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Concerning the "Certified extra scrum master" quote from the video, I really like [1]: > [..] if your organization is struggling with an Agile transformation,

Concerning the "Certified extra scrum master" quote from the video, I really like [1]: > [..] if your organization is struggling with an Agile transformation, drowning in chaos, you’re going to leap when someone offers you a lifeboat in the form of certifications and processes and tools. Executives understand processes and tools much more than they grok self-organizing teams. [1] https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/ https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellio...

jillesvangurp 4y ago
There's a reason startups run circles around not-so-agile but yet self-styled agile corporate teams: mental agility. Mental agility is mostly found in young people and sometimes in older people that choose to stay humble and keep an open mind about their own abilities and skills. I like to think about myself as such; though if I'm honest, I'm more conservative than I used to be. It's disgusting how much value I get out of young people on my team willing to learn whatever and unburdened by experience vs. grizzled veterans with a lot of certificates and a rigid/dogmatic mindset that regard anything new as a threat rather than an opportunity to learn. I find it very energizing to be around such people. I've worked with veteran teams as well (like more than half > 40) and there were some spectacularly cynical types on those teams sucking all energy out of any room they entered. Given the demographics of developers (doubling numbers of programmers every five years), finding yourself on such teams is relatively rare. I've worked with numerous people that had certificates for this and that and rarely came away impressed by their skill sets. Also, I shook Ken Schwaber's hand (one of the people behind Scrum) at the end of a 2 day workshop many years ago that made me a "certified scrum master" and him probably a little bit wealthier. So, I know how hollow that phrase is. Licensed to wield multi colored post-its and sharpies, basically. That was one of the least agile companies I've worked with trying to be agile. No mental agility whatsoever at the senior level. But they compensated by sending all their senior engineers to trainings like this so they could virtue signal their supposed agility. These days, I keep my teams agile mainly by keeping them small. Small, remote teams don't need a lot of process and can resolve issues by simply communicating with each other. Partitioning teams and keeping the team boundaries informal removes a lot of need for process. In person meetings are rare with remote teams anyway. So post-its and sharpy wielding scrum masters have no place in such teams. We do have online meetings but I limit them to once a week for engineers and keep them informal: I want people to talk, ask questions, debate, and bond in the rare meetings we do have. Standups in front of a web cam are even more pointless than the zoned out de-caffienated cluster of extremely bored engineers droning on about what they did or did not do yesterday. So, not a thing that I do. I've always hated those type of standups and lots of developers I respect a lot seem to feel the same. I never got much value out of those. People waiting for such meetings to raise important issues are actually wasting time instead of being agile. Reach out asynchronously as early as convenient. Lots of issue resolution and problem solving does not require having any meetings whatsoever. And when there is a conflict that requires a meeting, have it 1 on 1 as early as convenient and don't burden the rest of the team with unresolved conflict. The best resolution is often just asking "do you have time for a quick call about this?". Waiting for some arbitrary meeting to happen turns those meetings into synchronization bottlenecks. The longer they are or the more you have of those, the worse the problem is. You solve synchronization bottlenecks with asynchronous processes and not with a "stop the world" point in time where people "meet" and are collectively not productive. Some OSS projects function entirely without meetings or meet very rarely. And some of those projects have orders of magnitudes more commits, developers, and change happening than most corporate "agile" projects. So, it can be done and IMHO is actually optimal and more agile.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  > Mental agility is mostly found in young people IME that isn't true. I'd like to know if you've any evidence of this at all. It's a trope too easily repeated but never seen any evidence presented. I do agree that cynicism can come from older people simply mistreated/abused/ignored too long by a company, but that's directly from their treatment, and then, that isn't as common as one might expect. Again, IME.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Mental agility used to be a synonym for IQ. But it's a function of quality, not age. Or IQ. Good people make difficult things simple. Poor people make simple things difficult and overcomplicated. It's a two quadrant problem with good and smart being the ideal, and poor and not smart being the worst. Poor and smart can be extremely toxic - unnecessary complexity that's hard for everyone else to understand. IME often also comes with personality issues. Good and not smart can be workable with good guidance.
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      > Poor and smart can be extremely toxic - unnecessary complexity that's hard for everyone else to understand OMG yes, had one of these once. A simple application because a dog-slow matryoshka of virtualisation and containers stitched together with queues and microservices, distributed over a cluster. One good server, a database and a bit of plain coding could have done the job, and been vastly faster as well. But his version was going to be so scalable! (haha, not even slightly. Edit: and he couldn't understand why)
- nprateem 4y ago
  It's not age. The reason is that there are lots of large mature businesses where people can coast due to poor accountability. If you're at a startup with equity you'll be much more self-motivated. Older people (especially with kids) probably just want to get the easy money instead of the risky, long-hours startups.
watwut 4y ago
Agile has been here for 30 years or so already. It is super absurd to still frame it as some kind of new thing organizations are transforming towards from something else.
- mihaigalos 4y ago
  My understanding is that it's a template and you bring your own batteries, applying it differently depending on your organization. That's why the focus on certifications is absurd, imho, not Agile itself.
  - watwut 4y ago
    I am not saying Agile is absurd. What is absurd is the rhetoric that tries to frame it as something new in opposition to mythical evil waterfall. I am not young and as far as I can say, waterfall was something that was not used in my lifetime.
    - mihaigalos 4y ago
      I see. I saw a lot of project management being done using Gantt charts, essentially waterfall. Did you ever see that happen?
      - watwut 4y ago
        Gantt charts is not the same as waterfall. Waterfall is supposed to be analysis of the whole system -> development of the whole system -> test of the whole system -> customer sees it first time. I have seem projects with long term scope and notion of plan, but it had a lot more flexibility and feedbacks points in the middle.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  While this is generally true, I would point out that a lot of teams are always transitioning from [no process whatsoever] to [something like agile] by virtue of being incredibly early stage. This is the case for many, many startups when they go from pre-seed to seed or seed to series A, and I think many would be shocked to learn just how far some teams get before they do any kind of kanban or tracking. I think this may be partially responsible for the framing agile as something new, still, in 2022.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

