlenecks and it's just more obvious now.
It's possible, but at the same time it's been years and they haven't copied things like Graphite's dashboard or stacked PR interface yet. We have the advantage of speed :)
Best thing a doctor ever told me was "you CAN get imaging done, but I'd like to warn you that there is a near-certainty we'd find something wrong with your shoulder and your back".
I'm assuming there was a directive from comms or someone else requiring each cost center write up examples/demos of what they use Claude Code for. Then dogfooded and turned into what you see here.
It's weird to me that people have emotional feelings about Story Points as a concept. It's just another way to measure how hard something might be. I think what people should really be annoyed with is when these measurements are used as some sort of productivity metric, or if the team spends too much time debating a particular measurement value and not enough time actually working on it.
My annoyance with story points is how it always seems to end up returning to “how many hours of work will it take”, even though the whole point of using story points is to get away from trying to predict how many hours of work something is.
That is, we estimate a certain set of tasks. For this two-week sprint, we're going to try to do a subset, and that subset adds up to 20 story points. After two weeks, how much did we actually get done? 7 story points. Next sprint we did better, we got 11 done. After a few months, we settle down to an average of 10 story points per two week sprint. Now we know how many hours something is (estimated to be) based on the story points.
Note well: This velocity is a function of the team. If the team composition changes, previously measurements of velocities are no longer valid.
In all my years of software development, story points never became an accurate predictor of time, even with consistent teams and process. The types of tasks we would be working on varied too much and were too novel to become predictable.
If we were working on one app and just adding features and fixing bugs, maybe it would converge to a consistent average. However, I have always worked on teams that have myriad projects, moving in and out of development, with constant support and interrupt driven work taking up a huge variable amount of time.
Management always gets frustrated when this doesn't materialize. If the instrument meant to keep management off your back doesn't do so, people will get frustrated with it.
In my experience, they're always just used as some abstraction over amounts of time, which doesn't seem particularly useful but also isn't objectionable. What's weird to me is how specific the patterns are sometimes; I've worked on more than one team that insists on only using Fibonacci numbers for story points, but also that anything as large as 8 should be broken up into separate tasks, which effectively means that they used the range 1-5 but forbid usage of 4. On one of those teams, during one planning meeting someone mused that they wished there were something they could use to represent "less than 1", and I suggested we try putting 0.5 story points into JIRA, which to everyone's surprised actually worked, so 0.5 became the only other allowed value.
I think SP or similar need to exist for it to be possible to make decisions and prioritise, but issues arise when part of the company, e.g. leadership or managers don't understand that SP are more like guesses with risk and probability involved and they will be disappointed when the end result won't be as accurate.
So naturally people will come to despise it because managers will want a number and to hold you to that number. A strict number can't be given, but intuitive guess which has certain probability of being in a certain range according to experience can be.
If you have two engineers and one consistently completes 10 points a sprint and the other only completes 2 points a sprint, does that not tell you something about the output of those engineers?
At best it may indicate that there's something worth looking into, but it doesn't tell you much about the actual productivity of the engineers. One engineer may be producing low quality output that requires a lot of re-work later, or they might be gaming the system by over-estimating work, or picking up lower priority work that was accidentally over-estimated in order to improve their numbers. They may be a domain expert in a particular system while the other developer is getting up to speed. One developer may be spending significantly more time mentoring or helping their team work better. They might be writing design documents or spending more time with customers. They might have been around longer and are regularly getting pulled into supporting things they worked on years ago, or getting asked for help from other teams who need their expertise.
Not without much more data. Is the 2 pt engineer the one senior who supports all the juniors and multiplies their effectiveness by getting them unstuck, or is the 2 pt engineer the one who always takes the hard (misestimated) stories, or maybe they are the CEO's nephew and they just suck. No way to know just from pts completed.
Does it tell something that couldn't be equally (or better) represented by not pretending that story points are time estimates rather than something abstract?
no, it tells you more about what sort of tasks they excel at and how story points are chosen. it's important not to extrapolate beyond what your measurement supports.
Mr 2 Points might be taking one for the team, doing a task that would cost Mrs 10 Points 3-5 points of productivity if they were saddled with it.
Low point stories that take a lot of time are often coordination tasks, and for people who are good at heads down programming, that can be their kryptonite.
It's also possible that Mr 2 Points is not getting fed stories that they could weave into the blocking points of their highest priority task effectively. He is spending a lot of time working on untracked tasks or sneakily working on stories halfway down the backlog. And they can't do it in the open because someone is engaging in Efficiency Theater: we are so far behind on some milestone that the optics of anyone working on anything except that milestone are terrible.
Nevermind that the next milestone needs them and we will be having this Death March repeat again in three months because of it.
Agile isn't a framework, it's just a set of principles. Scrum is a loose framework theoretically based off of those principles with some ground rules that can be broken depending on what works for your team. Same with Kanban.
Marx wrote a gigantic book called Capital and it provides a thorough analysis of investment and risk. He wrote a great deal of words describing how investment relates to surplus value (hint: investment is simply a capitalist's way of generating surplus value - profit, which is then used to generate more surplus value, which is... you understand the systemic contradiction here, I hope). You should probably read it if you want to discuss it!
If you think Das Kapital is scientific work, you will have no problem providing a reference to any successful society or a company following the principles from it.
I enjoyed reading Toliken's fantasy LODR very much, but my attempts at reading Marx's fantasies felt like hammering a nail into my skull.
The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it?
BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxists I hear never mention the essential role risk plays, they usually just assume there is no risk.
There are so many interesting things to learn that are reality (like reading history books), why waste the precious remaining few years of my life reading books promoting nonsense?
I read historical accounts about the Kennedy assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian photography, ESP, flat earth, religions dogma, etc.
If Marxism worked, I'd be more interested in it. But it doesn't, so why bother?
I understand it well enough by reading history books on what happened in them. Have you ventured out of academic theories and read any histories of Marxist attempts?
Why should I waste time on a theory that has been proven false every time it was tried?
I'm not a Marxist so I have no interest in justifying their theories. However, if I made my personal brand all about being what a staunch anti-Marxist I am, I would hazard an effort to try to understand their position, if for nothing else but to understand why so many others have bought into it, and to be a more effective opponent against it.
Marxism is just one of many utopian schemes that do not work.
I do not need to study every perpetual motion machine design to dismiss them. It's their job to show that they work.
What amazes me is the people who desperately cling to Marxism despite its 100% failure rate. How can they make a career studying it and never notice its history?
Do you notice that nobody has been able to point to a Marxist success story, after what, 150 years of trying?
BTW, the fundamental flaw of Marxism is it fails to understand basic human nature - that people are selfish. You are selfish, I am selfish, everybody is. Marxism requires rejection of selfishness. This will never work. You cannot cajole it out of people, educate it out, indoctrinate it out, or shoot it out of them. They'll still act selfishly.
Free markets work because it creates a framework where selfishness benefits others.
> I do not need to study every perpetual motion machine design to dismiss them. It's their job to show that they work.
What amazes me is the people who desperately cling to Marxism despite its 100% failure rate.
Maybe if you bothered to try to understand the perpetual machine that everyone’s bought into then you wouldn’t be so amazed by people buying into it all of the time
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