[hdndjsbbs]

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?

Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

[TeMPOraL]

Did they ever pretend, and anyone ever believed that? "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.

Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

[ninjagoo]

> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.

> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.

There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.

[nradov]

Enterprise methodologies like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) are explicitly designed around managing that friction. Developers may complain about the additional toil and process overhead it imposes on them, but for the organization as a whole this is sometimes the least bad option.

[dbish]

None of the important projects or FANGs build with frameworks like that, sorry. Project management frameworks are all larp and mostly used by slow moving firms from the past.

[nradov]

Right, those frameworks aren't a good fit for sophisticated tech companies. They're targeted towards enterprises where software is just one component of a larger strategy. Sometimes moving slower is a better way to create shareholder value.

[dbish]

Press x to doubt. Moving slower is never the better way to create shareholder value unless you’re implying a million other things that are going wrong in your definition of moving faster.

“Move fast with stable infrastructure” as they say.

[liquidpele]

Yes, they do. In fact, they have several competing committees to market the concepts internally through armies of PMs and TPMs and KPIs and efficiency metrics tracking. Also your AI token use of course.

[StilesCrisis]

I was in two different Google orgs and neither one used any sort of agile methodology at all, and in fact I almost never heard agile even discussed. Some teams arranged their bugs "kanban"-style but that was up to the individual team; it wasn't a company-wide decision.

[ninjagoo]

> Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore?

Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.