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You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have cont

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too. Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways? You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically. Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.

ericbarrett 6y ago
From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later. You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.
      - jameshart 6y ago
        I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you. If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity... ... why would you work for anyone?
        junon 6y ago
        You're assuming that agile is a "positive spin on the working environment". In 11 years of professional work, it's only ever been used as a weapon against the development team.
        ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
        Spot on. Often it feels like a cult, but even more often is used as a micromanagement tool.
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        This has nothing to do with agile practices. Micromanagement is micromanagement. The people you are apparently working for and with will micro manage regardless of any process. I also suspect that you do not actually work in a team. You probably work with other people that are loosely grouped together. I doubt you are actually working together on a common goal though, if you do not see value in standups for example. If there's no value in knowing what your team members are working on, you are not working closely together,you aren't helping each other etc. I suspect you have a product owner that sees standup as a progress report to them and that tries to exert their micromanaging power through it. I also suspect that you don't have a Scrum master that protects the team from this rogue product owner. I would take such a PO to the side and explain to him that if he doesn't stop this practice they will soon be disallowed from being in standup and that they have one chance to stay in standup and at least listen. Meaning unless asked a question by a team member they better keep their mouth shut. Am I at least somewhat close?
- lmm 6y ago
  Sure, just as for every company that actually offers competitive payrates there are a dozen who just say they do. But it's not like not caring about management practices magically makes a company good at them either.
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly negative. 45-minute “standups,” major projects given 3 points, every negative stereotype bandied about on HN is something I’ve experienced.
    - jameshart 6y ago
      Why do I 'defend' agile? I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change. And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work, to replace the arbitrary deadlines and deathmarches? Turns out 'agile practice' has a bunch of useful ideas for those. Teams have limited capacity for 'work in progress'. The upcoming work can be prioritized on a backlog. Loose sizing estimates can help us make decisions about trading off time and features. You can only have one top priority at a time. It helps to let teams understand what problem they are trying to solve, not just tell them to implement a piece of a solution. That's what I value when I talk about 'agile'. A bunch of useful ideas stolen from scrum and kanban and lean and so on that actually help put developers in a position to solve the right problems in the right way, and get 'management' off their back. I'm also a fan of daily planning meetings to facilitate collaboration inside teams. I like retrospectives as a way to identify ways for teams to improve how they work. I like short fixed-duration iterations which deliver working code. I like pairing on problems. I like continuous integration and deployment and automated tests written alongside the code. Those are good practices that we, as a small team of developers, can use to help one another do good work, and ship working software. And those ideas are all also stolen from things like scrum and XP and TDD and devops, which are also all 'agile' practices. If someone tells me they don't like agile I am confused because... I don't know why you wouldn't want to work on teams that follow those kinds of practices. I do get that plenty of people have been subjected to environments that use things with the same names as these things in ways that aren't remotely agile. But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them is like saying you never want to use a programming language that has strings because PHP's string coercion sucks. I find these practices helpful, and better than not following them. I've been lucky to get to enjoy working in environments that use them, rather than have them badly forced upon me.
g051051 6y ago
> You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. Fine by me. Everything I've seen and heard of Agile (both in the last company I worked at and from others) is that's it's a dumpster fire. It wasn't created by developers to improve development, it was created by consultants to sell consulting. DevOps is dumb, too. > Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they haven't fallen for the hype and do what works for them.
- dboreham 6y ago
  You're hired!
- water8 6y ago
  It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
    - water8 6y ago
      I get a lot less grief from the people who pay the bills this way.
    - junon 6y ago
      I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way. However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
      - jameshart 6y ago
geofft 6y ago
Wow, I would love to work somewhere with waterfall requirements-gathering processes and change-control documents. Across several employers, I've seen a lot of misdirected work that just makes future work harder. Now of course the response is, why would I want to put up with that bureaucracy - won't it backfire on me? But it shouldn't be bureaucracy, it should be something driven by the engineers with the goal of shipping better products. Which is the problem with advertising agile. When a company says they follow agile, what they often mean is that there are people whose job it is to make sure the agile process is followed, effectively making their own agile bureaucracy. That's what scares people. I want to know that the company is going to get out of the way of practitioners and let us do big-design-up-front if we in our judgment as practitioners determine that a specific situation calls for it.
ryandrake 6y ago
I once worked at a place on the opposite side of the "process" spectrum: No source control No bug tracker No formal QA No versioning or release process. When a customer needed a build they just took whatever happened to be on the lead developer's PC at the time. No roadmap planning process. The CEO would walk into your office and spout off about some idea for the product, and that's what you'd be working on next. And I can assure you the did not do agile or scrum. Wasn't a really great place to work. Very chaotic and everything was a fire to put out. Lots of turnover and burnout too. Would not recommend. There's a sweet spot in the middle of the 'process' spectrum.
- topkai22 6y ago
  I interned in the software process group for a defense company building sattelites. It had the other extreme of the process spectrum- true waterfall/CMMI processes in place, but they were so painful that people just did work and then figured out how to claim they followed the process afterwards. They actually had a couple good processes that I walked away with (different levels of formality for code reviews, structured and a risk based QA processes), but overall it was about frustration and a molasses like movement. I was glad to end up on consumer software for a while after college.
omgwtfbbq 6y ago
Even at places that "do it well" it usually ends up being a massive time sink. 30 Minute daily standups, hour long sprint plannings and retros. Its hours of time lost each week.
junon 6y ago
I disagree. The only shooting-myself-in-the-foot I've done is to accept positions at companies with agile. It just doesn't work.
heywherelogingo 6y ago
"self-organize" - oh, sooner or later you're in for a treat. Agile coach: "Everybody go to the meeting room, you're going to self-organize. This is how you're going to do it...". I've not yet met an agile coach with the intelligence to parse what they're regurgitating. The only time I've seen agile work was pre-Agile when it had nothing to do with Agile.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  Then you've been with the wrong ones. Here's what my favourite agile coach does first thing in his courses. I've seen him consistently do this over many many times I've seen/participated in his courses: He runs a self organization exercise! You laugh now because you imagine it the way you described it. Well actually the first thing he does is to appoint someone as 'the worst micro manager in the world' and asks them to sort participant's by number of years of experience with agile development. He times this with a stop watch. When that's done he simply states that he wants participants to self organize standing next to each other sorted from one end to the other by number of years of experience in software development now. He then stands somewhere in the middle of the room himself and just starts repeating over and over "21 years, 21 years, 21 years,..." Usually it takes a little while for people to 'get' what he's doing but he stoically just repeats his 2 words. This is timed too of course. It's interesting how much less organized the second round seems when you are in the room watching this. But it's so much faster and gets the point across brilliantly if you ask me.
whimsicalism 6y ago
If they're really interested in talking about how agile they are, the signal to me is that this is a management-run company, not an engineer-run company. Plenty of engineer-run shops are lowercase a agile, but it's not something they bring up constantly.
jjav 6y ago
> getting out of the way of tech practitioners Agile is the literal exact opposite of "getting out of the way of tech practitioners".

