Yep, that's a pretty apt description. The sad thing is almost all these fires were avoidable if they had let forward thinking engineers work on problems we all

Yep, that's a pretty apt description. The sad thing is almost all these fires were avoidable if they had let forward thinking engineers work on problems we all knew were upcoming, but weren't the emergency of the week. Unfortunately, the dedication to "agile" seemed to mean that anything outside the scope of the next two weeks pretty much didn't exist, and if you tried to do anything that wasn't in the "backlog" you were some sort of rogue cowboy. (Even if the backlog was empty!) Fundamentally, the problem was trust -- the management didn't trust the engineers, so they micromanaged them poorly while invoking "agile" to make heavy management somehow seem like a populist movement for the "team". And because the team was micromanaged and not trusted, motivation was low and the output was poor, which just made the problems worse. (Not surprisingly: the company recently just laid off the entire staff)