I never really understood the hype around (f)ragile (as one famous google engineer called it in a small closed circle a few years ago). I think the main problem

I never really understood the hype around (f)ragile (as one famous google engineer called it in a small closed circle a few years ago). I think the main problem is that in the past 7-8 years it has become more of an evangelism effort rather than anything. > The important piece that gets forgotten is that Agile was openly, militantly anti-management in the beginning. Yet here we are: The process just became an endless rabbit hole of filling jira tickets, workday schedules, and a bunch of other systems(including a shared google sheets table as it was in a company I used to work for with 5000+ employees) which easily eat up a day of your week. Detrimental if you are aiming for a deadline. And while I embraced wfh and felt insanely comfortable with it, it was used as an excuse for management to further push those things further down everyone's throats. The end result was that, at least from an engineering prespective, work became more of a marketing team meeting, filled with absurd abbreviations and processes which hold no value and only drag you down. Another problem is when you get an email from jira that someone assigned you a ticket called "Implement X in Y" with no further explanation when you click the link. It's absurd that in large companies(think 250+ people) your value is determined by how many tickets you've ticked off. "Implement X in Y" seems like just another one, but in many case those 4 words end up being 8 separate things, each of which can take several days but no one cares even if you described those in detail in the comments. You might think that story points solve that but they often don't. Imagine the following scenario: you are tasked to hook up a system to an s3 bucket to store data but you have restricted access to the aws console so you can't even create a bucket on your own. Then it turns out that the vpn is set up wrong and you can't even resolve the host if you are connected to the vpn. Then it turns out that the library you use has some bug in it or it's incompatible with some of the other libraries you use so you end up upgrading a bunch of libraries, patch up a large codebase and only then be able to get on with the s3 bucket thing. At first glance what you would assume is a 2 hour task tops ends up being a week and a half of your life. And it can be insanely demotivating when you have the same thing to report that you are working on the s3 thing in your daily scrum for a week and a half. Which is even worse when your managers have little to no tech skills beyond excel for instance. The point of my rant is that agile became the thing it was supposed to destroy - a time tracking system for the assembly line. Edit: those things don't seem to apply for small companies/startups because... Well they are small and you get to know everyone on day one.