I came across this article on LinkedIn which talks about how agile is killing productivity. I can relate to so many things he has said about sprint planning and ‘’meta work’. His best line is we are sacrificing productivity in the name of predictability. https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-never-worked/
Stupid take. We aren’t formal agile on my team, we don’t do a lot of the ceremonies and we don’t do points for estimates. That being said we do estimate tasks and we have stand ups and build incrementally. We get a lot done quickly and it feels like we move faster than we would if operating more along the waterfall paradigm.
My observation is that all value derived from agile comes from: - stop planning, start coding - listen to your customer obsessively - get something working and iterate with regular/timely feedback All of the ceremonies and pageantry are total bullshit.
Yep, fundamentally being agile is about reactivity, with sacrifice on predictability. But management requires predictability to be useful. So they demand it, and add layers upon layers of management tasks and process to increase predictability. That way they are more effective. Doesn't matter that the whole organization become dysfunctional under the pile of processes and overhead. But realistically speaking, at least some predictability is required, especially at the helm of an enterprise. The role of middle management is to make the bridge between predictability and reactivity. In a software engineering environment.
Agile does not improve or reduce productivity. It just chop up your project into smaller block so when the demand change, you don’t throw out your plan for the next 2 years like you would if you waterfall. You team reacted to changing needs better with agile. The “sacrifice productivity” part is just BS
Grab the bag and run for it everyone. They are onto us.
Capital One laid off their entire Agile job family so if other companies follow it may soon be the end for Agile.
one of the weirdest things about people in tech is that they write dumb articles like this that are their own experiences that they project onto the rest of the industry, which in turn harms us as a collective. i’ve never seen any other industry where people come out saying that they make too much money and don’t do enough work.
Probably because in no other industry are people getting paid $500k to do nothing
And even worse, it is consuming talent. I cannot tell you how many ultra-bright software engineers with huge potential have in recent years decided to specialize in DevOps, or software factory, or agile coaching, or become scrum masters, or whatever other “meta-job” you can come up with. These people should be working real problems, not thinking about how to work!
100% agree. Those agile coaches and scrum master need to find something better to do.
FWIW I’ve seen 0 agile scrum masters be even a mediumly talented SWE. I’ve seen them go to product… never scrum/agile coach whatever.