The core of Agile, Scrum, DevOps, XP, TDD, etc, is just to get a developer to truly understand what it is they're doing and make a meaningful connection to the

The core of Agile, Scrum, DevOps, XP, TDD, etc, is just to get a developer to truly understand what it is they're doing and make a meaningful connection to the real results of it. But before they can ever begin to do that (which is a huge challenge in and of itself), the organization needs to get the hell out of their way, but at the same time, invest tons of money and effort to help them do what they should be doing. If you just "step back" from trying to control the average bunch of engineers, they will miserably fail, because they have never gone to a school that taught them how to rapidly drive business value through software. If you hire the right people, they already learned all of that, and so they'll be successful. That's how the Netflixes of the world survive. Their organization and process would seem totally insane to any "average" tech engineering organization. But it works for them because they learned how to work together the correct way, the business got the hell out of the way, and it also invested a ton in helping them do what they need to do. Agile does not give you any of that. Agile is just a promise of what should be happening, but it doesn't tell you how to get there at all. It's a pipe dream. Agile is not the problem, though. It's businesses thinking the engineers are simple tools to be used to produce widgets, and if they just shove enough extra business roles and processes around the engineers, that will end up creating value. But the solution is actually to remove all that extra crap, and get the engineers to do everything in a way that the PMs and DMs and QEs etc are no longer necessary.