[michaelochurch]

"Agile" is fucking terrible. It's an attempt to patch business-driven engineering, which is like spraying perfume on a turd in an attempt to make it smell good. Fuck user stories and fuck "iterations"/"sprints" and fuck "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and fuck story points and fuck all the meetings ("sprint retrospective meetings" that go on for 2 hours; how the fuck is that agile?) and fuck this culture of enabling indecisive businessmen by tolerating incoherent, rapidly-changing requirements and fuck this idea that programmers (even with 5-10+ years of experience) are supposed to be terminal juniors and be fucking happy about it.

I'm all for genuine agility but this cottage industry of developer fungibility and ritualized micromanagement needs to die in a fucking taint fire.

[wmeredith]

Lots of piss and vinegar here, but little that's constructive. What's the alternative? Waterfall? Chaos?

[michaelochurch]

Waterfall is a straw man. Waterfall and agile are two possibilities within business-driven engineering (a euphemism for "you just code what we tell you to do, we make the decisions").

I don't think Scrum is that terrible for junior engineers, but it provides no exit. It's the terminal juniorness of it that has me bothered. I'm 31 years old and have been programming for almost a decade and I'm too old to work on "user stories". No, I don't mean "because of age, I'm too good to work on it" because that would be bullshit; if it needs to be done and I'm the best person to do it, then I'm not "too good" to work on anything. I mean that, at age 31, if all I have to show for my time is a disjointed collection of "user stories", no one will take me seriously.

If you're any good, programming evolves into an R&D job after 5 years: exploring new technologies, testing new architectures, building whole products and company-wide initiatives. Ideologies like Scrum are trying to take that away from us. They probably provide some useful structure for junior programmers, but they're alienating to senior talent.

[maxerickson]

How many people have you managed?

How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable?

I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine.

Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

[fsk]

That is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?

I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only spending a couple hours a week on it.

They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad they dropped it. Having a daily 30 minute status report meeting that never started on time was killing almost an hour of productivity per day.

[sheepmullet]

"If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?"

As if it was that simple. My company is 80% waterfall and yet none of our agile competitors can keep up. Is that because waterfall is better in my industry? No, it's because there is a lot more to success than picking the right development model.

[dasmoth]

"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric.

Can't we judge people by results?

[maxerickson]

I'm not judging anyone, I'm asking if a conclusion is informed by a specific type of information.

There's perhaps some phrasing problems with the question, but I think if you are talking about managers being a useless component in organizations it might be good to have >0 years cumulative experience managing people.

[michaelochurch]

Where did I say that managers were "a useless component in organizations"?

[joshrivers]

I love you michealochurch.

[confiscate]

lol me 2