[sublinear]

> none of this existed like the cult it is now

So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?

All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results.

[hilariously]

Unfortunately in many places it is indeed a cult and serves to ossify management decisions. We ARE doing Agile, what do you mean? No this person is the scrum master and they tell us what Agile is and then we do it, see?

I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the engineers they are accountable for the bad ideas that are now their job.

CI/CD? How about make that only "Devops" job and then make the exact same undemocratized system before with gatekeepers who spend a significant amount of time blocking your work because they are afraid of things changing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[sublinear]

My point is you would never even have a clue that there is dysfunction at all without these methodologies. These days you at least have some idea in your head how it should be vs how it is.

I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.

[hilariously]

That's somewhat fair, though I dont think you need to know about the beforetimes to understand that the current times get nowhere fast with all their talk of velocity.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I worked in a mainframe team at a major financial network (very explicitly not a bank) and we were agile. The entire company was agile. The company was so agile that when we moved to our new building we did hot-desking where no team had a fixed location and every worker had a little safe where they could put their valuables and leave it in modular lockers throughout the building, so that anyone could sit anywhere there was space to sit on that day.

I mean of course it didn't exactly work like that in practice because directors had to have the corners and they wanted their teams close to them, so that, e.g. our team of 15 mainframe engineers could file in to a 5 x 5 meter cubicle and one-by-one give a report on what they had done the previous day a.k.a. The Scrum. We had a certified Scrum Master.

The one time I tried to sit in a different team's space I got yelled at by their director and had to go back. I had moved in his team's space out of protest because the only space left for me to be near my team was right in front of the gents and it smelled a bit funny. I was supposed to be sitting next to my (official) Mentor but I was studying part-time for a MSc and so was not there in the mornings and another engineer would always take my place next to the Mentor, who was the most experienced Cobol programmer in the team. He always looked at me with a wry smile whenever I came in to the office and found him sitting at ... well, it wasn't really my place so I couldn't really say anything. But then the only place for me to sit was in front of the loos. So I tried to go and sit somewhere else, farther away, in protest. And then I got yelled at.

But in principle we had hot-desking and we could sit anywhere throughout the building while communicating remotely with our colleagues.

We were very agile.

Our certified Scrum Master moved on before I did.

[FpUser]

>"So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?"

Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.

>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."

Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.

In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.

On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation