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"I wanted to make sure that my first job post-university would be somewhere where I would feel happy and work not on my own, but with an agile team ..." It's i

"I wanted to make sure that my first job post-university would be somewhere where I would feel happy and work not on my own, but with an agile team ..." It's interesting that any young developer would regard the micromanagement that comes with agile as a plus.

nerdponx 9y ago
Do they just mean agile in the sense of "adaptable and fast-moving"? Also, for some (many) junior anythings some micromanagement is a good thing, especially for a college grad with little "real world" experience.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  BBC levels of management are good for no one other than the management.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - josh602 9y ago
    Could you expand on that?
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      I could, but W1A, a BBC sitcom does a much better job. Beyond that, we’re talking about criminally overpaid management which until relatively recently spent a few decades covering for the likes of Jimmy Saville. It’s the same management which still can’t quite figure how to deal with the realities of content delivery in 2017, because it might mean real change.
sudhirj 9y ago
> micromanagement that comes with agile It's a sad day when the ideas behind the agile movement have fully become the Agile System (tm) in engineer consciousness. The word used to denote a style of working, not characterised by micromanagement or by a Scrum Master (tm, again) telling people what to do, but ironically by leaving behind dogma for a loose collection of principles that worked effectively for the team and the problem at hand. The word has been lost, though. Using the word 'agile' now evokes more derision than enthusiasm or excitement.
- ismail 9y ago
  Curious why would one think agile is micromanaging?
  - ErrantX 9y ago
    Because its the common mistake large companies make when implementing agile. As a C-level you want to know the roadmap for the next 12 months and waterfall gave you that. Agile can be a bit terrifying (ofc it shouldnt be), therefore certain people (SAFE, looking at you) have worked out how to make agile look like waterfall from above. Basically by building tiers of process and making the demon-scrummaster (rather than teams) all powerful. The BBC is, as i understand it, a notorious example.
    - josh602 9y ago
      This isn't true in my experience. Each team I've come across has their own variant of Kanban that works for them that has evolved over time. We have no scrum masters. We have a plurality of leadership in teams, comprising of a tech lead, one or more product managers, a project manager and maybe a senior UX designer. This works quite well for us. I've only been at the Beeb for a year, of course, but I wouldn't say I've generally felt micromanaged. In particular, the tech lead of my current team very clearly makes a conscious effort to ensure he takes a step back and allows the team to self-organise.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    SAFe destroyed the great progress many of my clients were making towards more nimble, more human, software development. Dean Leffingwell is a charlatan and a snake oil salesman.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Because Agile is seen as a set of processes, not a set of values. The new hotness is time tracking -- making developers accountable at a micro-level for how much time they spend at each step of developing a feature, enhancement, or fix. All of which will have been specified in the beginning-of-sprint planning meeting of course. Management likes this because to them it's like profiling and optimizing a program. Developers hate it because the numbers are BS and the planning is basically waterfall in miniature, giving them little opportunity to explore the solution space. Plus the data collection itself is panopticon-ish. Agile was an attempt to sell basic (old school, think CSAIL not L0pht) hacking strategies to stiff-necked managers and executives under the rubric of making better software for cheaper. But managers and executives have their own set of values: measurability and predictability, the more the better. Agile requires you to let go of those a little, which Corporate America isn't willing to do. So if you join a Scrum shop, you will likely see cod-Agile that goes through the motions of Scrum while forgoing the principles of Agile -- under pressure from the top.
