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Whatever Agile was, it's absolute garbage these days. It largely exists to hold developers maximally accountable to the business, at the expense of technical ex

• jimbob45 4y ago
  Agile is assuredly garbage but having every development company use the exact same process and terminology is too valuable to give up. It reduces training times, increases tool familiarity, and gets the process out of the way of developers.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Agile is assuredly garbage but having every development company use the exact same process and terminology is too valuable to give up. But...Agile doesn't involve that. Even when the same words are used, they don't have the same meaning, often, and the substantive processes even within vaguely Scrum-ish methodologies vary widely.
    • UnpossibleJim 4y ago
      What has been said so often on HN, AGILE started as a great tool that turned into a cult with no knowledge of why the things being used were being used. Its terminology and practices became mysticism and ritual, with common sense thrown to the wayside. There are exceptions, but in far too many companies AGILE has become a religion that slows the workforce down with high priests who insist that their ritualistic practices be followed and their tithes be paid =[
  • beckingz 4y ago
    This is actually a good point. We should be fighting against the standardization of the industry because it allows more competition for wages. On the other hand, damn near every company seems to only want to hire 'senior' developers who can deliver working software in spite of process, which I assume is somehow related to all the nonobvious process skills being commoditized.
• randomdata 4y ago
  > Whatever Agile was Has it changed? The Manifesto[1] is still there, unmodified, to provide thoughts on what you need to consider if you are going to run a software project without managers. > Fuck user stories, fuck sprints, fuck Jira, and fuck product management That does not sound like Aglie, especially given that you specifically call out managers, which are incongruent with Agile. The top-down organization where process flows down from management at the top to the developers at the bottom that you speak of is what is colloquially known as 'Waterfall'. This 'Waterfall' organization structure is what many believe the Manifesto was written to counteract, so it is interesting that you’re now calling it Agile. [1] https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
  • moron4hire 4y ago
    That is not at all what waterfall means. And calling "Agile" as the same thing as whatever the Manifesto says is like calling any other religion whatever their holy book "says".
    • randomdata 4y ago
      You’re right in your second point, at least. Whatever you develop out of the thoughts of Agile won’t be called Agile. It is its own thing, with whatever new name you decide to give it.
      • ajmurmann 4y ago
        You can build your own processes around Agile principles. As long as you don't carve the processes in stone and revisit them you still can be Agile.
        • randomdata 4y ago
          Reading the principles of Agile does not make what you're doing Agile any more than reading the words of the bible makes what you're doing Bible, even if you took something useful out of that reading. Whatever it is you end up doing is what you decide to call it. Agile is more like a checklist of things to remember if you're going to operate without managers. Like, stay in touch with the business people, keep your work available for other developers to see, work with people who can be motivated without a manager hovering over them, etc. All obvious when you think about what role managers fill and what you need to do if they're gone, but still a decent reminder if you're serious about going down that road. It's not something you do, rather something you can think about if you've decided managers aren't the right fit for your project.
• ozarker 4y ago
  I’ve been feeling a similar sentiment. This sprint some higher up agile coach or whatever their title is has been observing our team and making sure we follow the agile law to a T at the cost of real work efficiency.
• notjustanymike 4y ago
  Your anger sounds directed at the dysfunction within your organization. In particular if you hate product management then you've clearly ended up in a bad place. A good product manager is a joy, someone who is a partner to the engineering team instead of an antagonist.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dfxm12 4y ago
    Maybe they're rare, too. I am but one person, but I've yet to work with one that I'd describe as a "joy".
    • happimess 4y ago
      I have, at a truly well-run engineering team. She was fun to bounce ideas off of, and quick to rope in relevant experts, business or techincal. She also understood the value proposition of each feature, and could easily spot if you were wasting cycles on something unimportant. Probably not coincidentally, this was the only place I've worked where KPIs were truly a useful way of framing our place within the organization.
    • notjustanymike 4y ago
      I've spent a lot of my time helping ours grow into a collaborating by walking them through my expectations of a product brief and what we need from our user stories. They're also really good at helping with the release, managing story sign-off and communicating changes with the other teams (customer success, account managers, sales team, etc). A good product manager manages... the product. They also collect all the user feedback, validate feature requests with data, and act as a guard for the rest of their engineering team.
