Quit Demanding Purity - <AUTHOR> http://www.malcognition.com/blog/2009/quit-demanding-purity

<comment><USER2> Is there something wrong with an ideological boycott? If the "cost" to you of the boycott is less than the perceived importance of the issue, why would you continue to use something even though you disagree with it?

The nice thing about a boycott is that it provides a direct financial disincentive to the manufacturer simply ignoring the public's concerns. If lots of people are upset about an issue, and they change their buying habits based on that issue, either the manufacturer can choose to change their strategy to correct that issue, or it provides an opportunity for a competitor.

And even if you're the only person in the universe who cares about a particular issue, "everyone else is fine with it" doesn't necessarily mean that you feel like involving yourself in something you disagree with enough to believe that you can live without its benefits.

So I'm all for demanding purity if that's more important to you than the perceived benefits of the impure thing.

<comment><USER3> Also, if you never make your case -- then what's the impetus to make things change?

This article seems is too reductionist for me. Just because things always have their flaws doesn't mean you don't try to make it better.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, me too. "You won't make a difference, so don't bother trying" seems a rather dull way to approach life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is solid advice. When I was a kid, my first computer was a Commodore Amiga. I _hated_ PC's and felt the need to go trolling on BBSes about how the Amiga was superior in every way (sorry, keep in mind that I was 12). Of course, there were lots of PC games I wanted to play that would take over a year to be ported to Amiga. Not to mention countless other things like various hardware add-ons that were PC-only.

At some point I realized that I wanted to enjoy computers, and if I went with the flow and used what lots of other people were using, I would be much happier. My new philosophy has been "use what works" ever since. It's a much happier place to be, rather than binding yourself to a set of ideological restrictions where you only limit your own choices.

</comment><comment><USER5> I demand an SUV that gets 100MPG, but I'm not going to stop using cars in the meantime; if you support Free software, you don't have to be Stallman; etc. Being at either extreme, a pure idealist or pragmatist, is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Take the middle road and get the best of both roads.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't view pragmatism as an extreme. If you're truly pragmatic, you have a guiding philosophy, but aren't fanatical about it. I think it's a good middle ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not a logical argument; it's a collection of unrelated paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"Here we go: eight years of Linux kernels from 2.4 to 2.6 are vulnerable. That means, if you stumble along the wrong exploit code your safety is hosed. But thinking outside the security of your own computer, consider the millions of nodes out there that are running dangerously — and aren't to be upgraded any time soon. And all this on our stone-stable Linux kernel?"_

This is annoying. Yes, there is a critical bug out there, but it's a local privilege escalation exploit, which is _completely_ different from a remote exploit.</comment>


IBM To Furlough Most Of Its U.S. Hardware Staff In Late August - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-ibm-to-furlough-most-of-its-u-s-hardware-staff-in-late-august/ <comment><USER2> Hardware has been a loss-leader for IBM consulting services for a long time. Looking at the straight P & L for hardware alone doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The real story is that IBM has been moving to 100% offshore & H1B labor for a while, and this is just one more nail in the coffin. In a decade or so I'd be surprised if they have any US engineers outside of their research division.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would seem to me (i.e. someone who knows _none_ of the details of IBM's internal business) that if IBM is so sure that its mainframes are so much better than using "cloud" services, then they should be building a cloud solution on those mainframes to compete with the Amazons, Microsofts, and Googles of the world. It's really not that different from the lease model with their mainframes (which they invented, I believe) and they would actually make their systems somewhat relevant again.

But I'm sure that I just grossly oversimplified the problems that they are facing.

<comment><USER4> For mainframe customers like banks, stock exchanges etc, running "in the cloud" is just not an option due to availability and security, so pushing mainframes as a cloud service doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER5> This is why IBM is betting on the private cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So much for the shortage of qualified STEM people, huh, (at least if "STEM" includes electrical engineers).

<comment><USER7> Some companies hire, some fire. As long as the hiring exceeds, there can still be a shortage. I know very few EEs that have trouble finding jobs.

<comment><USER8> It took me over two years, and I ended up in a pure software engineering position. I couldn't get anyone to even call be back over EE positions, because everyone wants fairly narrow specialists for everything except entry level, college hire positions.

<comment><USER7> Interesting - perhaps because I see so many EEs in software or consulting I don't think as much about hardware. I can see how the field can get specialized very quickly, and the first post-college job is critical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cringely called this a few months ago: [http://www.cringely.com/2013/06/20/ibm-to-customers-your- han...](http://www.cringely.com/2013/06/20/ibm-to-customers-your-hand-is- staining-my-window/)

<comment><USER10> Wow. I lost a half-hour going down the rabbit hole of the projects he mentioned in that article. I know there are two sides to a story but when it gets out into the news like that (especially the one involving the City of Austin) that's real bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe my glass is half-full, but furloughing everybody for one week may have prevented them from cutting a number of individual positions completely. The thing that I find interesting is the statement about efforts being made to return the business model to sustainability: "new product launches, investments, acquisitions, changes to its go-to-market, new client centers of competency for Linux and flash memory".

Did I miss something or is this a list of things on any viable business model. I would have liked to see them make "out of the box" moves, but alas, this is the IBM we all know and love.

<comment><USER5> IBM just have had a large series of layoffs. People have suggested IBM is trying to get more employees to quit.

<comment><USER12> If you get them to leave, you don't have to pay severance. It's a typical maneuver to shake the tree before the culling.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention Google has a better office in the city, and hires a lot of the high-end IBM talent fairly quickly as it becomes available.

<comment><USER14> In what city? Poughkeepsie? Rochester MN? Austin?

<comment><USER13> "The City"

As in, much of IBM's operations are still in the NYC area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this part of a larger issue of the company shrinking? [http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/06/14/as-it- shri...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/06/14/as-it-shrinks-in-a- growing-market-does-ibm-have-a-strategy/)

My perception is they give a lot of money back to shareholders while milking long standing businesses. I would think aggressive cost cutting is normal for them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Last month IBM jettisoned entire STG teams and with this mandatory furlough one would assume others will decide to fly the coup. Couldn't blame them as I'm seeing a seller's market for those with hardware engineering skills.

</comment><comment><USER16> Former IBM'er here. I worked in Power Software Development within STG, and was laid off alongside 3,300 other US employees this past June. After first quarter results became public, employee morale within STG pretty much sank. Contractors were cut first, then a number of benefits were either reduced or postponed till the end of the year. It became pretty obvious that some drastic cuts were about to happen (now known internally as Project Mercury), but I made the decision not to jump ship, hoping that my performance as a solid contributor would see me through.

On June 12 I was laid off anyway, and while I was saddened to leave, part of me was relieved to be moving on. Based off my first-hand knowledge, I can attest that IBM is a huge company, and as such it's very easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind and have your skills as a Software Engineer stagnate. The company did not value employee creativity like I thought it would, and internally teams are constantly absorbed in office/management politics, to the point it ends up taking a negative toll on developer productivity. There were many occasions where I wanted to move fast and resolve customer issues or system bugs, but was slowed by the enormous overhead/red tape involved in making even a simple change.

So if I could give one piece of advice to CEO Ginni Rometty it would be this: Transform IBM into an organization that can move fast to benefit the customer. I believe many of the struggles IBM is currently facing stem from an organization structure that is slow and inefficient, part of which is due to low employee morale (it's a little hard to focus on your work when you're constantly fearing cuts/layoffs).

Fortunately for me I got back up on my feet pretty quickly, and landed a better paying job that values employee creativity. I still keep up with IBM news through the IBM Alliance, and feel for a number of IBM friends and former STG colleagues who are most likely affected by this furlough.

<comment><USER17> I hope you had sometime in to get a decent severance. We were acquired by big blue just a little over a year ago. I knew it would eventually come, but finally some of our office got cut. One of my friend got 2 weeks pay as a severance. I really don't see IBM ever being the type of company that can move fast. The biggest change for us is that we literally can't help customers anymore. We have to jump through hoops just to work with our own support team. I just can't wrap my head around the level of red tape and BS policies in this org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This furlough is an attempt to prevent another round of layoffs. Another round of layoffs would cause IBM to reconsider which projects are necessary and start eliminating projects as a whole.

30% pay for 1 week of a 52 week year works out to 0.5% of your salary. It could be worse...

</comment><comment><USER19> IBM's hardware division had a 35% profit on sales in the last quarter. In most businesses that would be considered tremendous. Unfortunately for IBM employees its not enough to drive up the stock price. That's the only decider. That's what's driving the stock repurchases and the layoffs. Meet the EPS goals set by management so they get their bonuses. Short term planning rules.