UK-AL 9y ago
He worked at a waterfall digital agency. Literally anything is better than that. The description of working a digital agency matches mine exactly. Your given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible. With no input into the actual experience.
- josh602 9y ago
  > Literally anything is better than that. Amen to that. :'(
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    I’ll take your waterfall agency and raise you a government IT shop pretending to be agile.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "He worked at a waterfall digital agency." > "Your given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible. With no input into the actual experience." That's not what waterfall is. That's almost the exact opposite of what waterfall is. The general idea behind waterfall is that you do most of the UX design planning before a developer gets to work on it. If you're "given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible" that is not waterfall. Look at the graph found in this Wikipedia page, and note how the 'Requirements' and 'Design' stages are either started or completed before 'Implementation' commences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
  - UK-AL 9y ago
    What your talking about matches my complaints exactly. I dont understand. Developers are almost never included in those stages. Your given designs that have already been completed. Then you "make them happen", you have no input in the designs because they have already been designed and signed off. They only care about the speed of implementation, not quality. Agile means that requirements can be more easily changed from feedback in process. Pictures = design and user experience documents. Most product based companies I've worked for means, I actually have input into almost everything around the product. If I feel something is not a great design or is difficult to implement I can change that as I go along. Can't do that in waterfall
closeparen 9y ago
I'm a relatively junior developer, and I work on a team that I would characterize as agile (though we don't use that word). I have broad latitude to write what I want to (with peer review of code, and peer + stakeholder review of RFCs), at whatever pace my manager and I agree is reasonable, to fulfill broad business goals. I wouldn't last long under the micromanagement of being handed an architecture and software design by someone else, and being told to just churn it out.
walshemj 9y ago
Agile or RAD done well can be very good but it does require more experience developers than say waterfall and the PM scrum leaders really need to know there stuff not just done a weeks course. Not sure that throwing a junior developer in the deep end with agile is always good idea
cortesoft 9y ago
What style of management has less micromanagement?
valuearb 9y ago
Agile, like waterfall, is only as good as it’s implementers. At my workplace we had lots of lingering bugs because the entire project had been poorly architected. We pushed to refactor and our scrum masters looked at us like we were crazy. Putting patches in bugs fits in a 2 week cycle, taking months to do something right, does not.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  Programmers having to beg glorified administrative assistants for permission to refactor code is why I’m inches from quitting this agile coaching bit to do a startup or something. I can teach people XP, Kanban, or scrum but I can’t teach them common sense.
  - sroussey 9y ago
    If you want to start a startup so you can have clean code constantly refactored, you will join many others shocked that customers don’t care (not directly, and pretty much never at startup stage). In the mean time, someone else with the idea moves quicker and has all your customers. The end (literally). At a (much) later stage, there will be times to refactor. Carefully, and with limited scope that shows real value.
    - ryanmarsh 9y ago
      Thanks. Done plenty of startups. You misread my comment. I’m saying agile coaching is fruitless.

