Edit : I appreciate all the PoVs and I will reply to everyone. This is important to me. Just going to go rest a bit and I’ll be back.
Edit : Leaving the self-insulting language in, but yeah… Point taken, I should stop being so mean to myself. And to add another FYI, I’ve been on this codebase for about 3 months, which I probably should have mentioned.
I have no idea what is wrong with me. I get tasks, I work on them, they NEVER seem to close. Meanwhile everyone around me is left and right solving their issues. I reach out for a second opinion because I must just be stupid, and every time I reach out the person is never able to assist in any meaningful way.
It’s like my tasks always have blockers that everyone around me seems perplexed by, I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”
I’m at the point where I’m in a daily meeting where I explain what I’m working on to a senior dev because obviously they noticed I’m a person on the team with sometimes zero points in a whole month. It’s so discouraging to have to go to a daily meeting because apparently I’m stupid? The thing is, when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”
So obviously I look at other peoples’ tasks… what are they working on? And their tasks are SO simple and straightforward, yet I’ve NEVER had a task like that, all my tasks were opened years ago, remained open for months or years, then were assigned to me. And they’re all fucky. Wth.
Tbh I’m running out of things to write because I don’t want to justify it, because I feel like I should be doing better. What the hell is wrong with me?
I have wanted to change jobs for close to two years now… but you’ve all interacted with recruiters… they never help, and job search is impossible as a person with anxiety and possibly autism?
I love coding, I hate my coding environment… Anyone else ever have this type of issue in programming?
If your company is using story points to “measure” developers, they are completely misusing that concept, and it probably results in a low-teamwork environment (as you describe).
The purpose of story points is so a team can say “we’re not taking more than X work for the next two weeks. Make sure it’s the important stuff.” It is a way to communicate a limit to force prioritization by the product owner.
And, in fact, data shows that point estimation so poorly converges on reality that teams may as well assign everything a “1”. The key technique is to try to make stories the same size, and to reduce variability by having the team swarm/mob to unblock stuck work.
Who creates these tasks? They need to close the year old items, reevaluate the work and break it down into sub-5-day chunks. If there are so many unknowns that it’s impossible to do that, the team needs to brainstorm how to resolve them.
Ahh, I see. I had no idea. I’m not from a programming background originally but fought hard to get into a programming job from a closely-related field. The way our team uses them is to justify our contracting support, “Look at our developers, they did X points! You should contract more work to our company!”
So if point estimation is that poor, maybe I should stop agonizing over adding points to a task… it always feels like I’m broadcasting that I can’t solve a task when the points go… 5… 10… 15… 20… 25… etc.
Who creates these tasks? Anyone can, most of the existing tasks were created by people I’ve never met, sometimes people no longer with the company, sometimes people on a different development team, the tasks get assigned to the team working on “the product” that we support and then are handed out.