Mainframes are a growing business. They're failing with their Unix boxes, same as Oracle. They can't compete with Linux. The other area where they are failing is in sales of retail systems. E-commerce and iPads are killing their intelligent cash register.

<comment><USER20> IBM sold its retail systems business last year.

I left IBM STG middle of last year. In the span of about 6 months, half of my former department either left IBM or transferred elsewhere in the company. In the latest rounds of layoffs, I was surprised at how many good people (but middle aged) in the larger organization were dumped, and how some bare some areas have gotten (100,000's of code falls on 1 or 2 people).

<comment><USER19> You're correct on the Retail Sales Systems. I misread their Q2 earnings report at [http://www.ibm.com/investor/?lnk=fif-inve- usen](http://www.ibm.com/investor/?lnk=fif-inve-usen) . The report, page 3, talks of decline in sales excluding Retail Sales. I didn't take that to mean they sold off RSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not surprising. The company I used to work for bought tens of millions in HW per year, much of it from IBM. However, the future plans are to move to "cloud" solutions, which, of course, still require HW (difference being that the cloud vendor will own it), but the utilization of cloud HW should be much, much higher than our utilization rates, such that on net about half as much HW would be required.

Of course, we were really, really awful at managing our HW capex, so that may be an extreme example, but even if 25% less HW is required across many industries that's a huge blow to revenues.

</comment><comment><USER22> IBM has forgotten that if they provide value to their customers, value to the shareholders will follow.

<comment><USER5> IBM has also forgotten that great companies are built by the people they employee. Instead they are cutting benefits, hours, and are falling behind other companies, all in an effort to chase shorterm shareholder value.

<comment><USER17> It really does seem that everything is related to short term profits for share holders. Still chasing that $20 EPS even if it's not the right move for the long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't play the market, but one thing I don't understand is constant need for "growth". I mean once you have one of the largest companies in the world how much more can you really grow? What is so bad about being good at what you do and making a decent profit. Why is there always so much emphasis on growth strategies? I guess it's all because of wall street.

</comment><comment><USER23> Now they can all go hang out with the Googlers at Burning Man :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Is IBM stock a shorting opportunity here?</comment>


Ask HN: How to Access Bitbucket Without Atlassian Cloud? - <AUTHOR> I would like to lookup some old code which is in a Bitbucket private repo, however it seems I can't login to Bitbucket unless I let Atlassian force me to create a Atlassian Cloud account.<p>Is there a way to recover my code? <comment><USER2> Since they switched auth completely to Atlassian Cloud accounts I don't think so. What's so bad about migrating your account to an Atlassian Cloud one, to me it didn't seem to make much of a difference?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mainly an ethical issue, I'm sure it is in their ToS somewhere they don't need to provide access but at least they could have sent a notification beforehand. Now I can't even delete my account. I don't agree it is simplified at all.

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the hassle. Though it's not your issue, we needed to clean up all the different identity systems we had created over the years (Bitbucket, HipChat, Atlassian cloud, Atlassian services). Nothing nefarious, and we have literally spent years planning to make it as seamless for customers as possible.

If you have any issues - contact firstname.lastname@example.com.

Scott

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Atlassian account should not affect any SSH keys you may have added.</comment>


Why some software developers hate Agile - <AUTHOR> https://www.objectstyle.com/agile/why-developers-hate-agile <comment><USER2> That's ironic since the Agile Manifesto was originally written by software developers, in 2001. The problem is that since then - as Dave Thomas put it in his "Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)" post

"The word "agile" has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products."

([https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill- agile.html](https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html))

<comment><USER3> >what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.

Worse. I once attended an agile community meetup, and felt like I had just stumbled upon a weird cult. It's scary to think that there are so many software developers out there who have to put up with these authoritarian doctrinaires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a developer who has been quite unhappy in Agile environments, I don't actually think Agile is to blame, which the article alludes to.

I think the issue with Agile is that software is a field in which is difficult to measure productivity easily. Then Agile comes along and offers the appearance of making it easy to score and and measure team and individual effectiveness. Sure it's "supposed" to be for the team to measure their own effectiveness and empower people to work more productively, but for folks in management roles, the opportunity to 'score' engineers based on Agile metrics is too attractive.

Once it becomes just a way to figure out who's not moving fast enough, or "failing to meet their commitments", of course people will hate it. It gets changed from a tool into a stick.

<comment><USER5> It seems like the measurements used by teams shouldn't be available to management because they will inevitably abuse that information.

<comment><USER6> I'll bite. Management always seem to get the crap. To summarize, if engineers knew how to manage things better than management, why don't they? From my experience, teams without management seem to complain about that and end up with bad results. There are more factors at play, and honestly it's very rare that the engineers sees that (or even acknowledge that they don't know all the relevant factors, with all the implications that gives).

Of course, just as with engineers, there are good and bad managers. But it seems pointless to always complain about management being the ones screwing it up all the time.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I don't mean to imply that it's _managers_ per se. Management seems suuuuper hard and I wouldn't want the task of assessing engineering productivity.

I just mean that the "metrics" put out by Agile give the illusion of something useful to managers. It's totally understandable that folks in positions of authority would attempt to make use of them. But I think the illusion of objectivity is more damaging to teams than the acceptance of uncertainty.

<comment><USER7> I'd say that attempting to use the same tool to help a team communicate with one another _and_ to communicate with management or stakeholders who aren't very close to the project (involved daily near the ground level) is essentially doomed. Management will either hate the answers they get or they'll ruin the tool's utility to the team, resulting in worse communication _at every level_ and slower work. Or both.

It's where I think Jira and other do-everything tools that try to be useful to both ICs and management fall down hard, every time I've seen them used. Management wants to see their burndown charts and such. They want projections out months on minimal data. They want to see the performance of people, not teams. Points become BS because everyone knows they're being watched. Totals are missed the first few sprints (of course they are, you're still calibrating WTF a point means for this team and this project!) and management gets pissy, exerts more control, implies ICs are failing at their job, project goes downhill from there. But look, we're Doing Agile! Such professionals we are.

<comment><USER8> As a project manager, I _hate_ taking a bug tracker and trying to beat it into being a project management/communication/measurement tool. The only reason I always end up doing so is that bug trackers are already in the engineers' daily workflow so they are usually the source of truth about the project.

I'd love it if developers would be willing to collaborate using a dedicated project management tool and leave the bug tracker for bugs, but the chances of that happening voluntarily are nil. You gotta go where everyone else already is.

<comment><USER7> > I'd love it if developers would be willing to collaborate using a dedicated > project management tool and leave the bug tracker for bugs, but the chances > of that happening voluntarily are nil. You gotta go where everyone else > already is.

What'd that look like, that's different from what they do now? Trying to imagine what developer input to that would look like. I think a lot of devs already feel like existing PM tools they use for sprint tracking and such are worse than if they pushed more planning into git or somewhere otherwise closer to the code, so getting buy-in might not be _so_ hard if devs got to be a little less heavy in a bunch of not-actually-that-useful-to-them tools on a day to day basis.

<comment><USER8> Could be something as complex as MS Project or simple as a shared spreadsheet with rows for each project and columns for each milestone or for things like ETA, dependencies we're blocked on, escalations needed, scope changes, etc. Not sure how that could gel well with a source control tool but I'm all ears!

I think 1/4 of the challenge is what tool to use and 3/4 is convincing and motivating people to be reliable and forthcoming with accurate information. A good project manager demonstrates he or she can add value, unblock things, escalate and communicate appropriately, and not just be the Project Police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We moved to Kanban a few years ago and I think it's been much nicer than the "sprints" we used to do.

There is a board. The board has a prioritized list of things to do. You work on your thing until it is done. Then you pick your next task based on where the priorities currently sit.

It's really not far off from the "sprint" idea. The main difference is it is a constant re-balancing rather than an every X weeks affair.

<comment><USER10> There is always a list of things to be done and it's usually prioritized and often the highest priority item is what you do next. This isn't unique to software. It isn't even unique to white-collar jobs. Why does that even need a name?

<comment><USER11> Kanban goes a little further in my own experience. Here are some things I've seen in the wild:

\- make sure that developers have some slack time, so that they can cater to their tools and study new things

\- never move back an item to a previous column. If something more important came up, you "cancel" the current task and start the new one. This helps to identify bottlenecks

<comment><USER12> > never move back an item to a previous column. If something more important > came up, you "cancel" the current task and start the new one. This helps to > identify bottlenecks

Could you explain this a bit further? I'm imagining three columns, todo / doing / done, and I'm working on a widget when I'm asked to put out a fire. I'd imagine that the fire is moved from todo to doing and that the widget work is moved from doing to todo, but it sounds like you're advocating for something different.

