4 ms·
At this time even management was kind of nerdy. It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful c
by elzbardico 2y ago
At this time even management was kind of nerdy.
It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region.
Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone.
Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people.
Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people. If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
- llm_trw 2y agoIf you're in a hiring position and hire anyone who uses agile as anything but a way to blend in with all the bullshit today you should quit and do something more productive with your life, like watching paint dry.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoIf you're in a hiring position and don't even know what "agile" means, please go do a more appropriate job.
- llm_trw 2y agoThat's the beauty of it, it means what ever you want it to mean.
- dekhn 2y agonah it's pretty clear at this point agile is mainly waterfall with more unnecessary meetings and stress.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoYou might feel like that, but it's only because you don't know it describes a category. As I said, please find a more appropriate job if you're in a hiring position.
- thisisfine1234 2y ago[dead]
- llm_trw 2y agoWhen even the founders of agile are telling everyone else they are doing it wrong it is truly a word without a definition.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoWhat founders of agile, there's no such thing. Maybe you mean the authors of the Agile Manifesto? Or what? Are you conflating Scrum and agile?
- skeeter2020 2y agoIt can hurt to swallow a lot of the BS, but you can fight the good fight inside these companies, one guerrilla incursion at a time. Some of use do still exist in management, or at least believe we still hold true to the conceptual integrity of what agile means vs. what it has become. You only get to execute the nuclear option once (i.e. quit) so yes you need to understand where the line is, but there's almost always a better option.
- llm_trw 2y agoFeel free to email me about starting an insurgency, that's basically the only way I can see motivating myself to ever go back in big tech or big corp.
- TheGRS 2y agoIt just takes time and patience to get the sort of political capital that you need to make change. You wait for disasters to happen because of incompetence and then you pounce. There's also a finesse to it though, half of the battle is convincing the right people that they had these ideas in the first place. I also employ the "whisper campaign" often. Just seeding ideas in various conversations lightly, once people start to say them in conversations without you prompting it you know your job is done.
- llm_trw 2y agoYeah, I have better things to do with my life. You're also making the (bad) bet that the disaster will be small enough to not wipe out the company but big enough that management notices.