I hope by sharing these stories of how I dealt with two failing software projects, I'm able to convince you to avoid blaming and instead rise to the occasion of doing your best despite the outcome. Let me know any thoughts or questions you have below.

This channel is a hidden goldmine! It really helps us younger and inexperienced developers out there put the problems we face to a perspective that would otherwise take failure and years of experience to reach! Thank you for that!

I have never resonated more with a tech career channel. The kind of toxic positivity that takes hold in some dev shops just for the sake of the sale, and the devs sacrificed in the process...totally a real thing. I've been through this and felt alone, but I was really being gaslit when I brought up concerns.

I am so glad I found this channel. After 20+ years in the industry myself, burnout really hit me hard. This channel has really helped me find a more positive attitude and gave me the boost I needed to start digging myself out. I can't thank you enough for putting these videos out there.

I'm currently in a similar situation as you did...this is my first job ever and most of the devs (including me) have no experience in building the software. I screwed up on my code which resulted in delay but then I realised a lot of people screwed up too, but because I was quick to point out 'I screwed up', all the blame is on me.

Great video! Not many people talk of the realities of software development. Your thought process of dealing with it and keeping an eye on remaining mentally healthy and positive resonated with me. Thanks!!

7:00 The guilt trip - that really hurts.

You have more patience and empathy than me, I would have gotten angry at that project with the angry fighting programmers and would have had a hard time to help them. I personally experienced being blamed by another programmer who did btw not want to work on anything than his very limited - but important - part of the project, and I cant deal with such behavior well. Looking back, i should have stopped him blaming me, and the team I was leading, right there and I should have put clear limits to that behavior. But as an external consultant, i dont know if i would have had the patience to deal with such behavior.

Ive been backend developer for 4 years last year was in a bank... all I did was mundane change requests and incidents resolved no impressive projects or real achievements.. I did automated letters generating app but then got rejected and never used... then I was assigned with a project to consume external API for financial information analysis but I couldn't complete that project because of my lack of integration knowledge... lots of dragged tasks never completed work and when I deliver something it's usually not that big ... the reason I'm not fired yet because firing is not a thing in my organization currently .... I feel like a failure all the time and anxious to go to work and deal with my lack of skills and I feel like I will never be skilled in anything...

I've found that being aggressive to prevent failure labels me as hard to work with and not a team player because I dare to have high standards to encourage successful projects.

great example of learning from others experiences. thank you. i feel like i can relate to your stories although my situation is different, but at least it helps to hear others have went through struggles i am or i may be going through in the future. so thank you

Lol this is very relatable. I was on the client side. I joined this company as an SE. Most of their dev work was being done by an external agency. Project was a mess and already 1.5years behind schedule. Seemed obvious to me that it was still miles away from completion. They kept pushing beta launch back by 1-2 months even though it was probably a year of work remaining. They eventually got impatient, and fired and sued the external agency, then expected our team of three internal developers to wrap up the projects in 1 month. We said this is clearly impossible and unrealistic. So they found a new consulting firm who promised to rebuild the project from scratch in 1 month (LOL). Our leadership started acknowledging reality after 2 months. And proceeded to lay off our internal dev team, myself included. So idk how it’s going now, but 6 months later it still hasn’t launched 😂

It seemed like the sales people were trying to sell the client on Agile for Agile sake. Trying to convince the client to jump on the Agile bandwagon but the Client had a waterfall perspective.

This genre of video slams. We take on these devidual transistor gates of processes & info flows, + most importantly with each other so rapidly. Yet, it's that freedom of expression between each other without fear - a willingness to clarify ourselves without defense, to ground ourselves in that shared vision or motivation which is the shape of the work itself. So much comes up within that product of expectation, & negotiation of our social fabric - I know childhood issues like attachment trauma completely warped my experience of routine meetings without my seeing it for many years. It's difficult to time box these choices or commit to systemic remedies unless your team & stakeholders are willing to surf the seas of risk & reward together So often like mentioned here is that 1st time experiences where we bring our own baggage on stage can be especially stressful & expensive. Having group discussion moderation or structure with historical notes might be a necessity on some level for these sorts of complexities + an articulation for leveraging AND pivoting from them

Hey Jayme. I've been a software engineer for 26 years and I can relate to a lot of the content you produce, specially the psychological side of things. This video grabbed my attention about how all the failures you mentioned are totally related with people dynamics and anything to do with technical problems. Great stuff.

Yep... I know the feeling... At least at the end I'm happy to use the famous "I told you". The issue is people without technical skills, taking technical decisions.

We have had a joke on our project that we are the band on the Titanic and we'll keep playing as all goes to hell around us.

Your experience word for word was exactly my experience last year on the project I was a part of. So much so I’m questioning if we worked for the same company 😅

I have no idea what most this lingo is 💀. However you’re a great story teller so thanks for the video!

Howdy, I’ve recently found your channel, and was wondering if there was any way you could do this video from the point of view of other team members, such as project managers, customer success, and product marketing. I’ve been struggling while working as a GTM strategist for a large Media company who just released their first SaaS Cloud product, and it’s been like pulling teeth getting things done. How do you cope with teams that are uncooperative?

Working for a consultancy, I turned up to the client's office and attended a meeting with a fellow developer, my Manager and the Product Owner. It started with an overview of the product we would be building and ended with us having to estimate the entire project right there and then. I raised my concerns about the estimates being useless during the meeting and more in-depth to my manager separately, and was told that the estimates were not rigid. However, as the project progressed I learned that this was not the case and the estimates were being used with a temporal weighting. During the project, the hardware we were interfacing with was not documented sufficiently and bugs that surfaced during development could not be patched without an entire replacement of the hardware shipped from the manufacturers, taking weeks at a time. Throughout this my colleague and myself were the martyrs for the project delay, despite the continuous affirmation of project related issues. In the end the project was released lacking features that were required and it ran over the deadline several weeks and there was little to no satisfaction in having "completed" it. I've seen this time and time again and it's a contributor to several reasons why I have taken a break from the industry.

Hi jamee, i am in a situation where my project Manager is supportive and the team lead is supportive and understanding and a tech lead who dosent seem to be really a tech lead , basically this person was a replacement to another one , and this person initially for 2 months tagged along with all the devs collecting info about project , and i this person was not helpful with regards to tech problems we faced , or she was not helpful with regards to team collboration , this person tries being good and pushing blame to the devs , and i have already taken the concern and also there was a small kinda cold war as i have taken this concern to the lead and PM , so i really dont know how to deal with people like this in the project , this person basically when ever allocates somework even if the work is least priority this person says it as the highest priority asap to be done.

The fear of failure itself will cause the failure!

Experiencing same thing now,iam marking in jira .but scrum master are misled by 2 developers who r there in my team and her boss is believing her.actually design is flawed and estimates are rushed

It's like the classic example of the technical guys who don't have their heads around humanities issues whatsoever, in some cases

Which mic do you use sir?

Why would you ever want to encourage people to stay in such a disfuntional situation? It's the worst thing you can actually do. Sales people that sell projects like that should get fired on the spot and every developer should run away as quickly as possible. I've been through projects like that and it's never a good idea to stay. It has tremendous consequences for everyone involved and is simply not worth it. You did not name it, but the force behind that project is called greed. Greedy sales people don't care about what happens next - only their commission is important to them. Unfortunately in US a lot of people still think like you do and its feeding that pathological behaviors. Next time : run!!!

Scrum master always take all projects to failure

Funny how it's never your fault in these stories

this looks like a 30 minute video from a dev experienced in failure...

You know you say "you know" A LOT!?