Could you explain more about it or link to resources that might help me understand? Thanks!

<comment><USER11> You need a mechanism to keep track of your unpredicted interruptions, so that you can improve your process continuously (which is what Kanban is about).

Moving items back makes this harder (although possible). What I saw some teams doing was to mark such items as cancelled, explaining in the tickets why they got cancelled, so that a manager can then see which columns (i.e. steps of a process) are interrupted more often. This could point to a bottleneck in this process.

In the near future, the "rest" of the cancelled ticket would make it back into the backlog as a new ticket entirely. This has the added benefit of keeping your backlog cleaner.

<comment><USER13> I will try this today with my own personal kanban board. I do find myself with cards moving back and forth a lot. The way I've dealt with "Cancellations" is I have a list called "Waiting" where I stick tasks that are blocked. Sort of like pending review but it could also involve waiting for a resource, a response, etc.

I think if I implement cancellations with details it could help me figure out what processes are broken that caused fires(i.e. this report is suddenly due, overriding everything else. Did I miss a memo? Do we have a solid process for anticipating these sorts of reports in the future? etc.) I could then go back during some planning time to view what needs some brain time.

Thanks for suggesting this!

<comment><USER11> There is another hidden benefit: sometimes a ticket that is moving forward and backward is a fat ticket that should have been a few thinner ones.

When you recreate a ticket that was cancelled, you are compelled to review its scope and adjust accordingly.

<comment><USER12> This makes a lot of sense, thanks for taking the time to explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's what's interesting... of all the people screaming about how much they hate "Agile", pretty much none of them are proposing any alternative. And if they _did_ propose an alternative, how much you do you want to bet that it would look an awful lot like ... wait for it ... the Agile Manifesto?

It's been said before, even in this thread, but "Agile" as it's practiced today is not the "agile" of the Agile Manifesto. The problem is ignorant managers and consultants who don't actually know anything about how software is developed, want a buzzword to slap on to what they're doing to CYA, and will do stupid shit no matter what it winds up being called.

<comment><USER15> The problem is that the "agile" of the Agile Manifesto is underspecified to the point of uselessness. I'll quote the Manifesto in full:

        We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it
        and helping others do it. Through this work, we have come to value:

        Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
        Working software over comprehensive documentation
        Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
        Responding to change over following a plan

        That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value
        the items on the left more.

That's it. That's all the manifesto gives us. In a real sense, _any methodology at all_ is "not agile", since agile values individuals and interactions over processes and tools. But while that _might_ work for a small team, it's a recipe for disaster in any kind of larger organization.

<comment><USER14> Right. which is why I argue that it is important to quit referring to "Capital 'A' Agile" as though it's an actual methodology in and of itself. Agile really just refers to a family of (loosely) related methodologies which purport to adhere to those principles to varying degrees, and where different methodologies make more sense in different settings. Collapsing all of this discussion under the umbrella of "Agile" elides the point that there actually are different approaches for different kinds of organizations, and different projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Developers don't like:

* Committing to dates and then being accountable for the results

* Spending time planning, rather than "doing"

* Admitting to business leaders that much of their work time is not spent writing lines of code, but dallying in all the interesting byways of the field, favorite websites, pet projects, and random semi-related technology interests

* Sitting in meetings of any sort (sprint planner and retrospective)

* Having spoken, out-loud disagreements and negotiations in order to arrive at a consensus (sprint point estimations)

* Having their mistakes, miscalculations, lack of planning visible to everyone on a big monitor (sprint board / retro)

* Getting out of their chairs to go talk to someone else in order to remove a blocker or understand a dependency (task estimation and completion by end-of-sprint)

* Anyone involved in the process that isn't a coder (Scrum Master, Project Manager)

<comment><USER17> Developers dislike:

\- Loosely estimating dates, then having management set them in stone

\- Spending more time talking about things than it would take to do them ("planning")

\- convincing business leaders that engineering is more than just writing code

\- sitting in meetings that add little value to the team

\- arguing over made up numbers for vague deliverables

\- having their mistakes, miscalculations, and other normal aspects of software development enumerated and held against them, as though it was an actual problem

\- having "scrum masters" come up with straw men to justify even more process

\- reporting to too many non-technical managers

The last point sums most of it up though. In many orgs, Agile is used as an attempt to compensate for lack of technical leadership, as though process can obviate the need. You need some, most, or all of your management and executive team to have technical foundations, depending on how technical your product is. You wouldn't put a football coach in charge of a coal mining operation (forgive the hyperbole). The same principle applies to software.

</comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 Software developers, like everyone else, hate bad managers.

Good managers don't do "agile". They just manage. They may use techniques that fall under the umbrella of "agile", but in reality, they just do what the situation calls for.

Bad managers followed a course about the latest trendy methodology and pick only the parts that that can be directly applied, ignoring the context completely.

Books describing a process do it on an idealized case. It is like everything is perfect except for the well defined problems that need solving. But "by the book" situation is extremely rare. When it happens, it is the mythical "$methodology done right". In practice managers have to mix and match techniques for a real life situation, where nothing is perfect, but nothing is hopelessly terrible either.

</comment><comment><USER18> Developers love agile. The thing they hate is Agile. Which is completely different. (Notably, it's not agile.)

<comment><USER19> Indeed, but this criticism suffers from the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. Better to just eschew anyone who endorses "agile" no matter how persuasively he claims to practice the one true actually-agile Agile methodology.

<comment><USER20> > this criticism suffers from the no-true-Scotsman fallacy

It really doesn't. Most of the things people hate about capital-A Agile are things that specifically go against the agile manifesto.

Take a look at the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):

[https://156s6k36aesz1w6oyx474wo9-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/wp-...](https://156s6k36aesz1w6oyx474wo9-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/46BP-FULL.png)

It's an atrocity of an overbearing bureaucracy created by a committee of consultants that obviously fetishise process.

Take a look at the agile manifesto:

[http://agilemanifesto.org](http://agilemanifesto.org)

Its very first principle is:

> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Take a look at the rest of the principles and compare them to that diagram. SAFe is clearly the opposite of agile. It calls itself "Agile", but it's as non-agile as is possible to get.

What we have here is not the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, it's somebody rightfully pointing out that somebody born in Australia, who has never left the country, with no heritage that comes anywhere near the northern hemisphere, is not, in fact, Scottish.

<comment><USER19> Sure. Yet every single time an organization tries agile, the result is a dysfunctional mess. After this history of pain, " _real_ agile isn't like this!" has just as much legitimacy and persuasive power as the old " _real_ communism has never been tried" line.

<comment><USER20> > Yet every single time an organization tries agile, the result is a > dysfunctional mess.

This isn't true though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I dislike Agile, but let's not operate under the assumption that removing or changing the process is going to stop "the business" from wanting more features, faster. There is no process that will make that go away.

<comment><USER22> [https://dilbert.com/strip/2005-11-16](https://dilbert.com/strip/2005-11-16)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Agile Fails for the following reasons. 1) In reality, most stories/tasks that make it out of the backlog and into sprints are the ones that were inserted by PM's, that support the short term goals placed on the PM. End result, massive technical debt in short order. Even if developers express the 'need' for refactoring, it gets delayed as the PM doesn't get fired for a messy code base, but gets fired for a late deadline. 2) Companies 'turned' to "SCRUM" and imagined/expected that by renaming meetings to "stand-ups" etc.. their productivity would increase significantly. This usually resulted in management blaming their engineering staff for their own follies. 3) Most Biz environments don't lend to a 'perfect' scrum model, as such, many organizations try to 'shoe-horn' practices in situations where it doesn't make sense. For example, an organization may not have the ability to adjust features or timelines, resulting in stories being a convenient way to blame engineers for poor decisions outside of their control (Sales selling products that don't exist and promising it yesterday, or Product demanding features that are unrealistic, etc..). 4) Another buzz word that has little functional value other than to help 'experts' get promotions, who in practice are nothing but glorified PM's with a pinch of snake-oil salesmanship.

<comment><USER14> _Agile Fails for the following reasons. 1) In reality, most stories /tasks that make it out of the backlog are executed on, ones that were inserted by PM's, that support the short term goals presented to the PM._

This is a classic example of the problem we're fighting here. Agile is _not_ a methodology and it does _not_ mandate use of stories, a backlog, scrums, etc. Those things are artifacts of one particular methodology which purports to be an exemplar of "Agile" \-- that being Scrum.

I really feel like most people saying "I hate Agile" really mean "I hate Scrum".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Agile is like HR - everyone thinks it's supposed to benefit the developer/employee. It's not. It exists to benefit the company.

