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The problem is in your team or your corporate culture. Not agile or scrum as a whole. On my team, agile is a process used among peers to coordinate. No one is

The problem is in your team or your corporate culture. Not agile or scrum as a whole. On my team, agile is a process used among peers to coordinate. No one is a cog. No one is checking up on anyone. We keep each other aware of what's going on because you have to in order to coordinate and collaborate. My manager is just one voice among many on the team. He isn't tasked with monitoring my work because I don't need a babysitter. I'm sorry that you work somewhere where you feel someone's monitoring or checking up on you. Where I work that kind of situation is called a Performance Improvement Plan. If you're not in that situation and are a highly productive individual, then your culture is broken and you should look for a different job. But you're wrong that agile and scrum are at fault. If you used any other process, you'd have the same problem.

overgard 9y ago
Well this is an aggregate opinion based on the last three places I've worked, mixed with a lot of conversations with peers at other places. It's certainly possible that I've just been unlucky and my colleagues have also been unlucky, but I would also point out that I've seen pretty much zero in the way of objective proof that agile actually improves anything, and a lot of subjective experience that agile doesn't actually benefit engineers. Frankly, I think it's up to the agile proponents to objectively demonstrate why this is better -- but 99% what I see is vague promises mixed with attempts at shaming people for "doing it wrong" when people say it doesn't work. (Not to mention the whole "waterfall" boogie man. As far as I can tell in the agilista world-view if you're not doing agile, you're 1970s IBM and you wear a blue suit to work every day) Anecdotally, the last place I worked, I was on a small team that didn't really do agile. This was composed of some of the most competent, extremely smart people I've ever worked with that had decades of experience in the CAD field and had worked together for a very long time. We're talking people with like dual PhDs from very respected universities that have been working in the field for like 20 years; kept very sharp by going to C++ conferences, were very particular about testing and code reviews, and so on. I remember the corporate office tried to impose agile on these people, and after humoring it for about a month the whole thing was mercifully abandoned because everyone felt like it was ridiculous and it was slowing things down and causing a bunch of friction when some ridiculous consultant wanted us to do "planning poker". The only people that really wanted it in the first place were essentially remote project managers that were annoyed with these uppity engineers that thought they knew better (which frankly: they did; 20 years writing CAD software and you're going to learn a thing or two, whereas the project managers were pretty much just dabblers -- and when they couldn't convince people to do what they wanted by merits of their argument, they just wanted to install "process" to essentially strong-arm people into doing their will)

overgard 9y ago

Well this is an aggregate opinion based on the last three places I've worked, mixed with a lot of conversations with peers at other places. It's certainly possible that I've just been unlucky and my colleagues have also been unlucky, but I would also point out that I've seen pretty much zero in the way of objective proof that agile actually improves anything, and a lot of subjective experience that agile doesn't actually benefit engineers. Frankly, I think it's up to the agile proponents to objectively demonstrate why this is better -- but 99% what I see is vague promises mixed with attempts at shaming people for "doing it wrong" when people say it doesn't work. (Not to mention the whole "waterfall" boogie man. As far as I can tell in the agilista world-view if you're not doing agile, you're 1970s IBM and you wear a blue suit to work every day) Anecdotally, the last place I worked, I was on a small team that didn't really do agile. This was composed of some of the most competent, extremely smart people I've ever worked with that had decades of experience in the CAD field and had worked together for a very long time. We're talking people with like dual PhDs from very respected universities that have been working in the field for like 20 years; kept very sharp by going to C++ conferences, were very particular about testing and code reviews, and so on. I remember the corporate office tried to impose agile on these people, and after humoring it for about a month the whole thing was mercifully abandoned because everyone felt like it was ridiculous and it was slowing things down and causing a bunch of friction when some ridiculous consultant wanted us to do "planning poker". The only people that really wanted it in the first place were essentially remote project managers that were annoyed with these uppity engineers that thought they knew better (which frankly: they did; 20 years writing CAD software and you're going to learn a thing or two, whereas the project managers were pretty much just dabblers -- and when they couldn't convince people to do what they wanted by merits of their argument, they just wanted to install "process" to essentially strong-arm people into doing their will)