life hack: live longer by dying on fewer hills

@aeva it was not until quite recently, in the grand scheme of things, that I had positive PR experiences that didn't involve pushback from a senior male employee that boiled down to (or was plainly stated as) this.

At my current job, in fact, I had a shit ton of anxiety about PRs for probably the first six months due to numerous, numerous experiences where a PR was used to gatekeep and delay my contributions. Especially when I could look at other PRs where male colleagues were doing exactly the same thing and were approved without even a comment on it.

I'm not as anxious now specifically because I've received good feedback at my current job (not coincidentally, none of it was ever shaped like this).

@aud my last job (about 10 years ago) I worked at a place like that and they tracked individual "velocity" as a performance review metric. every single thing I'd try to submit took a week to get through review no matter how trivial.

@aud that team also did a thing where the entire team votes on the "point" score of a given ticket, and mine always got voted low for some reason 🙄

@beeoproblem @aud my rule (i'm a lead now) is the person doing the work provides their estimates, and my job is mostly to keep track of the error bars and keep an eye out for signs of other problems. if someone were to ask a month for something that should only take a day, then the why is something I need to look into, but generally what happens instead is people usually under estimate the amount of time needed and I may need to ask them to add more time so our planning is more accurate.

@beeoproblem @aud imo velocity is a shit metric. imagine trying to budget your finances with "velocity". don't spend any less, just yell at your money until it spends faster

@aeva @beeoproblem I feel like it's obvious from what you said, but clearly in the hands of someone who is a team lead "in good faith", these metrics can be tools

but in explicitly or implicitly biased hands, they're weapons. Same story as ever, I suppose.

@aud @beeoproblem I honestly don't think velocity is useful for anything other than being a stack ranking KPI for companies with no real deadlines. Like how do you use that to actually plan anything? "Oh my team can crank out an average of 3 complexity points per person per week" that doesn't mean anything.

@aud @beeoproblem like, how many story points is a pregnancy lol can you divide that up between a team 9 men to make it go faster?

@aeva @beeoproblem story: "As a new person, I would like to be born faster..."