Agile was created so that consultants could provide better estimates to their clients in a field that was incredibly new, at a time when methods of evaluation were based on things like construction (think Gantt charts).

Its primary focus is on communication and setting expectations, which is critical when dealing with non-technical stakeholders that think everything should take a few hours. Everything beyond that is a bunch of bullshittery to sell books, conferences, keynotes, courses and certificates.

Search for the word "consultant" or "client":

[https://agilemanifesto.org/authors.html](https://agilemanifesto.org/authors.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> My favorite response when Product Managers bring up that business needs to know when a feature will be done is "And I would like to know Apple's stock price in 6 months."

I really believe this accurately communicates how difficult it is to estimate software development timelines. You can't estimate unknown work, and unless you're building wordpress blogs, your work in software is unknown.

</comment><comment><USER26> A lot of the conversation in the links shared in the article seem to be repeating the lessons learned by an author of a different article recently posted on Hacker News: [https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of- commoditized...](https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of-commoditized- excellence/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The idea referenced in the blog post that sprints are "rushing" developers is just nonsense. At least in every sprint process I've been a part of, the developers are the ones assigning effort (points/hours) to each task. The dev team is free to decide how much padding any task deserves to get the job done right -- and some padding is totally legit and expected.

If you have a large task, one that's either too complex to estimate accurately or with too many unknowns or outside dependencies, you should be breaking it up into smaller tasks.

Developers decide how many points they can do in a sprint, AND they decide how many points each task gets. There's no rushing involved here.

<comment><USER27> Except maybe for the point that humans are notoriously bad at estimating creative work and biased in the shorter side... So taking estimations as commitment is indeed a way to short-hand the one estimating. Thus the rush when you realise your naturally optimistic estimate became a deadline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've had one great experience working in an "Agile" team using the Extreme Programming method. I have fond memories of pair programming, starting work by writing tests with the business analysts, and focus on principles : DRY, YAGNI, no hesitation to refactor what needs to be. The driving forces were those principles. My other experiences with SCRUM, on the other hand have either been deeply dysfunctional, or just plain devolving into churning tickets. The driving force were metrics, velocity, charts.

I agree with one of the conclusions of that article (but not the title) : Agile has been taken over by SCRUM, for most people now Agile = SCRUM. However SCRUM is so successful precisely because it fits into the existing hierarchical structures, it gives the impression of control to managers who don't understand what software development is about, and it avoids having to profundly question corporate organization. It's at its core a management technique. If all implementations of SCRUM get it wrong, then SCRUM itself must be wrong.

I think an alterative way of doing things would be to create small teams that incorporate both programmers and business people, without product owner or project managers or hierarchy. The work would be focused on one specific project and driven by principles of craftsmanship. I've yet to try this idea in the real world...

</comment><comment><USER29> The missing ingredient in 99.9999% of "Agile" shops is developers having _hand_ in the relationship.

That's it. I realized a few weeks ago that I've been lucky to _almost always work under other engineers_ , nearly my whole career. Magically I become a thousand times more persuasive and articulate! (I didn't, I just have an audience with better priors).

One developer-stakeholder relationship to keep in mind is Google-consumer. When was the last time Google had to endure a call from you asking about "velocity?" ...never. And this is because Google has a zillion dollars and will continue on merrily if you die tomorrow. (Yes, Google has meme problems like killing own products, releasing too many things, etc. The point is that _you are not an active impediment to their development cycle_ )

The best way to Do Agile is to have engineers hold >50% voting stock in the company, _and_ for the company to be in a position that it can say FU to any particular client.

Actual agile is not rocket science, nor is it magic---you still have to make tradeoffs, test with users, etc. It's just that you're doing those things from an informed point of view, compared to the alternative where decisionmaking power rests with those incompetent to wield it.

There is of course more to business than engineering. You _also_ want >50% of the voting shares to be able to read an income statement, (and, in small- enough businesses, to understand the value-add of accounting at all!) and whatever metrics keep the lights on (CAC, etc). Yes, to effectively manage complex businesses turns out to be complex!

</comment><comment><USER30> Devs LOVE Agile, the ideas behind Agile and the agility itself.

What devs hate is cargo cults. When management slaps "agile" sticker on your team while having no clue what Agile is about, it's called deception, misrepresentation, misinformation, and exactly what people usually "hate".

You direct your disappointment towards wrongly placed label, not Agile. Hate your incompetent management instead.

<comment><USER31> I hate agile. And I'm a dev. This is not a matter of hating the wrong thing or not knowing what agile is.

I literally hate agile, i think the definition of agile is loaded.

I propose a new form of project management called "Relativity." The definition of relativity based project management is effectiveness. If something is not effective don't do it, if something is effective do it. Wait aren't devs doing this anyway? Is putting a fancy word on top of this obvious concept pure BS? Is this what agile is doing? No it can't be BS. Not when people can take a class for it. Once a class is made for "Relativity based project management" you know it's no longer BS.

<comment><USER14> So which principles from the Agile Manifesto do you disagree with, exactly?

And what is the alternative that you would prefer?

<comment><USER32> One alternative I prefer: not specifying any deliverables or deadlines at all. It's just that mangers often have a hard time selling that to stakeholders. But if you _can_ be in that process, it's fantastic.

That is "our product is great, but it's going to be outdated in 10 years, so we'll put you 5 devs in a room to try to build the Next Big Thing".

I did that and it was great.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, a process like this is applicable to maybe 5% of development projects out there, and is definitely not ripe for abuse by all and sundry in the other 95%.

Demonstrate you're producing valuable work on a regular, fixed cadence. Use whateve process you want to do so.

The hard part is defining value somewhere below "the whole project is done." Harder than it sounds, people get it wrong all the time, astoundingly so, almost to the point where I'm convinced it's some sort of evolutionary defect.

<comment><USER32> Completely agree. But here is the thing: as a developer I'm probably going to dislike any process that management and stakeholders agree is viable. It's not that I expect to find myself in any kind of non-viable process, but I also don't expect to not dislike it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There was a big push for Agile in my old group at Microsoft (no names here).

It was basically micromanagement. I saw hours-long, daily meetings by PMs and managers who were digging into the "velocity" of individual developers. They would still add and remove work mid-sprint, and generally treated estimates hard commitments rather than, well, _estimates_. You'd get a _talkin ' to_ if they thought you were behind.

Mgt: "We need that Frobicle system done in a week."

Me: "What. This is mid-sprint. You're changing things up? And what the heck is Frobicle?"

Mgt: "Don't care. Our estimate is a week, go do it."

Me: "Repeat: What is a Frobicle? Is there a spec? Someone I can talk to? What color is it? Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?"

Mgt: "A week."

Our mandated daily stand-up was actually just a PM getting the team together in a hallway while he polled us and wrote down our status, grist for those aforesaid meetings. I got our PM to say, "Time for status" instead of "Time for standup" because the meeting was useless to our team. Eventually I just stopped going, and a few other developers did, too. We were doing our own scrums, informally and as we needed them.

Naturally there was still crunch time. I'm actually okay with that, as long as management doesn't try to deny that crunch time is happening, and limits the damage to people and the organization, and doesn't do it continuously. A bit of crunch every six months to a year is fine, while a crunch at the end of every sprint is NOT, and that's where things were headed about the time I left.

Agile brings out the worst in management.

<comment> yoz-y Throwing this on agile seems like a stretch. Kind of reminds me of the recent article about Commoditised Excellence. As soon as you slap a name on something, people will use it willy-nilly everywhere and then blame you.

<comment><USER34> The effort started out as "agile" and then turned evil six months to a year later.

Scrum planning sessions, scrum masters, funny hats, we had it all. It's not a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Agile is fine if it is an organic, bottom-up process. And as any of the founding Agile gurus like to profess, this was the original intention.

The problem is that it is usually implemented as a centralized, top-down imposition by management. The net result is usually just a tax on productivity to ever more process, paperwork, status updates, and meetings.

<comment><USER36> I built a from-the-ground-up agile/scrum process workflow for a team shipping a monolithic enterprise app that had a complex build process. Our productivity sky-rocketed. We went from semi-annual production deliveries to monthly ones.

Management didn't skip a beat -- they pivoted to new and innovative ways to push against the guardrails we built for requirements, approvals, agreements and deadlines.

In this case, neither agile nor Agile were the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Some of the most frequently-mentioned problems with Agile are: Agile ignores > technical debt;

This isn't a problem with Agile. This is a problem with the management in your organization. I worked at an org that implemented Agile into 5 sprints. Sprints 1-4 were focused on the business work - things that deliver value to the organization. Sprint 5 was an "IT" sprint, where the developers owned the priorities and had time to fix things like technical debt. This worked pretty well.

