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by misja111 1213 days ago
True but not only management is to blame. Proper agile requires a certain amount of common sense and a willingness to spend some thought on improving the process. There is a group of developers that are either not able or not willing to think about these things. This group just wants a set of rules that tells them exactly what to do in every situation so they can switch off their brains, don't have to carry any responsibility and just do what they are told.
3 comments

> There is a group of developers that are either not able or not willing to think about these things.

In most cases because process improvement suggestions by non-managers (or in the worst cases, by anyone non-external) tend to get ignored by the upper chain or, worse, being stolen by someone along the chain.

Or, to put it shortly, why invest mental energy into improving processes when it's either being discarded anyway or used for the promotion of some manager without delivering any benefit to oneself?

And to make it worse, some organizations are actively set up that way to discourage internal improvement ideas so that the uppermost management is free to hire the infamous Big Four "consulting" agencies to mask what upper management wants as "external and independent" expertise that must now be followed. The Big Four (and their smaller fellows) are a fucking scam set up to enrich the top level at the expense of everyone below.

I'm not sure I see the point here. You improve the process because you're subject to it, and because the current process has some downsides to you.

If you're trying to improve a process just for the recognition, then you're by definition not subject to it, so you're playing the role of a manager. And you excluded that yourself in your first sentence.

> If you're trying to improve a process just for the recognition, then you're by definition not subject to it

Simple: when hired as a developer, I expect being compensated in one way or the other for work that goes beyond scope - especially when it is like in most private companies where you need some form of achievements to show to get a raise or a promotion. And do not forget: when you improve processes, usually your workload will be increased as a result, so in the worst case you'll end up with your manager getting the raise for your suggestion and double the workload as "thanks".

This falls squarely into stepping out of the developer role and taking on the role of a manager though. It's really not about the people who don't want to think about those things.
>True but not only management is to blame. Proper agile requires a certain amount of common sense and a willingness to spend some thought on improving the process. There is a group of developers that are either not able or not willing to think about these things.

You can fire or train those developers. You can't do that to the CEO.

Agile tranformation requires buy in right to the top. I've seen it work from the top down, never from bottom up and never from middle up/down either.

Oh, there is definitely something to that. There are people, not just managers, in general who for one reason or another _want_ someone to take charge, be responsible and tell everyone what to do. Which is not bad, per se, it gets bad when the insistence is that this be a boss assigned to you, rather than someone you choose, but that is broader than just agile and the topic in question.