[skgoa]

In my experience "the old waterfall companies" are the ones where the engineers are trusted with a task and left to do their thing. In such an environment, managers are only there to assist the engineers. I.e. escalate issues, provide ressources etc. and most importantly: fight for their team/department in meetings. We go to our team lead only when it is necessary and he only asks for updates when he needs to report our status to a superior.

What I have witnessed in those hip, agile young companies is that you have to report exactly what yyou have done, what you are plannign to do etc. constantly. At least once a day, plus whatever other weekly meetings you are in. Sometimes your entire day is filled with meetings and you are supposed to fit your actual work somewhere in the breaks. And if you can't finish a task in a day, you trigger extra attention from managers and suddenly you find yourself sitting at your desk with another engineer and a manager looking over your shoulder, wasting hours of expensive time instead of letting you work.

Those are the two extremes I have encountered and they are only annecdotes. But they do serve to show that the development process chosen for a project is not tell you anything about the management style.

[parasubvert]

What's odd about the "agile" companies, is that while you are a designer or engineer in product mode, you're not supposed to attend any meetings beyond daily standup, weekly IPM, and weekly retro... Maybe the odd town hall. Maybe the odd inception day or cross-team retro every few months for a major new initiative. But that's about it. PMs do attend other meetings mostly as a liaison to the outside world, because that's the gig, but even then, it tends to be limited.

The whole point (at least at Pivotal) is to spend more time coding/designing/testing and not in meetings.

[finder83]

Interesting. What I meant by "old waterfall companies" is that there's a few businesses in town that write enterprise software, oracle, etc, for fortune 500s. Those tend to not be kind to their developers, and have been around for a while.

I have worked for another large telecom that treated its developers great that did kanban.

Currently I work for an agency that really does neither. :-D

But I think you're right, the methodology doesn't matter nearly as much as the managers.