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> Scrum has outmarketed "Agile", and swallowed it up wholesale. Agile was about putting people before process, Scrum is all process, no-wonder the people feel d

> Scrum has outmarketed "Agile", and swallowed it up wholesale. Agile was about putting people before process, Scrum is all process, no-wonder the people feel downtrodden. This. I understand that some managers want graphs, points, velocity, etc. Those things makes it easy to point at something and tell the team to improve. A good (imo) manager on the other hand, would just ask the team how the sprint went and what problems needs solving.

wayoutthere 5y ago
I usually come back to my “products vs projects” division. Projects are discrete work efforts with a specific business objective and an end date. They’re effectively waterfall, and managing a whole program with multiple work streams is at least possible via scrum (if you have the right feedback loops into the product team and execs). I suspect this is the kind of work people really hate. This is the kind of work consulting companies generally do. Product development should be much more free form. The product manager should own P&L for the product (or at least some proxy) because it aligns incentives. The dev team need not be 100% utilized all the time as their ability to quickly and effectively develop functionality is valued above cost efficiency (because again, product owns P&L so no business case has to be made). You can then use the “extra” time to deal with tech debt or take on special projects. The companies that really suck to work for are the ones that confuse the two. They are two different mindsets — one requires a developer who thrives on tight deadlines and can turn around functioning code and toss it over the fence, the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly. Put a project developer on a product they’ll be lost without the structure; put a product developer on a project team and they’ll quit within 6 months because they hate being micromanaged.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Yes I tell everyone who ll listen this distinction too. I've arrived in a project based financial institution. It boggles my mind the software mind set: get project "done" toss / handover to some poor bastard to struggle with. Repeat. I actually think handovers should be banned. They don't work.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    I used to lament “they’re doing it wrong” but I’ve come around to the fact that sometimes, that op model really is best for the size and way the company operates. If they don’t have technology product management as a skill in-house, it’s a seriously hard capability to build. In those cases, being able to work with an experienced vendor is great — but usually requires either time-boxed T&M or a deliverable-based contract (which is effectively timeboxed to protect the consultant’s margin). So you need to do handovers as your MSP / internal IT may not have the expertise to execute every project, and those (expensive, specialized) resources need to go away after the project is done.
    - bennysomething 5y ago
      I understand what you are saying, but this is all internally built stuff. The slopey shouldered mentally breeds a "don't give a fuck" mentality around code, testability, ease of new releases etc. I'm used to eat your own dog food.
- pbourke 5y ago
  This crystallizes for me that I’ve been a product developer mostly living in a project world (even when nominally building products). > the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly Yes. There is a surprising nonlinearity of benefits to doing something properly. It’s not about over-engineering to “best practices” or being a “cowboy coder” tuned only to your own preferences. These two are the Scylla and Charybdis of pursuing quality in software.
api 5y ago
> managers want graphs, points, velocity, etc. The desire for metrics is also a major driver of surveillance capitalism and why every web site and app is now larded up with telemetry. Some of surveillance capitalism is indeed about making the user the product, but a decent chunk of it is about people having metrics to show to people higher up the chain. People who sell advertising need metrics to sell it. Managers need metrics to show the value of feature X or Y or the application in general. Companies need metrics to woo and placate investors. Investors need metrics to show to their investors/LPs. It goes all the way up the chain. I'd say there is a general lust for metrics on the part of everyone who answers to anyone. Markets are not DAGs, but undirected graphs of power relationships, so everyone has a boss somewhere and thus everyone wants metrics.
mumblemumble 5y ago
To me, Scrum is a sad story about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Scrum does have a lot of processes and artifacts and things to measure. They all had a decent purpose: to give the product and project managers (Product Owner and Scrum Manager in Scrum parlance) information that allowed them to do their jobs more effectively. Story points and velocity estimates were supposed to drive decisions about what to build and when by giving the product manager some sort of signal they could use to decide things like, "Let's skip this feature; it's going to cost more than it's worth," or, "Let's push this bit a few weeks forward in the schedule, because it's looking like it's bigger and more likely to go quagmire on us than I had been hoping." There was supposed to be an understanding that generating this signal would reduce the speed at which the development team could churn out features. (Of course it would; that time spent playing planning poker had to be taken from somewhere.) But this was understood to be worthwhile in the long run, in a, "Work smarter, not harder," sort of way. On paper, it seems like a pretty good idea. The critical flaw, I think, is that, when you take a system that produces all those numbers, and even do something boneheaded like name one of them "velocity", and then drop that in the middle of a crowd of people who went to business school and have had heavily indoctrinated into Taylorist ways of thinking, well, it's like a will-o-the-wisp to them. They'll see something that looks bright and shiny, and follow it straight into deepest part of the swamp. And, since they're the manager, they'll be able to drag the whole team, or even the whole company, along with them when they do. Years ago, I had an interesting "A Tale of Two Scrums" experience. I was on a product team that had been doing Scrum as their own internal thing for years. Quite successfully, too, everyone was happy, it was possibly the highest morale team I've ever been on. But then senior management decided they wanted the company to go Agile. So they brought in $FAMOUS_AGILE_CONSULTANT to deliver a week of workshops which was mandatory for all the developers and skipped by all the managers, including product managers. And then we had this very top-down, Taylorist, how-much-blood-can-we-squeeze-from-this-stone brand of Scrum rammed down our throats from above. Half the team left the company within 2 years. I found later that, not too long after I left, the company had subsequently divested of the product I worked on. While I was there, it was the market leader and cash cow. Long story short, there's Scrum, and then there's Scrum. I can't tell you how much I loved doing Scrum, but I also can't tell you how much I hated doing Scrum.
- 5y ago
chmsky00 5y ago
Those things provide jobs and revenue streams for companies. That’s why it exists. Our free speech society relies heavily on sticking to jobs, economics, and service to industrialists.

