It’s well known that creative people lose their creativity if asked to explain themselves while they are working. (To put it bluntly, an open-plan programmer is more valued as office furniture than for the code she writes.) For a variety of cultural reasons, that made the open-plan outfit seem “cool” and “youthy” and now it’s infesting the corporate world in general. VC-backed startups that needed to manage up into investors used these plans to make their workspaces look busy. Open-plan offices aren’t even about productivity in the first place. When you force people to play a side game of appearing productive, in addition to their job duties, they become less productive. They’re anti-intellectual, insofar as people become afraid to be caught reading books (or just thinking) on the job. Open-plan offices are the most egregious example. There are a lot of workplace trends that are making the programming career extremely unattractive, especially to the sorts of creative, intelligent people that it’s going to need in order to fill the next generation. Scrum seems to be tailored toward the body shops, where client relationships are so mismanaged that the engineers have to be watched on a daily basis, because they’ve become a dumping ground for career-incoherent work that no one wants to do (and that probably isn’t very important, hence the low rate and respect). Mismanaged consulting firms often end up becoming garbage disposals for the low end work. It’s probably obvious that one class of consultant gets respect and the other doesn’t. At the low end, they dump all the stuff they don’t want to do. At the high end, they hire for expertise that they don’t have. In general, people tend to create two types of jobs, whether inside a company or as clients when off-loading work. This means that the work gets atomized into “user stories” and “iterations” that often strip a sense of accomplishment from the work, as well as any hope of setting a long-term vision for where things are going. Corporate Agile, removed from the consulting environment, goes further and assumes that the engineers aren’t smart enough to figure out what their internal “customers” want. This makes working with non-technical people harder for us than it needs to be, because we tend to take every request literally rather than trying to figure out what they actually want. We like systems that have precisely defined behaviors. Programmers tend not to be great at managing clients. We’re very literal people. The second is to accept client misbehavior (as, say, many graphic designers must) and orient one’s work flow around client-side dysfunction. The first is to manage the client: get expectations set, charge appropriately for rework, and maintain a relationship of equality rather than submission. Rather, I mean that its stock dropped by almost 90 percent in less than two years.Īgile grew up in web consulting, where it had a certain amount of value: when dealing with finicky clients who don’t know what they want, one typically has to choose between one of two options. By “kill”, I don’t mean “the culture wasn’t as good afterward”. There’s a variety of Agile, called Scrum, that I’ve seen actually kill a company. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t really think that the Agile/Waterfall dichotomy is useful in the first place. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Note: My first novel, Farisa’s Crossing, will be released in spring 2022.Īgility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable.
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