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They just didn't do the true agile. /s In reality, I'm not sure I've ever seen the "true agile", only excuses of that form. It has the same feel as there being

They just didn't do the true agile. /s In reality, I'm not sure I've ever seen the "true agile", only excuses of that form. It has the same feel as there being no 'true communist countries': Ease of implementation (and human nature) matters!

toenail 2y ago
> It has the same feel as there being no 'true communist countries So you've never worked in an environment where developers were trusted as professionals who can organize themselves?
- feffe 2y ago
  I actually did at one time, and it was fantastic. Then Agile was rolled out in that organization and ruined everything. Oh, the irony.
  - toenail 2y ago
    It sounds like some top-down management style mislabeled as agile was introduced.
    - p_l 2y ago
      So about 99.99% cases of "agile" from corporate standpoint.
      - toenail 2y ago
        In my experience 0%, if this is important working on your interview skills can help.
        p_l 2y ago
        As so called "Individual Contributor", my interviewing skills have little impact on people 2 or more rungs of hierarchy above me. Because that's who pushes "bad agile" so much, who is targeted by all the SAFe propaganda, who tells you to shut up or be fired when you tell them their brilliant ideas about how SCRUM is to be done across the company result in unnecessary friction with no benefits. (I nearly quit there and then because of that talk) And due to geographical constraints I can't exactly shop around as much as if I lived, let's say, on west coast of USA. So, "working on my interview skills" doesn't change anything, except maybe grinding leetcode so I can tasteore of the fecal rainbow of corporate agile.
        jzackpete 2y ago
        I've left 2 companies that have reorganized around SAFe, and I'm currently at the third one now. It's a malignant egregore that I can't escape
- ownagefool 2y ago
  I've worked at about 20 orgs and I've seen this about ~2 times.
jiggawatts 2y ago
> no 'true communist countries' Communism works... at small scales. It just doesn't scale up to country size. Every business with more than a few staff members is a communist dictatorship. Employees don't vote in their boss. Business are not democracies. Employees don't own their own means of production. They share a communal shared pool of capital resources, which is the very essence of communism. Every functional business is a success story for communist dictatorships. Where it breaks down is at large scales. Too much bureaucracy and misaligned incentives degrade the efficiency until it's worse than a bunch of competing organisations voting in a democracy. I'm saying this because Agile is similar. It too works. Just... not in the way that people try to apply it, at huge scales to large inflexible enterprises that say they want Agile but insist on implementing it using every step of the waterfall process, just renamed. Agile works, Communism works. Just not everywhere.
- papichulo2023 2y ago
  You could argue that almost everything works at small scale where you can constrain the context to perfectly fit your model. (This works*****)
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    "I tried your fancy antiobiotics, but it didn't cure my flu."
- Filligree 2y ago
  See, the 'true communism' is a democracy. Certainly if you go back to read Marx' book you'll find that's what he was going for. There's an interesting conversation here -- the governance of the countries where it was tried didn't change very much; new tsar, same as the old tsar -- but my main takeaway was that while you might be able to change the economic system, changing the governance requires deeper changes to the underlying culture, which is usually infeasible. Scandinavia, especially Norway, are IMO closer to marxist communism than the USSR ever was; last I checked around 40% of the economy is state-run. It seems to work pretty well, and it's democratic. But it's been democratic in one form or another for the last twelve hundred years. Even when it was ruled by Denmark or Sweden, there was local democracy. I suspect it would still be democratic even if it were explicitly communist. = And so we come back to Agile, which I think is similar: You get the qualities that are already inherent in the team, implementing something like Agile doesn't make a huge difference one way or the other. Except if you're heavy-handed about it, in which case you can absolutely destroy what's already there.

toenail 2y ago

> It has the same feel as there being no 'true communist countries So you've never worked in an environment where developers were trusted as professionals who can organize themselves?

feffe 2y ago
I actually did at one time, and it was fantastic. Then Agile was rolled out in that organization and ruined everything. Oh, the irony.
- toenail 2y ago
  It sounds like some top-down management style mislabeled as agile was introduced.
  - p_l 2y ago
    So about 99.99% cases of "agile" from corporate standpoint.
    - toenail 2y ago
      In my experience 0%, if this is important working on your interview skills can help.
      - p_l 2y ago
        As so called "Individual Contributor", my interviewing skills have little impact on people 2 or more rungs of hierarchy above me. Because that's who pushes "bad agile" so much, who is targeted by all the SAFe propaganda, who tells you to shut up or be fired when you tell them their brilliant ideas about how SCRUM is to be done across the company result in unnecessary friction with no benefits. (I nearly quit there and then because of that talk) And due to geographical constraints I can't exactly shop around as much as if I lived, let's say, on west coast of USA. So, "working on my interview skills" doesn't change anything, except maybe grinding leetcode so I can tasteore of the fecal rainbow of corporate agile.
        jzackpete 2y ago
        I've left 2 companies that have reorganized around SAFe, and I'm currently at the third one now. It's a malignant egregore that I can't escape
ownagefool 2y ago
I've worked at about 20 orgs and I've seen this about ~2 times.

jiggawatts 2y ago

> no 'true communist countries' Communism works... at small scales. It just doesn't scale up to country size. Every business with more than a few staff members is a communist dictatorship. Employees don't vote in their boss. Business are not democracies. Employees don't own their own means of production. They share a communal shared pool of capital resources, which is the very essence of communism. Every functional business is a success story for communist dictatorships. Where it breaks down is at large scales. Too much bureaucracy and misaligned incentives degrade the efficiency until it's worse than a bunch of competing organisations voting in a democracy. I'm saying this because Agile is similar. It too works. Just... not in the way that people try to apply it, at huge scales to large inflexible enterprises that say they want Agile but insist on implementing it using every step of the waterfall process, just renamed. Agile works, Communism works. Just not everywhere.

papichulo2023 2y ago
You could argue that almost everything works at small scale where you can constrain the context to perfectly fit your model. (This works*****)
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  "I tried your fancy antiobiotics, but it didn't cure my flu."
Filligree 2y ago
See, the 'true communism' is a democracy. Certainly if you go back to read Marx' book you'll find that's what he was going for. There's an interesting conversation here -- the governance of the countries where it was tried didn't change very much; new tsar, same as the old tsar -- but my main takeaway was that while you might be able to change the economic system, changing the governance requires deeper changes to the underlying culture, which is usually infeasible. Scandinavia, especially Norway, are IMO closer to marxist communism than the USSR ever was; last I checked around 40% of the economy is state-run. It seems to work pretty well, and it's democratic. But it's been democratic in one form or another for the last twelve hundred years. Even when it was ruled by Denmark or Sweden, there was local democracy. I suspect it would still be democratic even if it were explicitly communist. = And so we come back to Agile, which I think is similar: You get the qualities that are already inherent in the team, implementing something like Agile doesn't make a huge difference one way or the other. Except if you're heavy-handed about it, in which case you can absolutely destroy what's already there.