> frameworks like Scrum are just "red tape,

Yes, companies need their people to operate in a predictable way. This isn't the wild west - you need to be accountable to the people you report to. These "red tape" processes are just regular checkpoints with various people in the org to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Waterfall had this too, except the checkpoints were every 1 - 3 months.

I think the bigger problem is that some software developers don't want to be accountable to people. They just want to do their own thing, like Joel Spolsky recommends with his staff at StackOverflow. It can work great, in the right environment. But the vast majority of companies do not operate this way.

> programmers are asked to commit to arbitrary estimates and deadlines

This has been as old as software itself. I've been on a waterfall project which had "things that needed to be done" and those things had zero detail in them. Yet I was asked to come up with a "ballpark estimate" by my PM. When I had zero idea what it was about, who it would interact with, etc.

> never get the time to think thoroughly about the features they're creating.

So add a Spike and give it a two week estimate so you have the time to do whatever thinking / analysis you need to do to come up with a solid plan. Spikes exist for a reason - not everything on the backlog needs to be a feature.

</comment><comment><USER38> Devs are such a special kind of people that you should just leave them alone? #sarcasm

I for one like where we are heading with things like Event Storming/Modeling. I admit I care more about solutions than spending time on perfectly describing a problem. Stop the navel gazing. IMHO. Agile tries to solve the Big Issue. Communication.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been a developer in both good and bad Scrums. Usually, the difference boils down to one or more of these points:

\- Is the product owner any good? (physically present, has mandate, shields the members from company politics, open to story input from the team; like taking care of some tech debt or swapping stories around to fit developer needs, setting requirements that are not too rigid)

\- Are the team members any good? (physically present, self-sufficient, experienced enough or with a buddy, communicate open and clearly with the product owner and other team members / disciplines, flexible enough to produce a balanced result within the requirements)

\- Is the scrum master any good? (physically present, proactively alert for difficulties in the process or team, encourages interdisciplinary pragmatic solutions, expectation management product owner, balances the needs of the team vs the needs of the product owner, enforces 5 minute standups in the morning and a good but short retrospective after a demo)

\- Is the project any good? (realistic budget and MVP, enough room for creativity in development and design, good reason for existence, stakeholders that show up for demo's and stay for the drinks after)

\- Is the location any good? (a reasonably creative environment, preferably where stakeholders cannot make surprise visits, with an open floorplan so interdisciplinary communication is encouraged, with all needed materials and enough room on the walls for a scrum board, a burndown chart and to drown them in things like post-its, designs and technical schematics)

\- Is the timing any good? (one to two sprints minimum to get the team oiled, not more then 3 days a week - so the other 2 can be spent at a lower tempo, no team members with large attendance gaps or shuffling people in and out, not more then 12-16 sprints because if the project needs more then clean it up, have some downtime, and start a phase 2)

I probably forgot something, but I believe these are the main issues that can really influence the success (and pleasure within) a scrum. One or two issues can be worked around; any more and the project is a drag or even a bust.

</comment><comment><USER40> Agile was misery for me. There were 5 managers on the call and just two developers. The managers were taking status from the developers (me and another guy). The deadlines were measured in hours and it was just horrible to be on those calls.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've got mixed feelings about this article. Sure, I hate the idea to be force to meet unrealistic deadlines, but that doesn't come from Agile. It is a condition imposed by markets. Sure, in the long term, good quality code, whatever that is, trumps anything else. But that analysis doesn't account for the fact that those that don't fare well at the beginning...perish!

As in "we'll do it slower than the competition, but in two years they're going to be in a spaghetti code nightmare". Possibly, but YOU WILL BE GONE.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm currently part of a team implementing a "next-gen" HMI on an industrial machine. There are too many new technologies, not enough experience and no existing work.

Trying to squeeze this development effort into a Scrum workflow has produced all the problems mentioned in this article. I feel that we're producing a huge pile of crap that will come down on us sooner rather than later.

Our Certified Scrum Master is almost always absent.

It's just tiring.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just read the Agile Manifesto. Most likely whatever your company does has no semblance to what the manifesto says meaning it's not agile other than the name.

</comment><comment><USER44> I find that every single discussion I ever read about agile misses the point, both on the side of its defenders _and_ its detractors. Agile is about one thing, and one thing only: alignment between stakeholders.

Every single one of the twelve principles is either a truism that applies to any and all situations ("Build projects around motivated individuals (...)", "the team reflects on how to become more effective (...)"), or are observations about where consulting-like relationships go wrong, and simple strategies to mitigate those problems.

If you have an arm's length relationship between yourself and the business stakeholders, where the business stakeholder (knowingly or unknowingly) has a poor understanding of what the solution to their problem looks like, where iteration is cheap, and where partial success is materially better than nothing, then agile could work for you. This is common for consulting, but a lot of product-like projects look like this as well, and agile might actually be a good fit for product teams.

It doesn't work for a lot of environments, though.

In security/safety-sensitive environments, and many hardware-adjacent environments, iteration isn't cheap. Infrastructure work often has long lead times before the first milestone that can be meaningfully delivered to end- users for feedback, and the engineering team is also the stakeholder with the best understanding of the requirements. In cases where the business stakeholders are internal to your company, and they have a really good understanding of the work that needs to be done, the default agile posture is to keep them at arm's length where a better strategy might actually be to fold that business stakeholder into the development team.

</comment><comment><USER45> The Agile manifesto is fatally flawed, though for rather different reasons than the ones typically given.

Agile was started by software developers, and everything in the manifesto is very strongly tilted to how software developers do things and for bottom-to- top (or at least shallow) organizations devs like. However, every existing software company has much more of a top-to-bottom structure and is run by managers. They even have people who are not managers or developers!

Every 'twisting' of Agile is a completely natural outgrowth of trying to fit Agile to how organizations are actually ran and how people who are not software devs need to do things. That exactly is 'true' Agile, because business as structured today cannot support any other Agile you might conceive of.

That's why Kanban is so much more appreciated - it wasn't conceived in denial of how businesses are currently structured.

P.S. The other option would be to built the business to support Agile and not the other way around. For better or worse, almost no existing company actually works that way and that's not going to change.

<comment><USER45> snarf21 posted elsewhere in this thread a perfect example. I'd like to refer to his Agile list as some other roles in the organization might see it.

"Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools"

Management - _Processes and tools are exactly how we ran our business. It 's the only way that scales (and is also lawsuit-proof!)_.

"Value working software over comprehensive documentation"

QA - _How am I going to test that software if I don 't have good documentation of what it needs to do and how it works? Documentation is necessary for working software, not something to be balance against working software_.

"Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation"

Management - _We do need to get paid you know. On that matter, our interests are not exactly aligned with the customer 's. Furthermore, having clear expectations and legal protections for both sides is a form of collaboration, a necessary one in fact_.

"Value responding to change over following a plan"

Investors - _Ah, so you 're just following the market and have no intention of initiating change on your own? How is your company going to be the next Apple if you keep up like that?_

I'm not necessarily saying the other characters are right - but these perspectives are a given in today's organization and are going to influence the actual process. Indeed, given that managers have more power, these are going to be the defining influences, way over some manifesto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> CPP, CORBA, XMPP, SOA, UML, Agile... Whenever I've seen the developer community embrace a new set of tools (whether hw, sw, process, or a mix), I've then then the marketing departments and consultants follow. After a period of time the term for the new tools is muddied beyond recognition as people who don't truly understand it try to use it in sales pitches and class materials. In my experience the tool is rarely to blame (maybe I'll make an exception with CORBA, ymmv). The 'Agile movement' started with a bunch of developers who were good comparing notes on their processes. They came up with some points of commonality, and some points from one or more of the others they'd each like to adopt. These all revolved around the engineering version of the unofficial USMC motto "Semper Gumby", always flexible. Some call this the agile mindset (ycmv, i.e. your caps may vary).

"If I have an organization with an Agile mindset, and really rock-solid product management, Agile processes and tools will evolve out of that. If you have the Agile mindset and an awesome connection with your customers and are solving their problems, things will evolve in the right way" \- Todd Little, CEO Lean Kanban.

Over and over, people like Kent Beck have said that no one set of tools will work for everyone. Teams need to continually adapt, continually learn, continually improve, and do what's needed to enable those things.

I love the agile mindset, and the palette of tools I can choose from to paint a development process for a team that fits the way they work, their needs, and their customer needs.

OTOH, I hate the "Agile this. Agile that. You got to get certified in them all" Pokemon-style consultant sales pitches, and feel sorry for those who get sucked in by them, or who have managers who get sucked in by them.