ericbarrett 6y ago

From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.

jameshart 6y ago
Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later. You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.
    - jameshart 6y ago
      I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you. If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity... ... why would you work for anyone?
      - junon 6y ago
        You're assuming that agile is a "positive spin on the working environment". In 11 years of professional work, it's only ever been used as a weapon against the development team.
        ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
        Spot on. Often it feels like a cult, but even more often is used as a micromanagement tool.
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        This has nothing to do with agile practices. Micromanagement is micromanagement. The people you are apparently working for and with will micro manage regardless of any process. I also suspect that you do not actually work in a team. You probably work with other people that are loosely grouped together. I doubt you are actually working together on a common goal though, if you do not see value in standups for example. If there's no value in knowing what your team members are working on, you are not working closely together,you aren't helping each other etc. I suspect you have a product owner that sees standup as a progress report to them and that tries to exert their micromanaging power through it. I also suspect that you don't have a Scrum master that protects the team from this rogue product owner. I would take such a PO to the side and explain to him that if he doesn't stop this practice they will soon be disallowed from being in standup and that they have one chance to stay in standup and at least listen. Meaning unless asked a question by a team member they better keep their mouth shut. Am I at least somewhat close?
lmm 6y ago
Sure, just as for every company that actually offers competitive payrates there are a dozen who just say they do. But it's not like not caring about management practices magically makes a company good at them either.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly negative. 45-minute “standups,” major projects given 3 points, every negative stereotype bandied about on HN is something I’ve experienced.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    Why do I 'defend' agile? I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change. And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work, to replace the arbitrary deadlines and deathmarches? Turns out 'agile practice' has a bunch of useful ideas for those. Teams have limited capacity for 'work in progress'. The upcoming work can be prioritized on a backlog. Loose sizing estimates can help us make decisions about trading off time and features. You can only have one top priority at a time. It helps to let teams understand what problem they are trying to solve, not just tell them to implement a piece of a solution. That's what I value when I talk about 'agile'. A bunch of useful ideas stolen from scrum and kanban and lean and so on that actually help put developers in a position to solve the right problems in the right way, and get 'management' off their back. I'm also a fan of daily planning meetings to facilitate collaboration inside teams. I like retrospectives as a way to identify ways for teams to improve how they work. I like short fixed-duration iterations which deliver working code. I like pairing on problems. I like continuous integration and deployment and automated tests written alongside the code. Those are good practices that we, as a small team of developers, can use to help one another do good work, and ship working software. And those ideas are all also stolen from things like scrum and XP and TDD and devops, which are also all 'agile' practices. If someone tells me they don't like agile I am confused because... I don't know why you wouldn't want to work on teams that follow those kinds of practices. I do get that plenty of people have been subjected to environments that use things with the same names as these things in ways that aren't remotely agile. But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them is like saying you never want to use a programming language that has strings because PHP's string coercion sucks. I find these practices helpful, and better than not following them. I've been lucky to get to enjoy working in environments that use them, rather than have them badly forced upon me.

