[michaelochurch]

It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.

However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks.

Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.

[r0naa]

Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part?

I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?

[michaelochurch]

Scrum isn't so bad for juniors, but when you get older and want to tackle more ambitious projects, you won't want to be justifying mere weeks or days (sometimes even hours) of your own working time.

These methods take management strategies typically reserved for juniors and the underperforming and try to apply them to everyone. It's awful.

However, "Agile" and "Scrum" seem to mean different things everywhere. Some companies say they "do Scrum" but just mean that they have a 15-minute status meeting (which isn't that big of a deal; it's a minor annoyance but it actually can defuse politics and suspicion). Others haul out the whole shebang, with nightmarish "ceremonies" that take hours and involve beasts like "product backlogs" and "business user stories" meant to spread disease.

By "Scrum compliant", I meant the sort of mediocre (or junior) engineer who will accept being managed down to the day.

That said, I don't think that Agile or Scrum is the right thing, even for juniors. Junior engineers should be getting daily feedback, but it should be in the form of genuine doing-the-right-thing mentoring, not continual progress tracking.