</comment><comment><USER47> Any movement that gains traction will be corrupted. The moment companies want to hire people who tick a box, they pull on a supply chain of certification authorities (which includes, most perniciously in my opinion, grad schools) that codify and dumb down any set of good ideas and practices so that it's teachable at industrial scale to mediocrities.

Back in the late Aughties I worked with someone who'd recently graduated from a design program and was interested in becoming a UX expert, the new-hotness of the moment. The person wanted to go nearly straight from undergrad to a Master's program at CMU. I -- being a HCI/UI person myself (and rolling my eyes at the term "UX") -- counseled doing freelance work for a couple years to get some practical experience that would provide grist for the grad school mill. No interest.

I can't say I blame the person too much; big companies want to show their seriousness by hiring people with credentials, the value of the credentials be damned.

</comment><comment><USER48> As an engineering manager, I prefer to use the word lean instead of agile because even if the agile manifesto is a great manifesto, the word really has been hijacked by people in suits who live in their own world far away from day-to-day engineering work.

Lean is much nicer, it implies it's totally ok to remove process/meetings/things who don't add value

</comment><comment><USER49> Eating up post-it notes ("issues") and crapping out code - i.e., doing agile - is just not gonna cut it.

When the end goal is a robust, resilient system that customers depend upon to suit their needs and your organization depends on for its business, by doing Agile you're going to end up with something that neither your customers nor business can fully rely upon (once your system or service is past a certain level of complexity).

Two major reasons:

1\. A set of agile "Issues" (whether stories or bug reports) do not constitute a necessary or sufficient set of tasks necessary to produce, release, and operate a resilient or complex system.

2\. You know the phrase that "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"? Agile gives you utterly meaningless metrics (e.g., story points) that can be counted, but don't count. What does count depends on the nature of your business or product: Small start up? Probably revenue or users. Large-scale infrastructure system? Maybe average latency or uptime. Unless you can directly correlate "story points" to your bottom line, just skip that clutter in the first place.

Call me old fashioned, but I found that when you bring engineering back into software development, specifically systems engineering (not "engineering" in the sense of "I'm a ruby-on-rails engineer"), products and teams are able to support a high level of confidence and reliability in their work products. This means (yup) requirements engineering and analysis, QA, Independent Validation and Verification, etc etc. It does not mean you have to have full departments for each of these, but at least having someone to "own" each of these areas (esp for small teams). Again, in the end, no amount of stuffing post-it notes down your developers throats will replace old fashioned engineering process and engineering management.

</comment><comment><USER50> That first Extreme Programming book was really excellent. Not at all like the MBA nonsense most "scrum masters" push.

</comment><comment><USER51> So if you can't use Agile, what is the way to manage software development?

There are many industries with complex product design processes, which need to deliver at a fixed deadline. We expect Apple to deliver new iPhone every fall, and they meet their deadlines without exception. Same thing for many other product manufacturers.

There is no reason to assume software development is very different from other industries regarding product design. Other industries also work with changing and innovating semi-finished products, components, and new materials.

Donald Reinertsen has written some interesting books on managing the design process (not related to software development or agile). It offers a lot of theory and economics behind product design processes. A lot of focus on reducing the size of Work in Progress.

<comment><USER52> You can choose your features, or you can choose your deadline. You can't choose both.

Apple delivers a a new iPhone every fall, but they make absolutely no promises about what it will be.

<comment><USER51> Yes, and agile is a framework which ensures you can select your features and meet your deadlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Agile's not the problem. Micromanagement under the guise of agile is the problem. Ideally implemented, Agile sort of allows a development team to micro-manage themselves, but management is usually unwilling to let this happen.

</comment><comment><USER54> Software developers hate working for the pointed-haired boss too. Agile is just a name for a process which is a meta "tool" for a company to get its work done. We're always going to hate working in an environment where management doesn't understand what goes into the sausage and what's important to do now that won't cause problems later. And we can all agree that hard work and code quality are key but I will push to do THOSE under any methodology. If a company isn't doing them then maybe it's not the process -- maybe it's the company/culture.

</comment><comment><USER55> All modern Developers are doing agile, whether they believe it or not.

The agile movement of the 90's was in response to waterfall constraints imposed by the tools of the 70's and 80's.

The majority of projects today are no longer handcuffed by these constraints.

For historical context, I would suggest reading up on the Scrum vs XP _war_ , as one camp pursued a commercialization and certification path to agile and the other remained largely principle-based.

When I see people expressing frustration with agile, the cause is typically a byproduct of the commercialization camp.

</comment><comment><USER56> Agile was designed for small consulting teams (like PwC consulting teams, not remote software development teams).

I am not be surprised that bits and pieces of it are useful in other contexts (e.g. standups -- when they really are quick, standing-up touching base).

I am very much surprised by wholesale fetishization/adoption in other contexts. My GF sees it used by teams that don't even do software development.

Makes me think of that "commoditization of excellence" essay posted here yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER57> My own take is that agile simply become tool for non developer actors to influence development team in (extremely) unproductive ways. It leads to short term thinking, really strange people practices.

I have only seen it getting exploited. Specially in large orgs, where you are surrounded by non development team members (people higher up are more detached to development). So the roles like scrum master etc etc. become important to them. And quite frankly leads to burnout and toxic environment.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's because Agile as a theory (in a vacuum) works but in practice, fails to be anything but a time sink for most development teams. Agile was supposed to help teams react to change and allow for elasticity in the development process but in my experience, managers rarely allow pushing deadlines or allowing for cutting features. Agile is basically just used by managers as a way to make sure people's velocity is maximized at all times.

</comment><comment><USER59> When I was working on an agile project based on scrums, I developed a real dread of the daily standup meeting. You don't always have results to report on a daily basis. On the days that I had nothing much to report, I was implicitly given the feedback that this was _not_ an acceptable answer. I was simply not able to lie and always give a positive progress report. This was one of the main motivations for my quitting that job.

</comment><comment><USER60> SCRUM is toxic. It is toxic because it dis-empowers the developers who are doing the actual work and hands that power over to the "SCRUM master". The SCRUM master is the ultimate bureaucrat -- and a proxy for Management -- in a heavily bureaucratic methodology. The job of the SCRUM master is to guard and protect the SCRUM process. Often to the detriment of the developers and ultimately the project.

</comment><comment><USER61> Any process can be abused all the way to unproductivity.

The problem is literally _always_ some empowered moron in charge, without any clue what the work actually looks like, yet with the ability to destroy work.

I'm looking forward to a time when companies don't insist on running themselves like hierarchical feudal societies... it's such an immense efficiency drag, but since it's the dominant dogma in business, the garbage continues.

</comment><comment><USER62> Most software developers like the principles of Agile development but its become a marketing term that high level management don't understand. For Agile to work, it has to have buy in from the top, hence it often is assumed Agile means quick results for the business if they follow Sprints. Recruiters market places using Agile, but never really understand what it means

<comment><USER63> By such developer's many people who don't even heard about Agile can knew about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> The problem with current implementation of agile is it tries to standardize a process and use it across all companies and all project.

In reality, I've found that every developer are unique. And together with unique company cultures and projects, the process need to adapt with those things, and not the reverse.

A scrum may work well in a team / project, while it may not work in other.

<comment><USER65> > _In reality, I 've found that every developer are unique. And together with > unique company cultures and projects, the process need to adapt with those > things, and not the reverse._

Which is pretty much the core of the agile manifesto.

<comment><USER66> I think it's fair to say the manifesto have been misappropriated by authors who wanted to write thick books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> A daily SCRUM standup is often described as answering three questions: "What I did yesterday, what I will do today, what impedes me"

When I described a daily standup to my father and brother, a physician and a university professor, they shuddered a bit. Many people from outside software do. I've heard this described as _violent_ transparency, and if it seems intimidating to people on the outside, that may just mean that we, as software developers, have grown so accustomed to a fundamentally unfair work environment that we no longer question it. Similar to "interviews" that are actually whiteboard exams. Did you know that most job types don't interview this way? Again, my friends who work outside software shudder a bit when they hear about this practice. It sounds awful, because it is kind of awful.

Now, in spite of my stated belief that it is awful, I did explain (or at least tried to) why we do it. Software is highly unpredictable, and difficult to estimate. We pick a task, and work on it, and report on it. This, at least at first, was to me the essence of agile. Waterfall wasn't working. It is difficult and, ultimately, unproductive to try to spec out everything in advance. You have to evolve toward a solution, through repeated iteration and constant communication. Not a bad idea.

