[abalone]

He just vaguely blames everything on "non-technical management" without really offering a cogent argument why.

When he does get to concrete points, one of them is "Short feedback loops to measurable outcomes create good software." And yet "two week iterations" he calls "agile nonsense".

The overal tone is kind of "technical macho" to me.. like, Real Developers don't need management and if you slipped then it's because your programmers suck and you should just hire better ones.

[SixSigma]

It would also suggest that someone who isn't a qualified doctor couldn't run a hospital. I continually run up against this attitude that programmers are somehow special and the rules of management somehow don't work with them.

The sentence should read "The core problem is that bad managers will usually fail, or at best be counter productive, whatever the methodology".

[briantakita]

Non-technical agile management usually gets in the way. They get in the way with rigid prioritization. Prioritization means less gets done because you are optimizing sequential outcomes instead of a solid development process. Good engineers will evolve the architecture toward where the product is heading.

Non-technical agile management uses points to measure the work that gets done because they don't know any better and they "need" to measure something.

The technical architecture starts to go downhill over this never ending treadmill of the prioritized backlog with the non-technical task masters whipping their developers to get more points done.

Sure, we can educate the non-technical management over keeping a low standard deviation of points. We can bargain to get technical cleanup time (marked as chores). We may even have a debt cleanup week out of the month.

However, the spirit of the engineering endeavor is lost to the marketers, or their henchmen, running the project. It's too bad because subpar products and subpar code are the result.