Isn't what agile/scrum literally is? Or "equaliser" languages like Go? Both a trained monkey and a senior engineer will be equally mediocre in using it. Zero room for improvement.
Project success? Thanks to workers, they deserve a reward! Project failed? Due to managers, they should be replaced!
Or vice versa, depending on what side of the fence you are on. Acknowledging incompetence seems to be taboo everywhere, managers don't want to acknowledge that managers are often incompetent, and neither do workers want to acknowledge workers are often incompetent.
I think I disagree. As an IC, I have often experienced the problem of all the developers knowing who the critically weak developer is on the team, but nobody is willing to inform the manager of just how much of a problem the weak link is causing, and the manager doesn’t have the perspective or role to realize just how poor that teammate’s work is, despite generally understanding the hierarchy of ability / experience / output of the team.
And I say that as someone who thinks this forum tends to dunk on management a bit too much. My point is that workers do want to acknowledge that others workers are incompetent, and likewise for managers and their colleagues, but they are structurally and culturally disinclined to do so primarily from an information gap problem.
often it's both, it's not like a poor manager is consistently hiring talented developers.
We have that with one of the teams internally, I don't know what the technical leadership on that team is actually doing but whatever it is, it's not working and hasn't been for a while now.
I'm talking 6+ months of code not working right that I myself could have implemented better in a single day because it's not hard.
I'm talking API 1 calling into API 2, API 2 reports a problem with detailed information (per our standards) and API 1 logs it as "see API 2 logs". Then you go look at the API 2 logs and _it's not there_. I've legitimately had this experience.
multiple of our offshore development teams run _circles_ around this team. The developers are not good so they can't be successful despite the poor leadership and the leadership is not good so they can't fix the problems with the development team.
I'd say that's backwards. Agile is all about having a lighter and more flexible process that allows skilled developers (very little correlation with "senior" IME) to go faster than something more rigid like RUP or Six Sigma. Agree about Go though.
I am not talking about actual Agile (as in the Agile Manifesto), I am talking about the actual "business" bastardisation of it. Otherwise, I 100% agree with you :)