Here's the problem - agile turned out to be a particularly insidious version of waterfall. The point of all this "violent transparency" was that we embraced the essential futility of estimates. We make them at as granular a level as we can get away with, but what we are really doing is reporting in every day on how things are going, and embracing the fundamentally uncertain nature of what we do. Well, these standups turned out to be an irresistible opportunity for micromanagement and a daily application of pressure deadlines.

I view agile as the Nitroglycerine of the software development methodologies. At some point, you can't keep saying "it would be safe if they'd just use it more carefully." The inherent instability of nitroglycerin _is_ the flaw. And agile is just too damn unstable. Any dev who things the customer (could be a project manager, a boss, a stakeholder from a different department) is going to "collaborate" if the spec isn't met by the deadline is just shaking a big bottle of nitroglycerine. And at this point, the daily "standup" will be a person patiently waiting for the developer to finish making excuses (which is what these three questions will be interpreted to be), followed by "so are you going to make your new deadline, or will this be pushed back even further).

In many ways, if hard deadlines are involved, I prefer standard old waterfall. The original agile manifesto says "customer collaboration over contract negotiation". Indeed! Sounds great. Let's work together with trust, rather than lawyering up at every occasion.

Here's the thing - if you're committing to a deadline but the customer (who is often internal, with "litigation" being complaints to the bosses), doesn't commit to a spec, well, your customer is protected by a contract, but you, the dev, are completely exposed. Yes, change is common and must be embraced. If you'd like to change the contract, I'm all ears, but that will require - yes - a _renegotiation_ of the contract, including the deadlines.

Otherwise, the agile manifesto, almost seems like it encourages software developers to be pacifists in the middle of a war zone. Look, if a customer is going to hold my feet to the fire on a deadline, I am going to hold the customer to the original spec.

Personally, I got out, found a job in software development where deadlines aren't a big part of what I do. Not sure if everyone can get a job like this, but it seems product oriented companies are more likely to work this way than contracted development projects. Deadlines under conditions of uncertainty are a pretty hellacious source of stress for me, feels like a kind of roulette, and while agile in theory had the promise of making it better, the methodology turned out to be nitroglycerine.

<comment><USER68> >we, as software developers, have grown so accustomed to a fundamentally unfair work environment that we no longer question it.

Compared to a physician or a university professor a software developer might have a low level of autonomy (in the sense of free from being micromanaged) but developers do better than the vast majority of employees I suspect. Having to account for your time every day in a standup can get psychologically tiring but there's so many other jobs where it's much worse. I've worked in places where being out of your seat for more than a few minutes (when not on a break) would invite commentary or provoke questions.

(This isn't intended to sound like a "You should be grateful because there is a kid starving in Africa" thing, just trying to provide a perspective why I find it hard to feel hard done when so many more people have it worse than me all around me. This doesn't mean we shouldn't all enjoy more autonomy and agency in our work.)

<comment><USER67> This is a tough one to answer. Yes, there are harder done people, and I suppose that is enough to end the conversation.

The only part I'd mention here is that you focus on micromanagement and autonomy, which alone, to me, isn't really the source of stress. I've had boring but predictable butt-in-seat jobs with clear instructions. You do your work at a reasonable pace, you will make your deadline.

The source of the stress is being pressured to make firm deadline commitments under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, and the organizational aftermath when you don't make them (ranging from confrontational meetings, to angry emails to your boss, to threats to your employment, to threats to your professional reputation). I really have seen them all.

Can't speak to how much of this goes on in other jobs, I'm sure it does -- then again, I don't constantly hear about a "critical shortage" of workers in most of these other jobs either, which implies to me that people with options may be rationally choosing to avoid software development in favor of other fields.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Typical agile methods squeeze the max out of developers. You optimize estimates (velocity...), break down the task ahead of time and allocate every developer maximum out. Since the next release is always around, dept and a Sprint without full allocation is never there. Essentially, you transfer an engineer into a factory belt labourer.

<comment><USER70> How can that be, when engineers are the ones estimating the tasks? You essentially set your own pace.

<comment><USER69> Sounds right but is not. We ask them to estimate the feature effort and not the effort plus other stuff.

It is about the metrics. However, I agree. A smart team would do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The part missing from agile is the model for what software is and how it is built. If management don't correctly understand the nature of software development, they will inevitably manage it incorrectly, tie it to the wrong accounting measures, and embed an adversarial perspective to their own development teams.

</comment><comment><USER72> Regarding the technical debt problem, the manifesto does explicitly say (as one of the twelve principles) that:

"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."

Perhaps that principle could to be emphasized more, but including specific technical details would make it go quickly out of date.

</comment><comment><USER73> We hate Scrum, not Agile, and we hate it because:

#It gives management an easy chance to be abusive. Management abuse seems to be the norm with Scrum, not the exception.

#The methodology does not take this problem into account. The common answer to management abuse is that if you are experiencing it, you are not doing Scrum.

</comment><comment><USER74> One strange thing about the Agile Manifesto that people usually miss is that it's signed at the bottom by a bunch of consultants. Who are these people and why was it important for them to attach their name to this?

</comment><comment><USER75> Been working Kanban since June, life is better and I think our company is putting out more meaningful features than my last job using agile. We also continuously deploy everyday instead of doing 2 week releases.

</comment><comment><USER76> I've always been a fan of this slightly inappropriate methodology: [http://programming-motherfucker.com/](http://programming-motherfucker.com/)

</comment><comment><USER77> kanban is for factories to make more cars etc. the boss likes it, the workers, not so as they're pushed by the rule with less leeway.

agile is for software companies to hopefully build product faster, managers like it, developer not so, as daily standup alone pressures developers to stay on track all the time, e.g. less "free" time at work etc.

both are really designed for the owners, not for developers, so it's absolutely normal when you say software developers hate it.

</comment><comment><USER78> The point that agile produces tech debt is something that wrings true to me and matches my experience. Any good processes people have implemented to reduce tech debt?

</comment><comment><USER79> Maybe software developers (secretly) hate programming. We have a 2 minute standup meeting at the end of the day. Believe me, that's the least of it.

</comment><comment><USER80> Basically, self-organization is much more rigid than on the receiving end of high-flyers who don't do programming.

</comment><comment><USER81> Someone (I think possibly John Cutler) made a good point about this, which is that by now the early and middle adopters of classical manifesto-style "Agile" have absorbed it so thoroughly that it's no longer something deserving of a special term, it's merely the way things are done.

This leaves the late adopters, and the sociopaths whose main interest is extracting money from the late adopters. As a result, it's becoming a safe bet that anyone using the word "Agile" unironically is either going to inflict upon you whim-based development with added Post-It notes, or sell you an enormous slab of process binderware with bonus added two day certification courses. (From which your managers will return having spent the entire course answering e-mails on their laptop, and proceed to inflict upon you whim-based development with added JIRA.)

</comment><comment><USER82> I can't say I _mind_ Agile, but don't expect me to do any work when I'm constantly interrupted by meetings.

</comment><comment><USER83> Whatever you are trying to accomplish as a team, you need some things.

You need to know what you intend to build. Depending on whether you're trying to create a new market or compete in a large field, you might have a clear picture of the end result, or a lot of ideas you need to try out. Where you fall on that spectrum should tell you how far you're allowed to plan in advance. Rarely do you need to change what you're building on a timeline as short as a week, but of course that can happen, too. But given that planning and meetings require time, and rework also requires time, you need to find a balance that works for your team size and the above allowance of planning based on volatility of your goals.

Someone has to be able to make decisions. Often those decisions are high-level - what is the market value of the thing you are building, and how many resources are you willing to allocate. We know in software that estimation is hard and we will get it wrong, so that's always going to be a thorn in the side of the decision-makers, and some of them will always try to offload that responsibility back on us anyway. Still, at some point it is reasonable to relay how well things are going back up the chain.

You need to be able to share plans, decisions, constraints and a swath of other information among team members. Some of it will be for builders. Some will be for decision-makers. Team structure will probably dictate how important leadership and decision-making is compared to maker details. And that structure will hopefully flow from the kind of thing you're building, whether it's just an idea, or something that has to be done a particular way against a particular cost profile to ensure it's worth doing at all.

There's plenty of room in all of this for ambiguity, for conflict, for human errors, for ego. For prioritizing the wrong thing (whether that's the thing to work on, or the thing to measure, or how much of a stink you make about mistakes.)

Given all of the above, what I don't like about Agile is the tendency to put off figuring out how you're going to build things until the last minute, and in the middle of figuring those things out, you change what you're going to build. If you're building out ideas and moving fast and breaking things, then that pain I just described is something you have to accept as one of the costs of being a pioneer. In so many cases I've seen, you're not being a pioneer, so if you spend a bit more time on planning, you'll figure out what to build and how to build it, and then each member of the team will buckle down and focus on the details required to do to the building.

