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from the what-if-you-can't-program-your-way-out-of-a-paper-bag? dept.
Agile Development is hip. It's hot. All the cool kids are doing it.
But it doesn't work.
Before I get into why this "Agile" stuff is horrible, let's describe where Agile/Scrum can work. It can work for a time-sensitive and critical project of short duration (6 weeks max) that cross-cuts the business and has no clear manager, because it involves people from multiple departments. You can call it a "Code Red" or call it a Scrum or a "War Room" if you have a physical room for it.
Note that "Agile" comes from the consulting world. It suits well the needs of a small consulting firm, not yet very well-established, that lands one big-ticket project and needs to deliver it quickly, despite changing requirements and other potential bad behavior from the client. It works well when you have a relatively homogeneous talent level and a staff of generalists, which might also be true for an emerging web consultancy.
As a short-term methodology when a firm faces an existential risk or a game-changing opportunity, I'm not opposed to the "Code Red"/"crunch time"/Scrum practice of ignoring peoples' career goals and their individual talents. I have in mind that this "Code Red" state should exist for no more than 6 weeks per year in a well-run business. Even that's less than ideal: the ideal is zero. Frequent crises reflect poorly on management.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:37PM (2 children)
Agile is okay, if you have competent people, and a good environment. Having competent people is more important than the particular process. And by competent, I don't mean only rock star coders, I mean people who also have a bit of humility, enough that they can stand to be a "mere" follower and not The Leader. People who are, to employ another severely mangled buzz phrase, "team players".
The environment is critical. There's hardly any more toxic environment than Stack Ranking. That can push even the most saintly team members into plotting against the others. Anything that puts team members in cutthroat competition with each other is a team wrecker.
For the larger background environment, the US encourages vicious competition. A US citizen who loses a job is, by deliberate design, instantly faced with a crisis, wondering how to feed their children and pay the mortgage and the car payment and doctors' bills and so on. A lot of managers really believe that holding guns to people's heads inspires their best, think "team player" means someone who "shows commitment" by resting the foundation of their life on their job, so that if the job is lost, their life falls apart. People have committed suicide upon losing a critical job. It's like those legends of Mayan sports in which the two teams are driven to win at all costs because the losers will be sacrificed to the gods. They're going to accept broken bones and permanent damage to secure a win. They may beat themselves up too much to win the next game, but that's what it takes not to be sacrificed on the altar this time. Terrible though that vision is, it unfortunately is all too alluring to a lot of American management and even employees. There's a kind of sick fascination, a desire to see an ultimate cutthroat game. An American employer who doesn't want to put that kind of pressure on employees, actually understands that is counterproductive, has a rough time bucking the myriad ways the American system is set up to help employers whip, beat and subjugate workers.
It's very hard to avoid the toxic workplace, otherwise, no one would work there. So, the smarter employees keep a stash of money squirreled away. I've heard this referred to as "fuck you money", so you can tell your boss, "fuck you". Meantime, can fake that sort of desperate overcommitment for a short while. But the 3rd time in a row you don't put in unpaid overtime (unpaid because you are salary, you know), the slave driving boss is going to suspect you have too much liberty. And some are fool enough to rate lack of liberty as more important than proficiencies and skills.
With that sort of background environment, any development methodology is going to be mercilessly questioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @10:55AM (1 child)
As a non-American it's a bit shocking when you see it for the first time...
On a company message board we had a discussion about unrealistic timelines, overworked people etc., and I was suggesting that some people need to learn to say "not my problem". Management gives unrealistic timelines? "Not my problem". As an engineer, it can't be your job to fix up any and all of management's failings. That got fairly harsh comments from some people in the US, with comments like "you wouldn't and shouldn't get good reviews with an attitude like that" and "fear for your job is a great motivator" etc. Which I found also so utterly weird, because lack of motivation is not one of the top-10 problems I've seen at that company, aside of burnout-style issues at least...
It seems in the US it is not acceptable to say (even if worded more politely) "you messed this up, it is not my job to make unreasonable efforts to clean it up" to management. Well, maybe it's not really acceptable in Europe/Germany/Sweden as well, but at least I've been getting away with it and believe it leads to a more productive work environment long-term.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 05 2018, @04:57PM
Yes, America really believes in driving people. Some drive is good, but America pushes too hard. Had a boss once summon me to his office for a private talk, which sounded ominous. But I looked on the bright side. I thought things were going well. Maybe he wanted to praise me? Nope! He had 3 things to say. 1) He was "this close" (holding thumb and index finger a millimeter apart) to firing me because I was pushy and insubordinate, etc. Not one mention of whether I was getting work done and meeting targets, which I was. 2) He observed I had not bought a new car. Or a house. And that was Bad. Why? Because it meant I could afford to quit my job. Never mind whether I needed a new car or house. I was a "flight risk." ("Flight risk" is a phrase used to classify those prisoners who are likely to attempt to escape if sent outside the prison for whatever reason.) 3) And then seeing I was a teensy bit upset by then, he asked me if he needed to have all the passwords changed so I could not sabotage the company. I quit the next day, but not before I heard from all my coworkers that the boss had threatened every one of them with termination at one point or another. That was his way of motivating people to work harder and really it was no big deal. One of them called him on the threat, and yes, he was bluffing.
Even many employees endorse this "gun to the head" work environment. At another job that was in the midst of a nasty derailment on the way to becoming a train wreck, the only employee not in Trouble was the newest guy. He took a number of interesting steps to increase his job security. He bought a big house that he could not afford without that job, and told management all about his utter inability to feed his little baby girl and keep that house if he should lose the job. That was his way of letting them know they could rely on him. It was also a pity play, as in, make the bosses feel like total heels for even thinking of firing the poor bastard. The bosses would surely perceive that, and likely resent the crude attempt to manipulate their feelings. He was risking that they would value his utter financial dependence more than they'd resent his emotional manipulation, if they had uses for him. To me, he asserted that he was a better employee than me, because I didn't have a house and child, which meant I wasn't as driven. I didn't even try to tell him he was very wrong, just inwardly shook my head at his youthful folly.
It goes up the ladder too. I know my bosses were all being hammered by their bosses to do more. There's chronic suspicion that people could do more if they weren't being lazy, a sophistry that most people are by nature a bunch of unmotivated slackers who need constant prodding to be productive. If you aren't sweating blood, you aren't working hard enough.
In a sense, the US Civil War, over whether a slave driven economy is more productive than a free one, and WWII over whether fascism is more productive than democracy, is still being fought. The free economies won the wars decisively, already had a huge edge in population, resources, and productivity when the slave driver side started hostilities, yet lots of people still aren't completely convinced. It's the ancient East vs. West conflict that goes back before Islam and Christianity, when it was Greeks vs Persians. The Greeks were the democrats and the Persians were the authoritarians. The Persians had far more resources, yet they lost. Rome vs Carthage was another clash of that sort, testing whether mercenarism was stronger than nationalism. Really sad to see the winners forget or dismiss those reasons for why they won and cotton to so much of the losing sides' thinking.