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Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers. Your work is turned into a factory-style production line and you're reduce

Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers. Your work is turned into a factory-style production line and you're reduced to playing a game of musical chairs over yellow stickys with other engineers at the daily standup. That the rules are "fuzzy" just underlines the fact that the exercise of power is arbitrary. These fuckers even have a joke about how a bus hits an engineer and no harm is done to the project. How inappropriate is it to make jokes about a bus hitting your colleagues.

mycall 5y ago
Management is typically easier to change than developers. Dev needs a mental map of everything; mgt, not so much.
- dudul 5y ago
  The thing is management often doesn't realize that.
- p1esk 5y ago
  I’m a developer and I often see the opposite: a manager has a good mental map of everything, and developers develop separate chunks of functionality. Unless you’re a software architect or a very senior dev, like a team lead, you won’t see the big picture.
feoren 5y ago
To be fair, I'm pretty sure the term "bus factor" (also known as "lottery factor" for the less morbid version) was invented by developers. I use that term all the time, and think a lot about what would happen if I were "hit by a bus". Maybe grim humor is not your style, but I'd recommend you look past that because that complaint is detracting from your otherwise valid points here.
- lanstin 5y ago
  For a senior, a great way to reduce the bus factor is to periodically stop all work in things other people can do. (Catch up on your reading, or write that cool code transformer you can’t stop thinking about or whatever). Hep when asked but very passively “why don’t you share your screen and we can try to debug it” instead of “try again, it should work now.” It might go really well or might show what areas you need to grow the team capabilities, but either way you get to know how great the code transformer idea really was.
systemvoltage 5y ago
As a person who has worked on factory-style production line, it is not as bad as you guys make it out! Manufacturing is a unique beast and tons of new problems to solve. To be fair, I worked as a manufacturing engineer and not as a production line worker. Is it that bad to work on software tickets? I suspect there is a good variety of problems to solve?
- Rapzid 5y ago
  Well there is a term for those software environments; widget factories. It's derogatory and nobody that can avoid it works in those places.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
Bus factor is an engineer term. Easy to tell by how nobody with any sense of social etiquette would have invented it.
- simmerup 5y ago
  Same with ugly words like ‘grok’ and ‘meatspace’
  - walshemj 5y ago
    You know where those come from ?
    - bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
      Sci-fi authors. I could be wrong about 'meatspace', but I'm pretty sure that was Ian M. Banks.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  Dark humor is common in all fields that butt heads with reality. (Engineers, Doctors, etc) It helps one cope.
wwweston 5y ago
Process (agile or not) always has three goals: legibility, scalability, and fungibility. Both management and devs alike can be concerned about the bus factor, which falls under fungibility. Of course, an organization can have (or lack) humanity beyond those three goals. And hire people who have (or lack) the requisite humanity to bring to their role. If someone treats the bus factor or general fungibility casually, that's a problem.
arglebarglegar 5y ago
yeah bus factor is an engineering term, sorry
yyyk 5y ago
>Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers Agile was explicitly invented by engineers for engineers, just look at the history of the original manifesto. One big problem is that it was built for self-managing teams composed only of engineers and established businesses are not built like that at all. There are non-technical people which are necessary and have legitimate business needs. Some of these are managers with power, so of course they're going to (ab)use the process to get what they need. You can either change the structure of the business itself to be more Agile-like (good luck with that in an established company, especially a non-tech one), or adopt a more realistic posture which invariably involve concessions and deviations from the Agile model, but ends up better for all involved.
marcinzm 5y ago
>Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers. I mean, that's because managers do have arbitrary power over engineers in most places. No project planning approach will ever make that go away if it's true in your org. Blaming agile for the inherent broken power dynamic of your company just makes it harder to fix the underlying issues.

mycall 5y ago

Management is typically easier to change than developers. Dev needs a mental map of everything; mgt, not so much.

dudul 5y ago
The thing is management often doesn't realize that.
p1esk 5y ago
I’m a developer and I often see the opposite: a manager has a good mental map of everything, and developers develop separate chunks of functionality. Unless you’re a software architect or a very senior dev, like a team lead, you won’t see the big picture.

feoren 5y ago

To be fair, I'm pretty sure the term "bus factor" (also known as "lottery factor" for the less morbid version) was invented by developers. I use that term all the time, and think a lot about what would happen if I were "hit by a bus". Maybe grim humor is not your style, but I'd recommend you look past that because that complaint is detracting from your otherwise valid points here.

lanstin 5y ago
For a senior, a great way to reduce the bus factor is to periodically stop all work in things other people can do. (Catch up on your reading, or write that cool code transformer you can’t stop thinking about or whatever). Hep when asked but very passively “why don’t you share your screen and we can try to debug it” instead of “try again, it should work now.” It might go really well or might show what areas you need to grow the team capabilities, but either way you get to know how great the code transformer idea really was.

systemvoltage 5y ago

As a person who has worked on factory-style production line, it is not as bad as you guys make it out! Manufacturing is a unique beast and tons of new problems to solve. To be fair, I worked as a manufacturing engineer and not as a production line worker. Is it that bad to work on software tickets? I suspect there is a good variety of problems to solve?

Rapzid 5y ago
Well there is a term for those software environments; widget factories. It's derogatory and nobody that can avoid it works in those places.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

Bus factor is an engineer term. Easy to tell by how nobody with any sense of social etiquette would have invented it.

simmerup 5y ago
Same with ugly words like ‘grok’ and ‘meatspace’
- walshemj 5y ago
  You know where those come from ?
  - bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
    Sci-fi authors. I could be wrong about 'meatspace', but I'm pretty sure that was Ian M. Banks.
Baeocystin 5y ago
Dark humor is common in all fields that butt heads with reality. (Engineers, Doctors, etc) It helps one cope.

wwweston 5y ago

Process (agile or not) always has three goals: legibility, scalability, and fungibility. Both management and devs alike can be concerned about the bus factor, which falls under fungibility. Of course, an organization can have (or lack) humanity beyond those three goals. And hire people who have (or lack) the requisite humanity to bring to their role. If someone treats the bus factor or general fungibility casually, that's a problem.

arglebarglegar 5y ago

yeah bus factor is an engineering term, sorry

yyyk 5y ago

>Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers Agile was explicitly invented by engineers for engineers, just look at the history of the original manifesto. One big problem is that it was built for self-managing teams composed only of engineers and established businesses are not built like that at all. There are non-technical people which are necessary and have legitimate business needs. Some of these are managers with power, so of course they're going to (ab)use the process to get what they need. You can either change the structure of the business itself to be more Agile-like (good luck with that in an established company, especially a non-tech one), or adopt a more realistic posture which invariably involve concessions and deviations from the Agile model, but ends up better for all involved.

marcinzm 5y ago

>Agile is a way for non-technical managers to exercise arbitrary power over engineers. I mean, that's because managers do have arbitrary power over engineers in most places. No project planning approach will ever make that go away if it's true in your org. Blaming agile for the inherent broken power dynamic of your company just makes it harder to fix the underlying issues.