Why are we agile?

[resbear]

I graduated in 2010 and have worked in some "agile" environments in the short time since. That's in quotes, because it seems everyone has their own definition of agile. One of the things that's consistent is the idea of "long project bad", that any unit of work that takes more than a week or so to finish is too big. The result is a constant stream of 2-3 day (maximum) tasks. Let's call this the "firehose" process so we don't get into semantic wars over what agile means.

Personally, I find constant context-switching between little bite-sized tasks to be exhausting after a while. I've also seen it contribute to company-wide ADD, where any low-hanging fruit must be immediately grabbed at the expense of overall focus. Pivotal Tracker says there's room for it in the sprint! Perhaps this has more to do with startup culture in general (worse is better?), to go hard, take what you can get, and fail fast.

pg's latest post (re: Black Swans) got me thinking - if the vast majority of startups are going to fail anyway, and the VCs are pretty much taking a shotgun approach, it means the effects of choosing any of our various processes are statistically insignificant. There is nothing about the way Reddit (or Instagram, or Twitter, or...) was run that is accurate enough to help make investment decisions. So why do we feel beholden to a psychologically stressful process (firehose), if it hasn't been proven to be any more economically viable? We're just burning ourselves out. Perhaps while we're working on customer satisfaction, we should take a look at employee life too. And not through expensive and questionably useful perks like massages and free lunch, but meaningful issues like the nature and value of our work.