g051051 6y ago

> You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. Fine by me. Everything I've seen and heard of Agile (both in the last company I worked at and from others) is that's it's a dumpster fire. It wasn't created by developers to improve development, it was created by consultants to sell consulting. DevOps is dumb, too. > Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they haven't fallen for the hype and do what works for them.

dboreham 6y ago
You're hired!
water8 6y ago
It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
  - water8 6y ago
    I get a lot less grief from the people who pay the bills this way.
  - junon 6y ago
    I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way. However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
    - jameshart 6y ago

geofft 6y ago

Wow, I would love to work somewhere with waterfall requirements-gathering processes and change-control documents. Across several employers, I've seen a lot of misdirected work that just makes future work harder. Now of course the response is, why would I want to put up with that bureaucracy - won't it backfire on me? But it shouldn't be bureaucracy, it should be something driven by the engineers with the goal of shipping better products. Which is the problem with advertising agile. When a company says they follow agile, what they often mean is that there are people whose job it is to make sure the agile process is followed, effectively making their own agile bureaucracy. That's what scares people. I want to know that the company is going to get out of the way of practitioners and let us do big-design-up-front if we in our judgment as practitioners determine that a specific situation calls for it.

ryandrake 6y ago

I once worked at a place on the opposite side of the "process" spectrum: No source control No bug tracker No formal QA No versioning or release process. When a customer needed a build they just took whatever happened to be on the lead developer's PC at the time. No roadmap planning process. The CEO would walk into your office and spout off about some idea for the product, and that's what you'd be working on next. And I can assure you the did not do agile or scrum. Wasn't a really great place to work. Very chaotic and everything was a fire to put out. Lots of turnover and burnout too. Would not recommend. There's a sweet spot in the middle of the 'process' spectrum.

topkai22 6y ago
I interned in the software process group for a defense company building sattelites. It had the other extreme of the process spectrum- true waterfall/CMMI processes in place, but they were so painful that people just did work and then figured out how to claim they followed the process afterwards. They actually had a couple good processes that I walked away with (different levels of formality for code reviews, structured and a risk based QA processes), but overall it was about frustration and a molasses like movement. I was glad to end up on consumer software for a while after college.

omgwtfbbq 6y ago

Even at places that "do it well" it usually ends up being a massive time sink. 30 Minute daily standups, hour long sprint plannings and retros. Its hours of time lost each week.

junon 6y ago

I disagree. The only shooting-myself-in-the-foot I've done is to accept positions at companies with agile. It just doesn't work.

heywherelogingo 6y ago

"self-organize" - oh, sooner or later you're in for a treat. Agile coach: "Everybody go to the meeting room, you're going to self-organize. This is how you're going to do it...". I've not yet met an agile coach with the intelligence to parse what they're regurgitating. The only time I've seen agile work was pre-Agile when it had nothing to do with Agile.

tharkun__ 6y ago
Then you've been with the wrong ones. Here's what my favourite agile coach does first thing in his courses. I've seen him consistently do this over many many times I've seen/participated in his courses: He runs a self organization exercise! You laugh now because you imagine it the way you described it. Well actually the first thing he does is to appoint someone as 'the worst micro manager in the world' and asks them to sort participant's by number of years of experience with agile development. He times this with a stop watch. When that's done he simply states that he wants participants to self organize standing next to each other sorted from one end to the other by number of years of experience in software development now. He then stands somewhere in the middle of the room himself and just starts repeating over and over "21 years, 21 years, 21 years,..." Usually it takes a little while for people to 'get' what he's doing but he stoically just repeats his 2 words. This is timed too of course. It's interesting how much less organized the second round seems when you are in the room watching this. But it's so much faster and gets the point across brilliantly if you ask me.

whimsicalism 6y ago

If they're really interested in talking about how agile they are, the signal to me is that this is a management-run company, not an engineer-run company. Plenty of engineer-run shops are lowercase a agile, but it's not something they bring up constantly.

jjav 6y ago

> getting out of the way of tech practitioners Agile is the literal exact opposite of "getting out of the way of tech practitioners".