[Clubber]

I believe Agile (at least as thought of by management) is designed to make programmers interchangeable. If programmers are interchangeable, they are easily replaceable.

We just started doing "by the book" Agile with daily stand ups. Now that you mention it, it does feel like I'm being micro managed. Put in your time every day so we can email everyone the burn down chart. Lets add some more pressure to the job if you are behind a day. There are no milestones, just an endless grind. I don't know why programmers don't push back against that stuff.

[meddlepal]

Push back and you'll just be replaced by someone younger or more naive or willing.

At the end of the day programmers are mostly just factory workers of the 21st century. The best ones are perhaps closer to the mechanics of the industrial revolution.

[d0lph]

Except with amazing pay, serious benefits, and better working conditions.

[Grishnakh]

Compared to factory workers of 50+ years ago? Certainly.

Compared to programmers 25 years ago? Absolutely not. The pay is worse (inflation-adjusted), and the working conditions are far, far worse (see: open-plan offices).

[mikestew]

(My apologies for crappy formatting. All I wanted was a bulleted list. Wasn't that doc'ed in the FAQ or something?)

Let's see what I was doing 25 years ago:

    * Private office with a door that closed.

    * Status updates mail to $SOMEONE once a week that were mostly auto-generated from the tools we used. Took 30 seconds.

    * Sat down to a chunk of work uninterrupted for long periods of time because no one was micro-managing me or bugging me on Fashionable-Chat-App-of-the-Week.

    * Used development tools that had a half-life measured in years, not months.

    * Got to really, *really* know my tools because they weren't swapped out for the new hotness every six months. Man, the ways I used to abuse FoxPro bordered on criminal. I can't do that these days since the tools get swapped from under me so often.

    * Was paid well, and treated with professional respect. Sometimes a collared shirt was required, but I didn't mind when everyone else had to wear ties.

    * Was provided with good equipment, often without asking. "I have a quad-core server box with an assload of RAM for a...mikestew?" "That's me, but I didn't order it." Boss: "oh, thought you might need that for multithreaded testing." Thanks, boss!

    * Went in at 9:00, went home at 5:00. Every day.

Today:

    * Today I'm sitting in a retasked storage room because I refuse to sit at the "hotel desks" (note that I'm currently a consultant, so it's not *as* egregious. But 20 years ago, clients that wanted me on-site provided a desk or sometimes an office.) My last full-time position was in an open office plan sitting next to people that literally (and I use that word literally) spent more time talking about the fucking Seahawks than they did working.

    * Daily stand-ups to justify my existence.

    * Treated like an interchangeable line worker.

    * Working on the cheapest Macbook Pro that Apple would sell the client. With a 120Gb drive, I spend at least a billable hour a week trying to free up space what with Android/iOS dev environments and the multi-gig simulator images. But, hey, at least they saved $100 on the cost of the machine!

[toddan]

So much this. And the biggest fools are the programmers that believe that they are unique wizards working magic and being special. They are simply factory workers working under an illusion.

[fastcars]

It is probably also about managers protecting their positions and removing power from those below them.