6 ms·

Agile has failed. Officially. Now comes version 2

26 points by TaurenHunter 3y ago

TaurenHunter 3y ago
Funny developer rant.
BillyTheMage 3y ago
They were sounding good until they compared it to the "not real communism" thing. What people call "communist" countries were, by definition, not communist. They themselves never claimed to have achieved communism. The reason it wasn't communism, or even socialism at all, was the fact that *the workers did not own the means of production*. Whether or not you like the idea of communism or not, it's dishonest to call the totalitarian states of the 20th century "communist". They were authoritarian state-capitalists. This leads me to believe that the author of this article maybe actually didn't understand agile as much as they thought they did.
- ProcNetDev 3y ago
  Maybe there is something inherently wrong with a system of centralized ownership if it always seems to get taken over by authoritians?
  - BillyTheMage 3y ago
    Centralized ownership is not a requirement of communism, but of Marxism-Leninism. Workers can own the means of production decentrally.
- TaurenHunter 3y ago
  The author seems to be from Budapest. Looking at the wikipedia I see "In 1949, Hungary was declared a communist People's Republic (People's Republic of Hungary). ... After Nagy had declared that Hungary was to leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral, Soviet tanks and troops entered the country to crush the revolt. Fighting continued until mid November, leaving more than 3000 dead." So arguably, he knows better about how it is living under that kind of regime than most of people.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  Well that sounds exactly like the agile we had in the last 2 companies I worked at.
- sickofparadox 3y ago
  I dare you to go back in time and tell the leader of a soviet bloc country that they aren't doing "real communism". Something tells me you will be met with significant "pushback".
- screye 3y ago
  Any attempt at real communism is real communism. Lenin Stalin and Mao were some of the best read scholars of their era who made genuine efforts to make communism happen. They couldn't, not because they did not understand communism, but because communism didn't understand the world it was trying to be a solution for. Humans are hedonistic and insecure beings for whom status games lie at the core of their existence. In the absence of inequality, there are no humans. For the potential difference is what makes sure the blood, sweat and tears flow in a certain direction. _____ There in lies a great equivalence between fans of communism and agile. You cannot create a productivity system for knowledge work if you do not understand knowledge work. Agile starts with trying to solve a problem that it assumes exists, without ever questioning if its central assumptions have any validity at all.
ath3nd 3y ago
The rant is 100% spot on. Agile is like an insidious cancer that spreads and saps an organization of its strength, time and resources. What Agile does to your best people is just next level cruel. They are bombarded with constant meetings, status progresses, forced to be playing childish games with cards, and are being "led" by incompetent snot-faced BAs who happened to finish a single week's course and suddenly became certified SCUM masters or POs. Thus, your best people either leave or are rendered powerless and incompetent by the mire of mediocrity and cult-like ritual following that SCRUM drags you into. One thing I can never forgive Agile is that it claims to be one thing: "people over process", but then just goes ahead, and it's the exact opposite. It goes and defines a gazillion processes and its practitioners scream bloody hell if you don't follow them, because then it's "not real SCRUM". Let's be honest what each thing is. - Standup is a scheduled management upgrade, so the manager has some progress to report. - Planning poker is a useless waste of time so the manager has some false sense of security when something will be done (usually badly and incompletely). They will share that info with other managers, who will add that in their calendar as a deadline, and then will blame the devs when it fails to materialize on time. The real culprit for the delay, of course is obvious. It's the fact that the devs spent more time in meetings estimating things and explaining to the walking tool that is their PO why it's not so easy to simply do X or Y, instead of actually doing real work. - Retrospectives are actually useful, if the manager is out of them. By retrospective I mean all iterative methods of improvement, not only every sprint or every incident. All types of structured or unstructured improvements are good. - The Scrum Master role is made so the owner's son has some well paid work to do after dropping out of college. Also, the role was created and because some old dudes wanted to sell courses online or books, costing $$$. This should go to show you that making stuff up as you go into random processes and then writing a book about to give it some validity is a totally viable career in life. - The PO role is where the money people (vaguely called "Business" or "Stakeholders") wanted to initially give agility to the devs, because they read somewhere it's nice. However, after giving it some thought, they thought better of it. At the end of the day, they decided that a person with no technical knowledge and no understanding of the inner workings and details is a much better qualified decision maker than any of the people with intimate, in-depth knowledge. After all, a totally incompetent dumbo's mindset is much more relatable to the "Stakeholders" than those pesky devs, so of course they are gonna trust the PO's "wise" judgement. - Sprint is just a cleverly crafted ploy to make the developers endlessly hurry towards endless micro deadlines, sprint after sprint. Who sprints all the time, all year round? Sprints should also be called "The Death March". The way sprints break down everything in dismally small pieces also serve as an excellent reminder to the devs, that just as they are replaceable cogs in the machine, the thing they are building is just a bunch of badly fitting factory assembled parts. That's to eliminate any illusion that our work requires careful curation, ownership, ingenuity and patience, and that it's a craft. No, our work has to be thought endless sprint from one small insignificant feature to the next, in the pursuit of "value" (much like factory workers produce parts with repetitive moves, day in and day out). - Agile Coach role. I have to admit, when I first heard that there exists such a role, and that people have it as a career, I was out of words. The mere fact that there are people who are "agile coaches" and that there are companies who employ and take the service of agile coaches is a solid proof to me that humanity's days are numbered. Agile and Scrum, like every other religion, are basically the result of people giving up thinking for themselves and wanting an easy packaged guide to follow from snake oil salesmen. Such easy cures could never do anything but disrupt a company. Nothing can beat smart people thinking and communicating, because dumbness is not curable.
greentext 3y ago
Agile sure is a weird way to pronounce micromanagement. Why not just call it what it is?
not_me_ever 3y ago
Quoting Cliff Berg as a source of information? Cliff Berg?!?! I could quote a ton of stuff that Cliff said at conference dinners and parties in the last years, but really -- would anybody believe the world is flat? That guy lost his marbles decades ago. It's interesting that you can read from every single "agile is dead" rant that the author has abso-elfing-lutely no personal experience whatsoever, and is just using it as click-bait. :sigh:

26 points by TaurenHunter 3y ago

Funny developer rant.

They were sounding good until they compared it to the "not real communism" thing. What people call "communist" countries were, by definition, not communist. They themselves never claimed to have achieved communism. The reason it wasn't communism, or even socialism at all, was the fact that *the workers did not own the means of production*. Whether or not you like the idea of communism or not, it's dishonest to call the totalitarian states of the 20th century "communist". They were authoritarian state-capitalists. This leads me to believe that the author of this article maybe actually didn't understand agile as much as they thought they did.

ProcNetDev 3y ago
Maybe there is something inherently wrong with a system of centralized ownership if it always seems to get taken over by authoritians?
- BillyTheMage 3y ago
  Centralized ownership is not a requirement of communism, but of Marxism-Leninism. Workers can own the means of production decentrally.
TaurenHunter 3y ago
The author seems to be from Budapest. Looking at the wikipedia I see "In 1949, Hungary was declared a communist People's Republic (People's Republic of Hungary). ... After Nagy had declared that Hungary was to leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral, Soviet tanks and troops entered the country to crush the revolt. Fighting continued until mid November, leaving more than 3000 dead." So arguably, he knows better about how it is living under that kind of regime than most of people.
rusticpenn 3y ago
Well that sounds exactly like the agile we had in the last 2 companies I worked at.
sickofparadox 3y ago
I dare you to go back in time and tell the leader of a soviet bloc country that they aren't doing "real communism". Something tells me you will be met with significant "pushback".
screye 3y ago
Any attempt at real communism is real communism. Lenin Stalin and Mao were some of the best read scholars of their era who made genuine efforts to make communism happen. They couldn't, not because they did not understand communism, but because communism didn't understand the world it was trying to be a solution for. Humans are hedonistic and insecure beings for whom status games lie at the core of their existence. In the absence of inequality, there are no humans. For the potential difference is what makes sure the blood, sweat and tears flow in a certain direction. _____ There in lies a great equivalence between fans of communism and agile. You cannot create a productivity system for knowledge work if you do not understand knowledge work. Agile starts with trying to solve a problem that it assumes exists, without ever questioning if its central assumptions have any validity at all.

