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I guess Im too seasoned but Ive come to really resent all these project management 'techniques'. I don't know of any other profession that has such elaborate a

I guess Im too seasoned but Ive come to really resent all these project management 'techniques'. I don't know of any other profession that has such elaborate and cultish ideologies for getting stuff done. The funny thing is that none of this stuff is all that impactful in reality - you either have a good team, a bad team or more likely something somewhere in between. Unfortunately there is an army of project managers that keep on pushing the new magical pill as if its progress.

specialist 14y ago
*I don't know of any other profession that has such elaborate...* Education (the profession) comes close. But probably does more damage long term.
zbuc 14y ago
I prefer the "getting shit done" methodology. Find the least amount of process necessary to get your work done and make sure everyone knows what's going on and has reasonable expectations. It's honestly not hard to do this, and you don't need a crazy methodology to do it.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Er, that's pretty much Scrum in a nutshell :)
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    As naive as this comment seems, it's mostly true. Scrum is just a packaged set of practices intended to ease adoption of the agile philosophy. The end goal is to minimize process and maximize communication, which is exactly the same as "get shit done".
    - anthonyb 14y ago
      Thanks - I think...
    - zbuc 14y ago
      That's the end goal, unfortunately there are plenty of cargo cultists that don't really understand it and think the process is the important part. I've worked on scrum teams before, it can be done well if no one takes it too seriously IMO. Once you start guilting the team over the artifacts of scrum, it's fallen apart and become a detriment to your goal of Getting Shit Done.
      - vladvlad 14y ago
        This is the no-true scotsman argument. I have yet to see scrum implemented in a way that wasn't taken too seriously, that didn't make the team's life harder, etc, etc. It's just too easy to say they're all doing it wrong, if it's almost always done wrong. Maybe the reality is that it only works for some kinds of programming, when not taken too seriously. But then why bother at all?
  - vladvlad 14y ago
    Not in my experience, no. In fact, it's pretty nearly the farthest thing from the getting shit done thing I've actually dealt with. Just getting shit done doesn't mean bullshit arbitrary time-slices, half-day postmortems at the end of said timeslices, insertion of "project managers" who know little to nothing of either the actual business problem being address or the technical means used to address it, people working on a parallel svd implementation having to explain their work daily to web designers, blah blah blah. The whole thing is a money making cult for the people who invented it, and a means of empowering a class of employees (project managers) who should exist only in very small numbers, if at all. The claim seems to be that if you don't use scrum, you will just end up doing some horrible waterfall. This is a false dichotomy.
vladvlad 14y ago
Kanban and scrum are the revenge of the untalented and the humanities majors who would like to have technology jobs without having to learn anything about, you know, technology. Why not just learn about methodology instead? One of my least favorite aspects of the whole thing is having someone with little to no actual cs/math/ee/programming background tell me that since he/she/it used it for some trivial web programming, clearly my group doing r&d in machine learning were a bunch of morons who just didn't _get_ it because we thought it was incompatible with the kind of work we did. Not all software work is cookie cutter.

specialist 14y ago

*I don't know of any other profession that has such elaborate...* Education (the profession) comes close. But probably does more damage long term.

zbuc 14y ago

I prefer the "getting shit done" methodology. Find the least amount of process necessary to get your work done and make sure everyone knows what's going on and has reasonable expectations. It's honestly not hard to do this, and you don't need a crazy methodology to do it.

anthonyb 14y ago
Er, that's pretty much Scrum in a nutshell :)
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  As naive as this comment seems, it's mostly true. Scrum is just a packaged set of practices intended to ease adoption of the agile philosophy. The end goal is to minimize process and maximize communication, which is exactly the same as "get shit done".
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    Thanks - I think...
  - zbuc 14y ago
    That's the end goal, unfortunately there are plenty of cargo cultists that don't really understand it and think the process is the important part. I've worked on scrum teams before, it can be done well if no one takes it too seriously IMO. Once you start guilting the team over the artifacts of scrum, it's fallen apart and become a detriment to your goal of Getting Shit Done.
    - vladvlad 14y ago
      This is the no-true scotsman argument. I have yet to see scrum implemented in a way that wasn't taken too seriously, that didn't make the team's life harder, etc, etc. It's just too easy to say they're all doing it wrong, if it's almost always done wrong. Maybe the reality is that it only works for some kinds of programming, when not taken too seriously. But then why bother at all?
- vladvlad 14y ago
  Not in my experience, no. In fact, it's pretty nearly the farthest thing from the getting shit done thing I've actually dealt with. Just getting shit done doesn't mean bullshit arbitrary time-slices, half-day postmortems at the end of said timeslices, insertion of "project managers" who know little to nothing of either the actual business problem being address or the technical means used to address it, people working on a parallel svd implementation having to explain their work daily to web designers, blah blah blah. The whole thing is a money making cult for the people who invented it, and a means of empowering a class of employees (project managers) who should exist only in very small numbers, if at all. The claim seems to be that if you don't use scrum, you will just end up doing some horrible waterfall. This is a false dichotomy.

vladvlad 14y ago

Kanban and scrum are the revenge of the untalented and the humanities majors who would like to have technology jobs without having to learn anything about, you know, technology. Why not just learn about methodology instead? One of my least favorite aspects of the whole thing is having someone with little to no actual cs/math/ee/programming background tell me that since he/she/it used it for some trivial web programming, clearly my group doing r&d in machine learning were a bunch of morons who just didn't _get_ it because we thought it was incompatible with the kind of work we did. Not all software work is cookie cutter.