There's a reason startups run circles around not-so-agile but yet self-styled agile corporate teams: mental agility. Mental agility is mostly found in young people and sometimes in older people that choose to stay humble and keep an open mind about their own abilities and skills. I like to think about myself as such; though if I'm honest, I'm more conservative than I used to be. It's disgusting how much value I get out of young people on my team willing to learn whatever and unburdened by experience vs. grizzled veterans with a lot of certificates and a rigid/dogmatic mindset that regard anything new as a threat rather than an opportunity to learn. I find it very energizing to be around such people. I've worked with veteran teams as well (like more than half > 40) and there were some spectacularly cynical types on those teams sucking all energy out of any room they entered. Given the demographics of developers (doubling numbers of programmers every five years), finding yourself on such teams is relatively rare. I've worked with numerous people that had certificates for this and that and rarely came away impressed by their skill sets. Also, I shook Ken Schwaber's hand (one of the people behind Scrum) at the end of a 2 day workshop many years ago that made me a "certified scrum master" and him probably a little bit wealthier. So, I know how hollow that phrase is. Licensed to wield multi colored post-its and sharpies, basically. That was one of the least agile companies I've worked with trying to be agile. No mental agility whatsoever at the senior level. But they compensated by sending all their senior engineers to trainings like this so they could virtue signal their supposed agility. These days, I keep my teams agile mainly by keeping them small. Small, remote teams don't need a lot of process and can resolve issues by simply communicating with each other. Partitioning teams and keeping the team boundaries informal removes a lot of need for process. In person meetings are rare with remote teams anyway. So post-its and sharpy wielding scrum masters have no place in such teams. We do have online meetings but I limit them to once a week for engineers and keep them informal: I want people to talk, ask questions, debate, and bond in the rare meetings we do have. Standups in front of a web cam are even more pointless than the zoned out de-caffienated cluster of extremely bored engineers droning on about what they did or did not do yesterday. So, not a thing that I do. I've always hated those type of standups and lots of developers I respect a lot seem to feel the same. I never got much value out of those. People waiting for such meetings to raise important issues are actually wasting time instead of being agile. Reach out asynchronously as early as convenient. Lots of issue resolution and problem solving does not require having any meetings whatsoever. And when there is a conflict that requires a meeting, have it 1 on 1 as early as convenient and don't burden the rest of the team with unresolved conflict. The best resolution is often just asking "do you have time for a quick call about this?". Waiting for some arbitrary meeting to happen turns those meetings into synchronization bottlenecks. The longer they are or the more you have of those, the worse the problem is. You solve synchronization bottlenecks with asynchronous processes and not with a "stop the world" point in time where people "meet" and are collectively not productive. Some OSS projects function entirely without meetings or meet very rarely. And some of those projects have orders of magnitudes more commits, developers, and change happening than most corporate "agile" projects. So, it can be done and IMHO is actually optimal and more agile.

