THIS POST has ongoing contribution

Almost in every discussion around product engineering culture following two or three things come up constantly

• Code without tests or writing test cases is not developer’s responsibility.
• People keep wasting time on PRs (I will write another blog post about “Unbranching software, unleashing productivity”)
• Many people keep asking me how to measure developer productivity.

I said “all this is hopeless”, unless people change fundamental behaviors, and then I thought about what else is “hopeless” and here is the initial list.

• having code without tests is hopeless
• a pm who doesn’t work stories with research, acceptance criteria, is hopeless
• relying on qa and not on the test automation is hopeless
• thinking qa is quality assurance and not quality automation is hopeless
• treating product manager as project manager, and not giving them autonomy is hopeless
• instituting managers to manage people in product engineering is hopeless
• trying to measure product engineering productivity is hopeless
• work life balance is hopeless
• As startup founders expecting a 9-5 life is hopeless
• not having hands on engineering leader is hopeless
• having CTO and CPO both is hopeless
• treating product and engineering as separate teams is hopeless
• having product engineers who don’t understand data is hopeless
• having data science without data foundation is hopeless
• having a separate team for devops is hopeless (devops is a culture, not a team)
• Using the wrong language to express a problem is hopeless. (Think resources vs people)
• Everyone has agenda, either you fit your colleagues agenda, or they fit your agenda, having no agenda is hopeless :-)
• having a team that doesn’t understand the business is hopeless
• having a team that doesn’t understand the customer is hopeless
• having a team that doesn’t understand the product is hopeless
• calling/treating people as resources is hopeless.
• treating an estimate as anything other than an estimate is hopeless
• having meeting with more than 4 people is hopeless
• having a meeting without an agenda is hopeless
• not treating engineering, product, and design teams as a one team is hopeless

I will keep adding to this list, and I am sure there are many more things that are hopeless, if you have any, please do share with me on X (Twitter)