[sprafa]

The Toyota process says - you cannot manage a production line effectively if you don’t understand it.

Agile has become a way for people with no development experience to “manage” developers and that will always be wrong. The West’s obsession with “managerial” experience being a thing you can learn start to manage “anything” from is the origin of much of our malcontent. Management is just something you add on top of knowing how things work. It’s not valuable as an isolated skill.

[blinkingled]

> Agile has become a way for people with no development experience to “manage” developers and that will always be wrong

True of course but also now the Developers and Architects are compensating for the scrum master's/manager's lack of knowledge in tangible and intangible ways - they bear the brunt of everything and that can become the many straws that broke the camel's back thing easily.

[oytis]

> True of course but also now the Developers and Architects are compensating for the scrum master's/manager's lack of knowledge

What do you mean? Scrum master's role is nothing more than facilitating the process, they don't need any technical knowledge at all.

[blinkingled]

In reality they turn into work assigners - individual A in team C has no stories to groom - let's give them some stories from Epic D which has more story points per developer. Think about how simplistic that sounds to the scrum master and how complicated it is in practice and who is filling in the gaps.

[imbnwa]

The sheer arrogance I've seen a SCRUM Master speak with on matters like these with zero development experience sent me up the wall.

[oytis]

That sounds pretty awful and definitely beyond the competence of a scrum master. I would expect such things agreed between product and engineering managers

[datavirtue]

Most people have discarded his ideas and success as toxic waste but a lot of people are still drooling over Jack Welch. "A good manager can manage anything!" ...and similar pronouncements. People learned this years ago in the context of unquestioned success. And like the rapidly changing circumstances usually involved with things like communicable disease spread and business in general, these people have not updated their understanding in light of new information and so continue to act on the aforementioned "wisdom."

Who can blame them. They got an A for repeating what the professor repeated.

[blackpowder12]

Virtually all aspects of western society is being eroded by the “management is a job-skill” type thinking. I expect that eventually we will stop doing this simply because it’s complete nonsense and clearly counter productive.

Look at the difference between Elon Musk’s two companies and their ability to execute vs their rivals. The amount of value that was created because of an engineer led is so vast - it’s hard to even quantify.

[mal-2]

This is absolutely it. Since the managers are measured based on the productivity of their team, rather than the quality of their management, businesses have no mechanisms to identify whether managers are accelerating their developers or holding them back. This often leads to our products succeeding despite management, rather than because of it. Working under leadership that does not understand the work has been the single greatest source of burnout for me personally.

[icedchai]

This is definitely a fundamental problem. It often becomes clear when a "scrum master" asks some technical sounding but non-sense question.

[commandlinefan]

> when a "scrum master"

When my son was about 10 or so, my wife mentioned that they were forcing her to perform as "scrum master" on her team and he laughed and said, "'scrum master'? That sounds like something a third-grader would say to insult another third-grader - 'you're such a... scrum master!'". I think he had the best take on it I've ever heard.