[someengineer]

One thing about Agile that I don't see mentioned much is that it provides a way for bad managers to marginalize the effects of low performers among their groups, though at the expense of high performers.

Every company has "cowboy" programmers who break shit and ruin their coworkers' lives with massive 1am check-ins, and a lot Agile seems designed specifically to put up road blocks to prevent this from happening. Managers love it because it provides an escape from dealing with problem employees directly. Most of the vehemently anti-Agile people I've worked with were grossly overconfident in their abilities and difficult to work with, which I think supports this idea.

Unfortunately, the only way for this non-management technique to be effective is to do it dogmatically with no deviations (otherwise the cowboys will always have some excuse for why it shouldn't apply to them), and this is where things start pissing off the actual talent.