3 ms·

> Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other

by mojuba 5y ago

> Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent. But it is also important to be aware of what's going on in the company. Not just what you are doing but also why. Everyone can take part in decision making which happens during the day spontaneously. Or at least be aware of the process. From my observations: if done right, this kind of environments can be super productive.

DougBTX 5y ago
> the much hated "agile" culture I never got on well with Scrum, especially with the way it has become synonymous with “agile”. Really a shame that “agile” which focused on people has been swamped as a term by Scrum which is process process process.
- mojuba 5y ago
  Right, thanks for the correction, I meant Scrum of course.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Scrum isn't bad, but there are better agile processes. Most people doing scrum don't really do retrospectives and make changes to the process. In a large company this isn't really reasonable as there needs to be some process in common with each team, and the processes you most need to change in scrum are the ones that can only be changed if every team does it at once. I favor kanban processes - it locks in less at an organizational level and thus allows more freedom to make changes for the team. Though in my experience there is less change needed in the first place because the only processes specified are the ones that are locked in and everything else is whatever it takes to make it work.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Your thinking is part of the problem. Agile is rooted on focusing on people. Make a group of good people and empower them and they will create a process that works well. Also on the cases the process fail, they will change it. But if you go and decide the process, that's more than half the way towards a failure already.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      What you propose works in a small organization - which is the type of place where scrum was created and works well. In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes for that to work. Any individual change might be good, but they conflict and nobody can track what you are supposed to do now. That is why large organizations are so hard to change. Agile focusing on people is a good thing. People are number one, but agile has always acknowledged the roll of processes.
      - tonyarkles 5y ago
        > In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes Ideally, even in a large organization, it should still be structured down into small teams that can self-manage. You'll end up with Conway's Law taking effect, but you'll also alleviate the O(n^2) communication problem. In my experience, it works a lot smoother than 50 person teams where everyone's tripping over each other all the time.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
> From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent. When I was working in a startup, we did a "hybrid wfh" thing: we knew when we were about to have something requiring our full attention and would work one (or multiple) days from home. We had Google chat (or whatever it was called at the time) for anything that could handle a delay in response and the phone for anything that needed a chat right away. At the time, the office was in a kind of co-working space, so it was a particularly hellish combination of open-space and multiple companies, complete with people unaware of their phones' silent mode. The upside was that even for regular work, productivity skyrocketed when we were home, so the founder, who initially was against this, started warming up to the arrangement. More broadly, I think that different jobs have different requirements. I hate it when people talk around me and find it harder to focus. I never got used to this even after multiple years. And while I love listening to music, even while working, I don't enjoy wearing headphones all day long. I'm wearing glasses, so bigger headphones start to hurt after a while and in-ears are pain to put back in after every interruption. Also, headphones cut you off from the surrounding discussion (that's the point, right?) so the whole "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" kinda falls flat, doesn't it?
- bluGill 5y ago
  > "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" This is a good thing if the spontaneous decisions are always and only the ones that are important to you. This is a bad thing if there is any other decision. In a shared multiple companies space the only decision that matters to you is "where should we go for lunch" (they might not work with you, but you can still eat lunch with them). In a company only space it is better, but there are still a lot that don't matter to you. If it is a team only shared space most of the decisions matter to you.
odiroot 5y ago
> I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture Lowercase agile culture is not hated. What's hated is usually completely wrong implementation of that idea and cargo-cultism. Even more so, the whole industry of capital-case Agile.

by mojuba 5y ago

DougBTX 5y ago

> the much hated "agile" culture I never got on well with Scrum, especially with the way it has become synonymous with “agile”. Really a shame that “agile” which focused on people has been swamped as a term by Scrum which is process process process.

mojuba 5y ago
Right, thanks for the correction, I meant Scrum of course.
bluGill 5y ago
Scrum isn't bad, but there are better agile processes. Most people doing scrum don't really do retrospectives and make changes to the process. In a large company this isn't really reasonable as there needs to be some process in common with each team, and the processes you most need to change in scrum are the ones that can only be changed if every team does it at once. I favor kanban processes - it locks in less at an organizational level and thus allows more freedom to make changes for the team. Though in my experience there is less change needed in the first place because the only processes specified are the ones that are locked in and everything else is whatever it takes to make it work.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Your thinking is part of the problem. Agile is rooted on focusing on people. Make a group of good people and empower them and they will create a process that works well. Also on the cases the process fail, they will change it. But if you go and decide the process, that's more than half the way towards a failure already.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    What you propose works in a small organization - which is the type of place where scrum was created and works well. In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes for that to work. Any individual change might be good, but they conflict and nobody can track what you are supposed to do now. That is why large organizations are so hard to change. Agile focusing on people is a good thing. People are number one, but agile has always acknowledged the roll of processes.
    - tonyarkles 5y ago
      > In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes Ideally, even in a large organization, it should still be structured down into small teams that can self-manage. You'll end up with Conway's Law taking effect, but you'll also alleviate the O(n^2) communication problem. In my experience, it works a lot smoother than 50 person teams where everyone's tripping over each other all the time.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent. When I was working in a startup, we did a "hybrid wfh" thing: we knew when we were about to have something requiring our full attention and would work one (or multiple) days from home. We had Google chat (or whatever it was called at the time) for anything that could handle a delay in response and the phone for anything that needed a chat right away. At the time, the office was in a kind of co-working space, so it was a particularly hellish combination of open-space and multiple companies, complete with people unaware of their phones' silent mode. The upside was that even for regular work, productivity skyrocketed when we were home, so the founder, who initially was against this, started warming up to the arrangement. More broadly, I think that different jobs have different requirements. I hate it when people talk around me and find it harder to focus. I never got used to this even after multiple years. And while I love listening to music, even while working, I don't enjoy wearing headphones all day long. I'm wearing glasses, so bigger headphones start to hurt after a while and in-ears are pain to put back in after every interruption. Also, headphones cut you off from the surrounding discussion (that's the point, right?) so the whole "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" kinda falls flat, doesn't it?

bluGill 5y ago
> "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" This is a good thing if the spontaneous decisions are always and only the ones that are important to you. This is a bad thing if there is any other decision. In a shared multiple companies space the only decision that matters to you is "where should we go for lunch" (they might not work with you, but you can still eat lunch with them). In a company only space it is better, but there are still a lot that don't matter to you. If it is a team only shared space most of the decisions matter to you.

odiroot 5y ago

> I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture Lowercase agile culture is not hated. What's hated is usually completely wrong implementation of that idea and cargo-cultism. Even more so, the whole industry of capital-case Agile.