I do not necessarily disagree completely, but I am a bit more optimistic about this. It is definitely possible (I've done it) to do agile projects even when all

I do not necessarily disagree completely, but I am a bit more optimistic about this. It is definitely possible (I've done it) to do agile projects even when all the team members are not self-motivated, provided there are at least one or two alpha-geeks that are. So I don't think it is the case that you need to stack the whole IT industry with hackers in order to have agile work. But particularly as to this: Good people tend to gravitate towards interesting projects, new languages, challenging problems – stuff they can brag about to their peers over beer. Many software projects don’t meet this description, but still have to be done. I think this is part of the problem. Structuring a project so that it does have some interest to a good software engineer is one of the challenges of managing an agile project. You would be amazed what people find interesting - I know tons of great developers that are not new-technology- or brag-driven (though none of them would agree to work on an "evil" project I don't think). The trick is to get the people first, and structure the project later - which is why this fails a lot in the real world, when personnel ramping-up happens after the project has been defined.