I call it a grift because it really feels like it. It's this weird "you have to do this or else" thing that provides 0 additional value (SOC2 is not prescriptiv

I call it a grift because it really feels like it. It's this weird "you have to do this or else" thing that provides 0 additional value (SOC2 is not prescriptive, it is just a forcing function, you could have... just done it). A bunch of unqualified people coming in to rank the unrankable in a vague, gameable, expensive way is my definition of a grift. Then, on top of that, you have a sort of ring of high status organizations that will audit you and charge a fortune, but they've convinced all of these other orgs that their audits are Definitely Better (companies audited by them get breached all the time too), and now you've got this whole racket on top of the grift. Agile isn't forced on anyone. People won't skip over your product because you're "not really doing agile" or whatever. You don't get forced into yearly audits where you pay some outsider with an "agile certification" and 0 technical knowledge to take up multiple engineers for months to write reports. This post explains more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505894