ath3nd 3y ago

The rant is 100% spot on. Agile is like an insidious cancer that spreads and saps an organization of its strength, time and resources. What Agile does to your best people is just next level cruel. They are bombarded with constant meetings, status progresses, forced to be playing childish games with cards, and are being "led" by incompetent snot-faced BAs who happened to finish a single week's course and suddenly became certified SCUM masters or POs. Thus, your best people either leave or are rendered powerless and incompetent by the mire of mediocrity and cult-like ritual following that SCRUM drags you into. One thing I can never forgive Agile is that it claims to be one thing: "people over process", but then just goes ahead, and it's the exact opposite. It goes and defines a gazillion processes and its practitioners scream bloody hell if you don't follow them, because then it's "not real SCRUM". Let's be honest what each thing is. - Standup is a scheduled management upgrade, so the manager has some progress to report. - Planning poker is a useless waste of time so the manager has some false sense of security when something will be done (usually badly and incompletely). They will share that info with other managers, who will add that in their calendar as a deadline, and then will blame the devs when it fails to materialize on time. The real culprit for the delay, of course is obvious. It's the fact that the devs spent more time in meetings estimating things and explaining to the walking tool that is their PO why it's not so easy to simply do X or Y, instead of actually doing real work. - Retrospectives are actually useful, if the manager is out of them. By retrospective I mean all iterative methods of improvement, not only every sprint or every incident. All types of structured or unstructured improvements are good. - The Scrum Master role is made so the owner's son has some well paid work to do after dropping out of college. Also, the role was created and because some old dudes wanted to sell courses online or books, costing $$$. This should go to show you that making stuff up as you go into random processes and then writing a book about to give it some validity is a totally viable career in life. - The PO role is where the money people (vaguely called "Business" or "Stakeholders") wanted to initially give agility to the devs, because they read somewhere it's nice. However, after giving it some thought, they thought better of it. At the end of the day, they decided that a person with no technical knowledge and no understanding of the inner workings and details is a much better qualified decision maker than any of the people with intimate, in-depth knowledge. After all, a totally incompetent dumbo's mindset is much more relatable to the "Stakeholders" than those pesky devs, so of course they are gonna trust the PO's "wise" judgement. - Sprint is just a cleverly crafted ploy to make the developers endlessly hurry towards endless micro deadlines, sprint after sprint. Who sprints all the time, all year round? Sprints should also be called "The Death March". The way sprints break down everything in dismally small pieces also serve as an excellent reminder to the devs, that just as they are replaceable cogs in the machine, the thing they are building is just a bunch of badly fitting factory assembled parts. That's to eliminate any illusion that our work requires careful curation, ownership, ingenuity and patience, and that it's a craft. No, our work has to be thought endless sprint from one small insignificant feature to the next, in the pursuit of "value" (much like factory workers produce parts with repetitive moves, day in and day out). - Agile Coach role. I have to admit, when I first heard that there exists such a role, and that people have it as a career, I was out of words. The mere fact that there are people who are "agile coaches" and that there are companies who employ and take the service of agile coaches is a solid proof to me that humanity's days are numbered. Agile and Scrum, like every other religion, are basically the result of people giving up thinking for themselves and wanting an easy packaged guide to follow from snake oil salesmen. Such easy cures could never do anything but disrupt a company. Nothing can beat smart people thinking and communicating, because dumbness is not curable.

greentext 3y ago

Agile sure is a weird way to pronounce micromanagement. Why not just call it what it is?

not_me_ever 3y ago

Quoting Cliff Berg as a source of information? Cliff Berg?!?! I could quote a ton of stuff that Cliff said at conference dinners and parties in the last years, but really -- would anybody believe the world is flat? That guy lost his marbles decades ago. It's interesting that you can read from every single "agile is dead" rant that the author has abso-elfing-lutely no personal experience whatsoever, and is just using it as click-bait. :sigh: