[airfreak]

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

I don't mean to be harsh on anyone, but after working for over a decade in enterprises, mediocrity seems to be the norm. There are of course bright and insightful people, but mediocrity is pretty much the standard. Take any good process, technical practice or whatever and see it be abused and misused.

With Agile what happens is a mediocre implementation that usually leads to the usual complaints we see about Agile. The number of times I've been told about how Scrum enables self-organising teams only to be told I have no control over the process because it has been standardised across the company.

Mediocrity demands cookie cutter solutions that can be standardised without need to engage thinking. If you work in an incompetent organisation, department or team, then there's no hope that agile or anything else can help you. In fact, the religious nature of Agile often works in favour of mediocrity as critics, even well-meaning ones, get labelled as waterfall sympathisers.

[some_account]

I hate Enterprise environments now after working in one for just a couple of years.

They are all about conformity, standards, following established routines, established chain of command. Endless meetings due to the need to 'sync' every little decision with team leaders, product owners, scrum masters, who in turn syncs with the team members on other teams, making sure information gets distorted, lost, confused.

I'm never again working in Enterprise until I'm 60 and just want to sit on my ass, do minimum work, get payed and retire.

[bradknowles]

With respect, that will never happen.

The days of being able to "retire" went out the window, when companies stopped giving employees pensions, and they started offering 401k plans.

Then they decided to get rid of all the employees, and use exclusively contractors for whom they don't have to pay any benefits at all. No 401k for you!

[closeparen]

If your 401k isn’t earning enough returns to let you retire, neither is your employer’s pension fund, and it will become insolvent. The difference between pension and 401k is unlikely to be make-or-break, and when it is, it’s more likely to break the pensioner (corporate bankruptcy, taxpayer sticker-shock, etc).

[tcbawo]

Pensions are great when they work, but it's impossible to predict solvency at retirement age. It's one of the most under-reported financial travesties, but your pension can be taken away when you need it. Even the public pensions are targets these days.

[tabtab]

Most methodologies standardize bullshit so that your bullshit is consistent; and consistent bullshit is (allegedly) better than inconsistent bullshit.