    • soneca 4y ago
      I have worked with a few. It made my job much easier. I’ve worked with a couple that were neutral to my job, but I’ve yet to work with one I hated
• drewcoo 4y ago
  Big A Agile is what happened after management consultants got hold of little a agile and its manifesto. Now people get certifications in scrum dogma and claim we have to follow the one true way. Now it's entirely about managing people instead of about satisfying customers. That's why a bunch of folks left years ago to work on development as craft.
  • lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Author here, yes, I fully agree about all you said especially certifications and dogma. How can you have a certification, in something that is a list of half a dozen goals? By getting a certification in something else, that isn't Agile! > managing people instead of about satisfying customers. I wrote another article that somewhat alludes to this, it's linked at the start of this one. If I'm not helping people, either customers, or developers by making their jobs easier, then what exactly am I doing as a professional?
  • makeitdouble 4y ago
    I came to think that the whole Big A Agile and small a agile is also just an excuse to put the blame elsewhere. We can't say with a straight face that we expected IBM or Accenture like conpanies to move to an "agile" process. And smal and/or smart conpanies were already doing "agile" without making manifesto and boasting it at every occasion. What's left is the middle ground wh 'll blindly follow any trend and get certifications to proudly have the buzzwords on their company site, and "agile" weren't for them either.
• drstewart 4y ago
  >technical excellence Technical excellence doesn't pay the bills. Curious - what products do you pay for due to their technical excellence of their backend instead of the value they provide you directly?
  • rurp 4y ago
    There are a great many products I don't use, or use much less often, due to numerous bugs and painfully slow performance. Those qualities are highly correlated with engineering quality, in my experience.
• moron4hire 4y ago
  Here's one to add onto your list: pair/mob programming is bosses weaponizing employees against each other to "prevent goofing off". I've started to form a belief[0] that large software projects in general are A Bad Idea. Whatever it is, if it requires more than a handful of people to build, it's probably for the greater good of everyone--the workers involved, the users, humanity in general, anyone-not-identifying-as-shareholders--that it not be done. Software is the only thing I can think of where the input effort of creating it is completely divorced from the output work it can churn through. The right program at the right time, written in 10 minutes by just the right person, can save hundreds of years of otherwise manual labor. There's a sort of sense that arithmetic got us out of the stone age, calculus fed the world, computer programming gave us the stars. That sort of power is far too important to imbue into corporations. When you get a large group of people together, they start to think of themselves as Important. And when people think of themselves as Important, they start to think the work they do is Hard. And when they think the work they do is Hard, they start to think the software to help them do their work should be Complex. And none of it comes out of anything other than "we have a large group of people together." Like, microkernel operating systems have a reputation for being slow based on early experiments with them from the 1980s. There are modern microkernel systems that are perfectly fast and efficient and yet people still think "monolith go brrrrrr" and not "all my software lives here" is the reason Linux is any good. Like, I've seen people pitching blockchain-based solutions for municipal information and issue-reporting services, like anything beyond the most basic, not-completely-incompetent, traditional RDBMS is really necessary for such a project. Like, there's a serious cohort of economists that think that the best way to handle social safety benefits is to just give them to everyone who asks, no questions asked, because otherwise the management of welfare benefits gets to be so expensive that it eclipses any potential savings against "fraud". And I'm inclined to believe them. I see people talk about "there's no such thing as a 10x programmer". I think these people have been stuck in ossified institutions so long that they have no idea what it looks like to see a person fly. Cut away 90% of the currently employed software developers. Dissolve the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Don't replace them with anything. Leave us with the 10% of crafstpeople who can actually work through a problem on their own. And make them report directly to the C-suite. No more middle managers. No more grunt work of CRUD forms. If it can be done on paper than it's a waste of time to write software to do it. [0] AKA this is a feeling, not something I've created a double-blind randomized trial to study, dear pedantic HN reader.
• ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Agile was never good. Agile is a marketing word used to sell useless training to even more useless managers.
• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  > Whatever Agile was, it's absolute garbage these days. It largely exists to hold developers maximally accountable to the business, at the expense of technical excellence or even maintenance, Author here, this was one of the motivations for writing this and the other article linked at the start. I've seen agile actively harming maintenance and quality more times than I've seen it ever help maintenance or quality. You know things are fucked up when you need to put technical debt, refactors, library updates, etc down as "stories" (erm hello, where is the customer story in "fix that giant performance TODO") instead of just doing them. Sure, we can just carry them out to avoid the wrath of the scrum master and co, but then you have to balance time between doing the stories, and fixing bugs.