Over the past ten years, I've made sure our team's rely on scum and agile less and less. We still have a minimal board, and standups, but that's it. No extra me

Over the past ten years, I've made sure our team's rely on scum and agile less and less. We still have a minimal board, and standups, but that's it. No extra meetings. No definition of done. No stories. We just talk when needed. In practice, any work done to define in the card is likely to slightly change when there's new knowledge anyway. We find our approach substantially more flexible, agile, and stress free. One of our engineers today said that he felt bad that some of the cards were on the board for so long. He was self conscious about some false sense of velocity that was expected. I told him it's just a page on the internet with some text on it. Scrum, with its frameworks and ideology and self righteous way of looking like a way to be performant and sophisticated, is just some words on a page and some performative meetings. Poor guy was getting distracted by that. The goal of scrum is to let middle management and non coders bring Science(c) to the organization. There's a culture fostered by executives, consultants, that posits that engineers don't understand what to work on and waste time, therefore we need this stuff to run a tighter ship. As it happens, it'd also what justifies middle management's jobs. Scrum is good at tightening things that work, or making work feel predictable. A lot of growth scenarios or experimentation aren't predictable, so it becomes more like a broken dogma that serves the needs of the bureaucracy.