nerdponx 9y ago

Do they just mean agile in the sense of "adaptable and fast-moving"? Also, for some (many) junior anythings some micromanagement is a good thing, especially for a college grad with little "real world" experience.

QAPereo 9y ago
BBC levels of management are good for no one other than the management.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- josh602 9y ago
  Could you expand on that?
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I could, but W1A, a BBC sitcom does a much better job. Beyond that, we’re talking about criminally overpaid management which until relatively recently spent a few decades covering for the likes of Jimmy Saville. It’s the same management which still can’t quite figure how to deal with the realities of content delivery in 2017, because it might mean real change.

sudhirj 9y ago

> micromanagement that comes with agile It's a sad day when the ideas behind the agile movement have fully become the Agile System (tm) in engineer consciousness. The word used to denote a style of working, not characterised by micromanagement or by a Scrum Master (tm, again) telling people what to do, but ironically by leaving behind dogma for a loose collection of principles that worked effectively for the team and the problem at hand. The word has been lost, though. Using the word 'agile' now evokes more derision than enthusiasm or excitement.

ismail 9y ago
Curious why would one think agile is micromanaging?
- ErrantX 9y ago
  Because its the common mistake large companies make when implementing agile. As a C-level you want to know the roadmap for the next 12 months and waterfall gave you that. Agile can be a bit terrifying (ofc it shouldnt be), therefore certain people (SAFE, looking at you) have worked out how to make agile look like waterfall from above. Basically by building tiers of process and making the demon-scrummaster (rather than teams) all powerful. The BBC is, as i understand it, a notorious example.
  - josh602 9y ago
    This isn't true in my experience. Each team I've come across has their own variant of Kanban that works for them that has evolved over time. We have no scrum masters. We have a plurality of leadership in teams, comprising of a tech lead, one or more product managers, a project manager and maybe a senior UX designer. This works quite well for us. I've only been at the Beeb for a year, of course, but I wouldn't say I've generally felt micromanaged. In particular, the tech lead of my current team very clearly makes a conscious effort to ensure he takes a step back and allows the team to self-organise.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  SAFe destroyed the great progress many of my clients were making towards more nimble, more human, software development. Dean Leffingwell is a charlatan and a snake oil salesman.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Because Agile is seen as a set of processes, not a set of values. The new hotness is time tracking -- making developers accountable at a micro-level for how much time they spend at each step of developing a feature, enhancement, or fix. All of which will have been specified in the beginning-of-sprint planning meeting of course. Management likes this because to them it's like profiling and optimizing a program. Developers hate it because the numbers are BS and the planning is basically waterfall in miniature, giving them little opportunity to explore the solution space. Plus the data collection itself is panopticon-ish. Agile was an attempt to sell basic (old school, think CSAIL not L0pht) hacking strategies to stiff-necked managers and executives under the rubric of making better software for cheaper. But managers and executives have their own set of values: measurability and predictability, the more the better. Agile requires you to let go of those a little, which Corporate America isn't willing to do. So if you join a Scrum shop, you will likely see cod-Agile that goes through the motions of Scrum while forgoing the principles of Agile -- under pressure from the top.

UK-AL 9y ago

He worked at a waterfall digital agency. Literally anything is better than that. The description of working a digital agency matches mine exactly. Your given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible. With no input into the actual experience.

josh602 9y ago
> Literally anything is better than that. Amen to that. :'(
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  I’ll take your waterfall agency and raise you a government IT shop pretending to be agile.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "He worked at a waterfall digital agency." > "Your given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible. With no input into the actual experience." That's not what waterfall is. That's almost the exact opposite of what waterfall is. The general idea behind waterfall is that you do most of the UX design planning before a developer gets to work on it. If you're "given pictures and told to make it work as fast as possible" that is not waterfall. Look at the graph found in this Wikipedia page, and note how the 'Requirements' and 'Design' stages are either started or completed before 'Implementation' commences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
- UK-AL 9y ago
  What your talking about matches my complaints exactly. I dont understand. Developers are almost never included in those stages. Your given designs that have already been completed. Then you "make them happen", you have no input in the designs because they have already been designed and signed off. They only care about the speed of implementation, not quality. Agile means that requirements can be more easily changed from feedback in process. Pictures = design and user experience documents. Most product based companies I've worked for means, I actually have input into almost everything around the product. If I feel something is not a great design or is difficult to implement I can change that as I go along. Can't do that in waterfall

closeparen 9y ago

I'm a relatively junior developer, and I work on a team that I would characterize as agile (though we don't use that word). I have broad latitude to write what I want to (with peer review of code, and peer + stakeholder review of RFCs), at whatever pace my manager and I agree is reasonable, to fulfill broad business goals. I wouldn't last long under the micromanagement of being handed an architecture and software design by someone else, and being told to just churn it out.

walshemj 9y ago

Agile or RAD done well can be very good but it does require more experience developers than say waterfall and the PM scrum leaders really need to know there stuff not just done a weeks course. Not sure that throwing a junior developer in the deep end with agile is always good idea

cortesoft 9y ago

What style of management has less micromanagement?

valuearb 9y ago

Agile, like waterfall, is only as good as it’s implementers. At my workplace we had lots of lingering bugs because the entire project had been poorly architected. We pushed to refactor and our scrum masters looked at us like we were crazy. Putting patches in bugs fits in a 2 week cycle, taking months to do something right, does not.

ryanmarsh 9y ago
Programmers having to beg glorified administrative assistants for permission to refactor code is why I’m inches from quitting this agile coaching bit to do a startup or something. I can teach people XP, Kanban, or scrum but I can’t teach them common sense.
- sroussey 9y ago
  If you want to start a startup so you can have clean code constantly refactored, you will join many others shocked that customers don’t care (not directly, and pretty much never at startup stage). In the mean time, someone else with the idea moves quicker and has all your customers. The end (literally). At a (much) later stage, there will be times to refactor. Carefully, and with limited scope that shows real value.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    Thanks. Done plenty of startups. You misread my comment. I’m saying agile coaching is fruitless.