AaronWe are adopting scrum + Jira at work. The combination of the change in routine and the new stress of publicly reporting and tracking my progress every day has my life dominated by anxiety right now. And the more anxious I get, the harder it is to focus. So I end up doing my work late at night, when I'm too tired to feel anxious, but that only leaves a narrow band of time between too anxious and too tired, and I'm losing sleep too. IDK what to do in this situation, but I know I have to figure something out, so that's more pressure and anxiety. I'm also struggling to find the words to talk to my boss about it, which is part of why I'm writing about it here.
Advice is welcome, if anybody has any.
RealGravitas -Citizen Saboteur@hosford42 Process control is actually a good thing for a program, but I can see your point. Does your boss know about your autism? Scrum task allocations can be designed to tailor tasks to optimize the capabilities/ limitations of the various team members. But I suspect you're simply being forced into an uncomfortable level of social interaction. You could send an email to your boss outlining the issues and then use that to start the conversation. Good luck!
@CWilbur Yes, he's aware. It's hard to gage how much other people know what autism actually means, though. Most people only know what you specifically explain to them, in my experience.
You may be right about it just being too much social interaction. It's not just about the amount for me, though. The type also matters. I like interacting with the team daily and establishing/maintaining repoire with them. Where I struggle more is with the expectations being placed on me. I can't judge when or how I'm disappointing people, when they are getting annoyed or frustrated or impatient with me, or how to address those sorts of situations when they arise. And it's hard for me to know when they have expectations or what those expectations are. So I often feel like I need to demonstrate some level of performance, but IDK what level is actually expected of me or even what level would be fair to expect.
Nate Gaylinn@hosford42 The best way to think about these work tracking productivity systems (if you can--depends a lot on team culture) is not about setting an aggressive pace that you should follow, but getting a sense of what sort of pace is realistic. Like, it doesn't matter how much you get done this week, or if you fell short off your targets. The point is to learn from that experience so you make a better estimate next week. Eventually you get pretty good at estimating your productivity, and you become reliable because you don't over promise.
If you can think of it as an exercise in learning realistic expectations, it's generally way less stressful.
@ngaylinn But how do you reconcile that with the fact that it's the same person who fills out your performance reviews?
@hosford42 It depends. Did your boss say why they started doing this, or how it relates to your performance expectations? If they're trying to drive everyone to do more in less time, that's messed up, it won't work very well, and there's not much you can do about that except leave. But I definitely wouldn't assume that's the case. Usually it's more about improving team communication, coordination, and reliability. Or it's just copycatting some other team, to be honest. But some managers are really bad at explaining themselves, so people jump to conclusions and get anxious about it...
@ngaylinn The change isn't coming from my immediate boss, but from higher up. My boss is communicating fine. I just don't know how to not be anxious about having to present my daily progress to the same person who does my performance reviews, whatever the intent. It is inherently stressful, because no matter what people say, it's not possible for a human being to truly compartmentalize sources of knowledge and experience. My day to day interactions of this sort *will* impact my performance reviews. It's not a thing that can be controlled, limited, or prevented, even if that's the intent.
Not a Spring Onion[We already had this discussion a while ago, so I will summarize:]
I think your company simply does Scrum wrong.
Turning standups into reportings is... well, they apparently want to pay you for worrying instead of working.
Joelle@hosford42 I don't have any advice, other than saying most of the autistic devs I know hate the shit marketed as "agile" which these days is usually scrum + Jira. It's not an inclusive development practice, at least not the way I've experienced it implemented.
David O'Brien'the shit marketed as "agile"' is a good way of putting it.
#Agile, properly done, is about putting teams in charge of their work.
Giving them an outcome to achieve, and trusting them to come up with the best way of doing it.
And also allowing them to conclude: this is not achievable.
It is absolutely not:
• A management tool
• A reporting mechanism
• Productivity measurement
And Scrum !== agile
It's one possible implementation of a methodology. And that's all.
It's not a religion.
#Agile, properly, is just a way of empowering small multi-disciplinary teams to explore problems and develop potential solutions.
It's a methodology that is useful in highly uncertain environments.
It's not useful at all in known, or understood, environments.
If you're trying to buy new laptops for 1,000 employees, for fox ache don't use agile methods.
So-called frameworks such as #SAFE are, as you say, complete bullshit.
They are management consultancy responses to try to reimpose control.
It should come as no surprise that they are complex, complicated, and proposed by EY and other big management consultancy firms.
Tormod HalvorsenThe next time you experience any abuse, I suggest you pull out the principles of Agile, scrum or whatever specific framework you are using.
Any behavior that is not in line with the base principles should be considered an anti-pattern and must be called out.
bigiain@iamdavidobrien @joelle @hosford42
"It's not a religion."
Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise.
Scott Lett@iamdavidobrien: Dear Oracle, it is also not a method of mind destruction, but you do you.