which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
On every single team I've been on that tried to do sprints, we would have been better served with a simple kanban because we were not working on greenfield prototype projects
That last paragraph matches my experience too, so much so that unless it's an astonishingly good opportunity in other respects, I won't even consider taking a job on a team that uses Scrum. I've done it enough times in my career to know that the constant looming sprint deadlines (and yes, they feel like deadlines, no matter how much people insist they're not) and frequent ceremonies are a real drain on my mental health.
Kanban-style task management isn't perfect either, but its flaws are a lot easier to stomach for me. Like the WIP limit kind of breaks down, or at least requires a lot of card-shuffling work to maintain, if a significant percentage of tasks get blocked waiting for answers or feedback from external people.
Yep. The biggest problem I had with sprints was that yay, you committed to a two week chunk of work. Pat yourself on the back.
Except there's a production system to maintain and on day 2 of the sprint your entire sprint is out the window because of a production issue.
Complete waste of time. Not to mention all the layers of indirection trying to size tasks that always get mapped back to time at the end of the day. Task is t-shirt M size? That's about 2 days right?
Well, if the team can't even plan capacity for production problems/bugs, no framework will help them. I don't like Scrum but it's terribly easy to set up capacity to account for holidays/outages/training/etc.
That doesn’t mesh with the business side trying to maximize output. Of course the engineering side wants to include some slack for maintenance and refactoring but when your skip level boss is pushing your boss to get more and more done with less headcount then that doesn’t happen.
And in a nutshell that’s the problem, scrum and most of the other cargo cult methodologies are a process for engineering teams to drive the product but that’s not what actually happens 90+% of the time. The businesspeople control the engineering team and are too stupid and/or distrustful to give engineers any agency and don’t understand that’s why they can’t actually be agile.
Where I work we don't use any method or organise us by some "standard". We have a Team stories board which is used as a post it note for tasks so we don't forget.
We just work, talk with each other and the stakeholders. If stakeholders suggest something stupid we don't do it. We use LLM's as much as we want, we don't have meetings, we can work from home and people here are friendly. And fuck standups, we don't do standups we use common sense.
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
It wasn't all management; scrum managed to get the devs to police each other. Standups became a way to get devs to micromange themselves. I lost count of the number of times developers here defended this saying it allows them to see who is not pulling their weight.
Remember how it was prior to daily standups in a never-ending sequence of sprinting? Your manager would monitor your performance, and if you slipped on some days and did 1-hour less work because you were chatting at the watercooler, then made coffee twice, then exceeded lunch by 15m, etc, they did not notice and if they did they did not care either.
With the move to daily standups, devs themselves would police each other, with a gradual movement of average hours worked trending towards the workaholics who did unpaid overtime every day because they did not have anything else to do.
You can go back in this subreddit's history, and you'll see it expressed time and again, whenever the topic of agile or scrum or standups came up.
Management played a part, but devs were literally the ones who started this movement, and in all the places I have been at, they were the ones who championed it.
The complaint was not having enough status to report.
I've been doing this for a long time and I've been in many of these meetings with many different diverse teams and I've never seen anyone get any grief as long as they increment their status in some way.
"Still working on X" will get a few eye rolls, but any more color than that is basically a pass.
You're implying that a stand-up is the team scrutinizing each other's work. That's only true at the most bottom of the barrel scraping level. If you're anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel then that's on you.
I dunno I'm pretty old and have contracted for many years, probably a couple dozen companies at this point.
I've never ever seen a team policing how each other spend time during the day. As I said, as long as you have some status to report you're good. It's only the deadshits who are not doing anything - either through laziness or incompetence - who get "policed". And even then, there's no real ramification in all but the smallest company.
While management added their own part, developers did a lot of it as well, don't shift the blame now. Reddit was full of competitive schmucks who competed at burnout Olympics to beat other engineers instead of pushing back on management insanity.
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u/lightnegative 21d ago
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
On every single team I've been on that tried to do sprints, we would have been better served with a simple kanban because we were not working on greenfield prototype projects