wayoutthere 5y ago

I usually come back to my “products vs projects” division. Projects are discrete work efforts with a specific business objective and an end date. They’re effectively waterfall, and managing a whole program with multiple work streams is at least possible via scrum (if you have the right feedback loops into the product team and execs). I suspect this is the kind of work people really hate. This is the kind of work consulting companies generally do. Product development should be much more free form. The product manager should own P&L for the product (or at least some proxy) because it aligns incentives. The dev team need not be 100% utilized all the time as their ability to quickly and effectively develop functionality is valued above cost efficiency (because again, product owns P&L so no business case has to be made). You can then use the “extra” time to deal with tech debt or take on special projects. The companies that really suck to work for are the ones that confuse the two. They are two different mindsets — one requires a developer who thrives on tight deadlines and can turn around functioning code and toss it over the fence, the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly. Put a project developer on a product they’ll be lost without the structure; put a product developer on a project team and they’ll quit within 6 months because they hate being micromanaged.

bennysomething 5y ago
Yes I tell everyone who ll listen this distinction too. I've arrived in a project based financial institution. It boggles my mind the software mind set: get project "done" toss / handover to some poor bastard to struggle with. Repeat. I actually think handovers should be banned. They don't work.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  I used to lament “they’re doing it wrong” but I’ve come around to the fact that sometimes, that op model really is best for the size and way the company operates. If they don’t have technology product management as a skill in-house, it’s a seriously hard capability to build. In those cases, being able to work with an experienced vendor is great — but usually requires either time-boxed T&M or a deliverable-based contract (which is effectively timeboxed to protect the consultant’s margin). So you need to do handovers as your MSP / internal IT may not have the expertise to execute every project, and those (expensive, specialized) resources need to go away after the project is done.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    I understand what you are saying, but this is all internally built stuff. The slopey shouldered mentally breeds a "don't give a fuck" mentality around code, testability, ease of new releases etc. I'm used to eat your own dog food.
pbourke 5y ago
This crystallizes for me that I’ve been a product developer mostly living in a project world (even when nominally building products). > the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly Yes. There is a surprising nonlinearity of benefits to doing something properly. It’s not about over-engineering to “best practices” or being a “cowboy coder” tuned only to your own preferences. These two are the Scylla and Charybdis of pursuing quality in software.

api 5y ago

> managers want graphs, points, velocity, etc. The desire for metrics is also a major driver of surveillance capitalism and why every web site and app is now larded up with telemetry. Some of surveillance capitalism is indeed about making the user the product, but a decent chunk of it is about people having metrics to show to people higher up the chain. People who sell advertising need metrics to sell it. Managers need metrics to show the value of feature X or Y or the application in general. Companies need metrics to woo and placate investors. Investors need metrics to show to their investors/LPs. It goes all the way up the chain. I'd say there is a general lust for metrics on the part of everyone who answers to anyone. Markets are not DAGs, but undirected graphs of power relationships, so everyone has a boss somewhere and thus everyone wants metrics.

mumblemumble 5y ago

To me, Scrum is a sad story about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Scrum does have a lot of processes and artifacts and things to measure. They all had a decent purpose: to give the product and project managers (Product Owner and Scrum Manager in Scrum parlance) information that allowed them to do their jobs more effectively. Story points and velocity estimates were supposed to drive decisions about what to build and when by giving the product manager some sort of signal they could use to decide things like, "Let's skip this feature; it's going to cost more than it's worth," or, "Let's push this bit a few weeks forward in the schedule, because it's looking like it's bigger and more likely to go quagmire on us than I had been hoping." There was supposed to be an understanding that generating this signal would reduce the speed at which the development team could churn out features. (Of course it would; that time spent playing planning poker had to be taken from somewhere.) But this was understood to be worthwhile in the long run, in a, "Work smarter, not harder," sort of way. On paper, it seems like a pretty good idea. The critical flaw, I think, is that, when you take a system that produces all those numbers, and even do something boneheaded like name one of them "velocity", and then drop that in the middle of a crowd of people who went to business school and have had heavily indoctrinated into Taylorist ways of thinking, well, it's like a will-o-the-wisp to them. They'll see something that looks bright and shiny, and follow it straight into deepest part of the swamp. And, since they're the manager, they'll be able to drag the whole team, or even the whole company, along with them when they do. Years ago, I had an interesting "A Tale of Two Scrums" experience. I was on a product team that had been doing Scrum as their own internal thing for years. Quite successfully, too, everyone was happy, it was possibly the highest morale team I've ever been on. But then senior management decided they wanted the company to go Agile. So they brought in $FAMOUS_AGILE_CONSULTANT to deliver a week of workshops which was mandatory for all the developers and skipped by all the managers, including product managers. And then we had this very top-down, Taylorist, how-much-blood-can-we-squeeze-from-this-stone brand of Scrum rammed down our throats from above. Half the team left the company within 2 years. I found later that, not too long after I left, the company had subsequently divested of the product I worked on. While I was there, it was the market leader and cash cow. Long story short, there's Scrum, and then there's Scrum. I can't tell you how much I loved doing Scrum, but I also can't tell you how much I hated doing Scrum.

5y ago

chmsky00 5y ago

Those things provide jobs and revenue streams for companies. That’s why it exists. Our free speech society relies heavily on sticking to jobs, economics, and service to industrialists.