[BenMorganIO]

My best experiences, as I think about it, tend to have these patterns:

- No Slack for non remote

Slack is cool, but I remember thinking that if I needed to talk to someone, it's over email or in-person. This really encouraged face to face or email conversation. There was also Skype for remote workers, but if you're not doing remote, you could kill Slack. Now that I think about it, Slack is more of a vitamin than a pain killer for non-remote organizations. Slack is great for remote though and love it.

- No Agile

Ah, I remember when I had my first job using Agile. It was cool the first few weeks and that was it. Again, it's not a pain killer, it's a vitamin. I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we'd work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.

- Support with Tools

It sucks not having the right tools to do the job. Receiving the appropriate hardware, desk, and software has always been useful and makes me happy to come into the office. It really sucks when you wake up, look at your amazing at home desk, then go to a lousy work desk. Bling out the work desk. You can do anything from getting a top end work computer, a great monitor, an eGPU (may actually save a company money from AWS bills), a DAC/AMP (cause devs usually have a thing for headphones and the budget for great ones), or a desk goes up and down and has memory settings and it's fast.

- Minimum Friction

If you get told you need to change up your landing page, change up the tooling, or do a big refactor on something, always take it seriously. Some people marry a concept or an ideal and it can often cause friction between the team. Giving up the consistency and letting others use what best let's them get their job done should be given time and thought. All in all: be fluid with company practices and not letting a "mono-culture" take root is usually best.

My best experiences have been when a single employee can happily recommend a new way that could radically change the initial experience of a customer or a company culture. The fluidity maximized sales and development.

- Wrap up

We have so much now with tools that can be categorized as pain killer or vitamin. My best recommendation is to have less vitamins and more pain killers.

Note: This is just me though. I know a lot of other people have different ways they prefer to work. This is just me.

[jacques_chester]

> I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we'd work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.

I know I'm discussing Scotsmen here, but: what about this is not agile?

[ellius]

There’s:

• Agile as a set of values

• Agile as a set of practices

• Agile as a faddish silver bullet marketed to people who don’t know any better

I assume OP is thinking mainly of the latter two. It sounds like their business avoided formal standups and sprint planning, and didn’t generally care about Agile/Scrum etc. buzzwords. But I tend to agree with you that from a values perspective that seems perfectly Agile.

[jacques_chester]

I think you're right.

Agile has a dirty name now, but it's well-deserved, because most folks have had legitimately terrible experiences with stuff sailing under that banner.

I've had a legitimately awesome experience and I can't really use a different word, because it either creates confusion or sounds like sneaky wordplay and/or self-marketing hoopla.

I had a job where, due to the technology, I could not TDD. There was no sane way to version control. No CI/CD, changes had to be made in dev and then copied & pasted into prod. Before that I was in a job with pairing, TDD, CI/CD and an avowed commitment to agile.

Of the two, the ostensibly-not-agile was more agile, because it hewed closer to the values of talking to people and focusing on doing the most valuable thing first. I would work on projects by myself. When I wanted to learn more about my customers, I walked across the campus and talked to them. If I had something I wanted them to give their opinion on, I would ring them and tell them to take a look.

At the ostensibly-agile job we had a manager who talked to a middleman who talked to a board of directors who heard from a line manager who talked to his employees. It didn't matter how well we did the inner loop, because a lot of the time we just produced beautifully-engineered diversions.