Focus, and less volatility. That's what I want out of the process in play for accomplishing something. I think the decision-makers mostly don't want to be caught out making a bad decision, such as spending resources to build something only to find that the value isn't there - either because of the market, or the unknowns in resource cost.

</comment><comment><USER84> "Why software developers hate Agile that is done wrong"

FTFY

<comment><USER85> I've worked in a few Agile shops, and it was horrible in all but one. Perhaps that one was "doing it right".

The thing is that it appears to be extraordinarily hard to do Agile right. I think that any system that is so difficult to implement correctly is an inherently flawed system.

<comment><USER86> Might it not be that it's extraordinarily hard to manage software development in general? Are you aware of any other methodology that's easier to do right and get the desired results?

<comment><USER85> Yes, managing software development is generally hard and there is no silver bullet. But I do think that the methods that I commonly encountered before Agile were better in terms of both developer stress and software quality.

Interestingly, in many ways they also weren't all that different from what Agile is intending to bring. They still involved something analogous to "sprints", they still allowed for course correction and pivoting during development, and all of that.

Agile seems to position itself as the opposite of "waterfall", but outside of large corporate environments, I'd never seen a shop that actually used waterfall as described by the Agile community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> yes because programming is exactly like manufacturing cars on an assembly line or playing rugby.

</comment><comment><USER88> TL/DR: devs don't hate agile, they hate non-technical enterprise middle- managers and the people who hire them.

If you've ever worked in an enterprise that embeds non-technical managers on technical teams to run the show, you've probably seen some flavor of the following:

The manager starts with good intentions. They try to learn the product, the team, the rough implementation outline, etc. Over time, due to the delta between their understanding and the reality on the ground, their job devolves into:

1\. Attending ill-conceived meetings that generate mountains of noise because they demand the impossible, the nonsensical, or the redundant.

2\. Communicating this noise to their team through a series of terse bullet points / JIRA items / trello lists / whatever

3\. Assigning a senior+ engineer on the team to reconcile their list with reality, and then to do the actual work of translating product requirements into meaningful units of work for the more junior engineers on the team.

4\. Scheduling more meetings to reconcile the original list of items with the list of items that now makes nominal sense, producing more noise because people get upset about items they didn't understand in the first place changing, or feeling like they've "made commitments to stakeholders" that they now have to apologize for or backtrack on, etc.

5\. Scheduling meetings to handle the "drama" that emerged when manager A and manager B had an ego-fight over some insane laundry list of garbage. "Going to the mat" for their "stakeholders," etc.

6\. Scheduling more meetings with engineers to "fix the process"

7\. Scheduling more meetings to hire replacements for the engineers who burned out doing both the manager's job and their job while being held accountable to the latter while hobbled by the former.

8\. Rinse, repeat. Note that the cycle begins afresh with every new manager, who in my experience have at most a 1-year lifespan on a team because they were either good enough at looking important in meetings and showing up for 70 hours a week that they got promoted to the next shit-show, or they "moved on to other opportunities".

This whole ouroboros of noise gets wrapped up in whatever management terminology is prevalent at the company.

In this situation, the team loses time and energy every time the manager does a thing. They either have to stop working to correct the noise (which if left uncorrected festers and becomes worse) or stop working to attend an unnecessary meeting to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, or whatever.

Agile, which is really just a cover-all in enterprise for a "continuous planning because we don't ever really know what we're doing" strategy, multiplies this noise many times over because error compounds upon error multiplicatively, and it creates a lot of opportunities for error by creating many decision points.

(Edit: there's a darker version of this, which I've personally witnessed, where no one pushes back on the insanity because the team is very weak. This is how you get teams serving static web pages at 2.5 transactions a minute on giant web service frameworks that cost tens of thousands of dollars a month to "operate", or pick your daily wtf)

</comment><comment><USER89> It's not just management that gets into cargo culting. And it's not just "top- down" that results in pain in an agile working environment.

Sometimes "bottom up" can be a shitshow too.

I've (tried to) work with developers (special-grade assholes) who were quite far up their own orifice at using the language of "Agile" processes in an adversarial but socially point-scoring way. To beat other people over the head, and even harass people out of their jobs (including management), implying that anyone who isn't doing what they say, or providing continuous, detailed arguments why not, is doing software wrong - while producing mediocre, low-effort, low-results work themselves.

That isn't Agile, but I have seen the language of Agile used to abuse and pressure in a seriously uncool way. So I'm personally a bit cautious when I hear Agile advocacy from individuals, until I learn what they really mean, and how they use it.

Among other things, I listen for whether they have a working empathy gland, and use their tools and knowledge to lift up people they work with, or knock them down.

I've also seen it used to ignore proper handling of PII (GDPR-worthy personal data), via the principle "everyone is equal in the team, so should all have access to production data". Naturally this causes tensions, when some people pay attention to PII issues, and some would rather ignore them, perhaps disagreeing about how important it is, or perhaps just sloppy. (Related, I've observed a really interesting dynamic between privacy advocates and anti- privacy advocates.)

And the same with other quality-control issues when the level of care varies considerably.

At the same time, some people are very happy in their agile teams, and report that the rest of their team seems to be as well; and they are constantly shipping good work. It seems to be working for them.

Between all the things, I have the impression that _some_ people's "Agile" approaches risk a "productivity feel-good illusion", where the perceived productivity over weeks and months _feels_ great, and there's a happy buzz in the team, but long-term business-affecting output is sub-par because the feel good factor and constantly doing useful things misleads people into thinking they are operating at the best they can be.

And yet, it's not like planning everything, or top down direction changes from the business arm, makes for particularly good results in software either.

Since it works really well for some, and is used as a tool of abuse by others, I'm neither for or against "Agile" as such, and instead, prefer to look past the buzzwords used by each company and team, and look at what they actually do each week/month, how the individuals feel (not just "the team" but each member), and what sort of results over time they are producing (measuring strategically useful outputs, in addition to whether they seem to be busy and happy).

I think the principle of developers deciding themselves how to develop is an excellent one, to the extent we can encourage and assist that. But when developers are in conflict with their peers, and using the language of "Agile" as part of conflict or even abuse, it can be quite messed up, and may need an intervention from above.

<comment><USER3> >It's not just management that gets into cargo culting.

I've had the misfortune of attending a meetup for agile coaches. It's definitely a cult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> One of the biggest issues with the scrum (master|lord|bag) model of Agile is that any process grievances magically transform from "this process has issues" to "that person is wrong."

</comment><comment><USER91> Dogma destroys agile. If the team is coerced into behaviour that doesn't create momentum its counter productive, both in terms of morale and buy in on the end goal.

</comment><comment><USER92> Agile = Strict process.

Agile = Lots of meetings.

Agile = Releases done on fixed schedule.

Agile = User stories defined by product owner.

Productive Developer = Litte/No process

Productive Developer = Little/No (formal) meetings

Productive Developer = Releases as soon as ripe to release

Productive Developer = Doesn't need product owner. Actual usage and metrics tell productive developer what to do next.

Agile <> Productive Developer

<comment><USER93> Yeah not having meetings and process is great for a solo developer working in isolation, but it doesn't scale to even a single team, let alone a much larger organization. Once you go past a single person working on a product, you need some kind of process to facilitate communication.

Once you move beyond yourself you are gonna have a process, either implicitly or explicitly. I vote that it is best acknowledge there is going to be a process regardless of you liking it or not and be explicit and intentional about its formation.

Once you acknowledge that there is gonna be a process you can either start from a known set of processes (scrum, kanban, waterfall, XP, whatever) and then iterate on it until it suits your environment. The alternative is to somehow reinvent the process wheel from the ground up and probably not be as effective as if you had started with proven processes.

It's like people who start a project and say "all these frameworks suck!!! I refuse use them! Bloat!!!". Six months later you look at their codebase and surprise, they've created their own implicitly defined framework. They won't call it a framework, but lo and behold they have a framework. Probably worse on every measurable dimension than what they would have had if they started with what's out there too. Had they been honest with themselves, they could have saved a ton of trouble being explicit that there will be a framework no matter what and had been intentional about its creation/adoption.</comment></comment>


Satellite data for June shows 88% year-on-year increase in Amazon deforestation - <AUTHOR> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/brazil-amazon-deforestation-surged-june-bolsonaro-190703153738157.html <comment> daniel-cussen I was talking to a person in ecology and they told me the only real driver for deforestation is the interest rate, which has been rising lately.</comment>