zasdffaa 4y ago
> Mental agility is mostly found in young people IME that isn't true. I'd like to know if you've any evidence of this at all. It's a trope too easily repeated but never seen any evidence presented. I do agree that cynicism can come from older people simply mistreated/abused/ignored too long by a company, but that's directly from their treatment, and then, that isn't as common as one might expect. Again, IME.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Mental agility used to be a synonym for IQ. But it's a function of quality, not age. Or IQ. Good people make difficult things simple. Poor people make simple things difficult and overcomplicated. It's a two quadrant problem with good and smart being the ideal, and poor and not smart being the worst. Poor and smart can be extremely toxic - unnecessary complexity that's hard for everyone else to understand. IME often also comes with personality issues. Good and not smart can be workable with good guidance.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    > Poor and smart can be extremely toxic - unnecessary complexity that's hard for everyone else to understand OMG yes, had one of these once. A simple application because a dog-slow matryoshka of virtualisation and containers stitched together with queues and microservices, distributed over a cluster. One good server, a database and a bit of plain coding could have done the job, and been vastly faster as well. But his version was going to be so scalable! (haha, not even slightly. Edit: and he couldn't understand why)
nprateem 4y ago
It's not age. The reason is that there are lots of large mature businesses where people can coast due to poor accountability. If you're at a startup with equity you'll be much more self-motivated. Older people (especially with kids) probably just want to get the easy money instead of the risky, long-hours startups.

watwut 4y ago

Agile has been here for 30 years or so already. It is super absurd to still frame it as some kind of new thing organizations are transforming towards from something else.

mihaigalos 4y ago
My understanding is that it's a template and you bring your own batteries, applying it differently depending on your organization. That's why the focus on certifications is absurd, imho, not Agile itself.
- watwut 4y ago
  I am not saying Agile is absurd. What is absurd is the rhetoric that tries to frame it as something new in opposition to mythical evil waterfall. I am not young and as far as I can say, waterfall was something that was not used in my lifetime.
  - mihaigalos 4y ago
    I see. I saw a lot of project management being done using Gantt charts, essentially waterfall. Did you ever see that happen?
    - watwut 4y ago
      Gantt charts is not the same as waterfall. Waterfall is supposed to be analysis of the whole system -> development of the whole system -> test of the whole system -> customer sees it first time. I have seem projects with long term scope and notion of plan, but it had a lot more flexibility and feedbacks points in the middle.
sam0x17 4y ago
While this is generally true, I would point out that a lot of teams are always transitioning from [no process whatsoever] to [something like agile] by virtue of being incredibly early stage. This is the case for many, many startups when they go from pre-seed to seed or seed to series A, and I think many would be shocked to learn just how far some teams get before they do any kind of kanban or tracking. I think this may be partially responsible for the framing agile as something new, still, in 2022.