Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jjav 2187 days ago
That's an insightful concise description of "agile" experience.

As an anecdote, I have an acquaintance who is a psychologist in silicon valley and he has mentioned he frequently works with patients suffering from mental health issues related to being subject to "agile" at work. I wish someone would do a proper study on this topic.

Personally, agile hasn't driven me to depression but it has made me target roles that avoid it at all cost. Life is too short and precious to suffer through a detailed status report meeting every.single.day.

2 comments

I found that testers in particular find agile off putting and some avoid working at such companies if they can. I am not sure why testers specifically end up disliking that.

I think that agile ignores human psychology. First, in management theory, intrising motivation happen when one has autonomy, mastery and purpose. Imo, plus accountability. Agile removes that from individual, but has some rhetoric that places it on the "team". But team is not person, it is set of people.

Second, it kind of assumes that people are socially perfect and everyone is kinda the same and its answer to any social human problem is "that is team dynamic or bad individual". It does not help to deal with predictable human imperfections, emotions and conflicts.

possibly because usually they get a fraction of a sprint to do a whole sprints worth of validation.
I think UX people should evaluate the different development processes. UX people because they have the concept of that something tasks take more mental effort while other less, e.g. searching for a button within 100 buttons has a cognitive load than searching for a button within 10 buttons.

My guess is that SCRUM has a greater cognitive load than waterfall.