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Agile Ruined My Life

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Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#91

Post by lzw »

tjpick wrote: post #69
ww520 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There used to be a manager who would schedule a meeting at 10am everyday with me to force me to come in. I was like fuck this, if I have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night, I should have a little leeway in coming a bit late the next morning. I don't want someone to babysit my time.

> have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night ? Just don't do that then. In at 9, out at 5. No problem, life goes on.

I once worked at amazon. They hire managers who can barely operate computers and can't code. They like to keep engineers on call.

So for instance, on more than one occasion I was forced to wake up and fix a chronic problem caused by another team at 3-4am,and would show up at 10:15 and miss he scrum.

Got chewed out for being 15 minutes late on only 5 hours sleep.

Worst company ever.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#92

Post by moondowner »

haze wrote: post #21
lzw wrote: post #2

Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally…

Being Agile has become a fad off late. This has led to team adopting agile blindly doing things without understanding the reason or need behind it. This could lead to frustration mentioned by you involving a lot of long ass meetings standing. I believe as mentioned in the article that Agile is a set of best practices followed by a ever adaptive team. I completely agree there is in no ONE TRUE WAY.

True, It can disorganize the team and make it counterproductive if it isn't in the 'agile' mindset (or hasn't adapted to it in a reasonable period of time).

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#93

Post by neiljohnson »

cageface wrote: post #27
Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #10

As a young software developper, what really bores me with Agile, is the name, the shiny box you put things into, where it should just be named "Good practices for software developement". It's the mentality of selling things as products, with some kind of prebuilt ideology and aesthetic built along with the core, that really makes me run far far away. I don't want to be sold a product. The fact that it led people to t…

Exactly. It reeks of buzzwords and consultant speak. Every brush I've had with an agile evangelist felt like a scene from "The Office".

Warren Buffet is an unlikely person to quote in a discussion about agile, but .....

"First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich."

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#94

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

When I was an early teenager, I took violin playing lessons. Whenever I asked my teacher about violin playing technique, he would always give me a quote which he attributed to famous violin teacher D.C. Dounis:

"There is no technique, only a bunch of tricks that help you play better."

He didn't want me to get stuck in the 'technique' mindset. I think he was trying to tell me that applying a predefined technique instead of experimenting with different things meant you were not adapting to the current song, style, your, body or cognitive abilities. Different 'tricks-from-the-masters' worked differently with different people in different situations and a smart player would try different things until they found the combination that made playing easier and better sounding in his current context.

I always thought that quote applied very well to programming.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#96

Post by btilly »

chromatic wrote: post #37
btilly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile is anything but agile when it comes to the process. The Agilists out there will be the first to beat you over the head when you don't follow the process by the book. There is a delicious irony here. The first bullet point of the Agile Manifesto is that individuals and interactions matter more than processes and tools. (See http://agilemanifesto.org/ if don't know what I'm talking about.) The heart of the Agile…

* The message became, "Here is a magic methodology that is right for all situations, which we'll be glad to teach you about in our next expensive seminar!" * Would you hire someone to manage your software development process who's only qualification is sitting through an expensive three-day seminar? Would you trust an organization which does so? If not, why the surprise that such projects struggle?

There is no surprise. But many people's only exposure to agile is this, and the result is that people wind up with an unfairly bad impression of what agile means.

That said, I've used a variety of agile methods for years, but I'm quite sure in ways that would make many of the presenters of those seminars object very strongly to my calling it agile.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#97

Post by cageface »

bitwize wrote: post #74
Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #10

As a young software developper, what really bores me with Agile, is the name, the shiny box you put things into, where it should just be named "Good practices for software developement". It's the mentality of selling things as products, with some kind of prebuilt ideology and aesthetic built along with the core, that really makes me run far far away. I don't want to be sold a product. The fact that it led people to t…

Eric S. Raymond accurately characterized Agile when he described it as repackaging the things hackers do anyway, in a way that can be sold to non-hackers. Maybe you don't want to be sold a product. You're not the target audience for Agile Methodology(tm). The MBA and Tim Robbins crowd are.

It's funny that you mention Tim Robbins because after listening to somebody talk for 30 minutes about the "values" of the agile process I felt like I'd just sat through a Robbins seminar. The harder somebody tries to convince me that they deeply, truly, personally care about their customer the more convinced I am that they're trying to sell me something.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#98

Post by gxti »

aphexairlines wrote: post #41
Tichy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also probably what annoys me about it the most :-/

What about dialing in?

Trying to communicate with a mix of people who are A) standing too far from the conference phone or B) driving to work and thus drowned out by road noise, not to mention paying attention to either you or the road but not both -- is a waste of time. Plus, people who are not dialed in can't read body language and so they end up talking too long because they can't see how bored everyone else is but nobody wants to be the one to tell them to shut up.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#99

Post by j_baker »

tieTYT wrote: post #56
j_baker wrote: post #38

You know, I'm really beginning to regard the "Agile is led by consultants who don't know what they're doing" and "TDD is a crutch for beginners" crowds as being like the Rush Limbaughs of programming. There's a grain of truth to their points of view, but that's it: just a grain. They get their strength just from being loud enough to make people notice. To be fair though, I think of the Bob Martins out there as being…

"Can't we all just accept that different people work different ways rather than being constantly at each others' throats?" We could if we all worked on one-man projects where you are the only one that reads the code that you write. The reality of the situation is, one day someone else will need to understand and modify your code. If you're inconsiderate about your coding style, then I would say, "No, I can't accept t…

"We could if we all worked on one-man projects where you are the only one that reads the code that you write. The reality of the situation is, one day someone else will need to understand and modify your code."

Please don't patronize me. I'm fully aware of the fact that I'm working on a team of developers. They even work in the same room as I do.

Secondly, my argument is about 5 miles away from the argument you are arguing against. I'm arguing about organizational issues. I'm not saying that any developer needs to be able to be "incosiderate" all he wants (whatever that means). Guess what? Some shops do well by being agile. Some shops do well by not being agile. Some shops (if you can find them) do well by using Haskell. And there are a ton of shops out there that don't. What I'm getting at is that just because something didn't work for you in your particular situation doesn't mean it's bad.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#100

Post by jsyedidia »

bitwize wrote: post #74
Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #10

As a young software developper, what really bores me with Agile, is the name, the shiny box you put things into, where it should just be named "Good practices for software developement". It's the mentality of selling things as products, with some kind of prebuilt ideology and aesthetic built along with the core, that really makes me run far far away. I don't want to be sold a product. The fact that it led people to t…

Eric S. Raymond accurately characterized Agile when he described it as repackaging the things hackers do anyway, in a way that can be sold to non-hackers. Maybe you don't want to be sold a product. You're not the target audience for Agile Methodology(tm). The MBA and Tim Robbins crowd are.

I think you must mean Tony Robbins.
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