Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#121

Post by anoncareer0212 » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

aurelianito wrote: post #45

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall picture: Google recognizes it's a large company that has an extreme diversity of teams with idiosyncratic goals and personalities, and doesn't prescribe _anything_ Dollars to doughnuts, there's multiple teams doing extremely prescriptive Agile, but I've never seen one in 3 years in a 2,000 employee office. By far the most organized team I've been on merely kept track of bugs using an internal web app that ren…

The team you are referring to is highly likely to be using kanban. Kanban is the destiny of agile.

Nailed it, that's the name of the internal web app :) I always hesitate to call it Kanban because my relative that's a university professor is obsessed with Proper Kanban and it's nigh-unrecognizable to me beyond the post-it notes and status

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#122

Post by anonygler » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #103

anonygler wrote: post #89

At Google, there are too many complex systems and too many team dependencies to break tasks down into granular chunks, or to shoot from the hip in a pair programming session. Google runs on design docs. You define the problem, dependencies, risks, end state, etc, in a 20-page doc, and then you drive its development for 1-2 quarters. Google doesn’t do extreme programming, we do extreme ownership. I really prefer it to…

There’s a lot of power in refactoring, but I’ll allow that some of it is counterintuitive. Anything counterintuitive requires state of mind and experience to line up and that’s quite hit or miss. When that awful Design Patterns book was off the hype train but the new devs had heard about it and asked if they should read it, I would tell them No, read Refactoring twice instead, because it tells you why and when to use…

Google does refactoring, but you’re expected to sell the idea, plan its roll out, and measure its impact... and then bring the codebase into a consistent state. I would rather things be consistently “wrong” than inconsistently right.

You can assign work to teams to complete, but you must drive the effort and gain buy in. Otherwise it’s not actually worth refactoring.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#123

Post by taftster » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

jpalawaga wrote: post #96

gordaco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why woul…

This is 100% caused by stack ranking, and the problem you identify is a very real one. Chopping off the bottom 5% of employees works if you have a LOT of dead weight, but realistically you can't really do it continuously or you start removing legitimate talent and, just as worse, fostering a toxic community that values playing politics over delivering value.

Not only that, but chopping off the bottom 5% typically makes room for more hiring; these emptied jobs are likely to be filled with less-than-stellar candidates. It take the new hires a few years before they too are dropped down into that lower 5% rank.

Stack ranking ensures that you have churn in your workforce, and not in a good way. You wonder why workers in the tech industry move around so much? Look at stack ranking as a significant contributing factor.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#124

Post by CivBase » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

> much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it

If your work doesn't have a customer, why are you even doing it?

The customer doesn't have to be the business's end user. The can be another team or even your own team. Someone must benefit from the work or else the work should not be done.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#125

Post by hinkley » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #107

hinkley wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without mature technology, you want to shake down the new tech early to find out if it’s going to crumble around your shoulders at the worst possible moment. While Agile is not perfect for this kind of work, it does have a lot of facility in this area. Now if you could just get any two people to agree on what constitutes the last responsible moment... And with new tech you often have to do it first or do it bett…

So, just from observation, when developing new tech, there is always LAST to market advantage. MS was LAST to market. Google was LAST to market. Kubernetes was LAST to market. Apple was LAST to market (After MS and Palm). I think that Agile is good after the market is captured. But when developing the core tech (usually with no customers beside product managers and based on research), it might be too constraining.

I’ve observed the same thing. I’ve also observed that the dogma in the startup world is exactly opposite. Everything is about version 1 and there is nothing left in the tank for version 2.

The whole MVP thing is more about selling demoware to investors. It just sounds like it’s being supportive and it gets them what they want. They don’t give one shit about what happens 18 months from now. That’s somebody else’s problem. There’s always someone with a higher pain tolerance they can hire (note: pain tolerance is negatively correlated with capacity to anticipate problems before they become emergencies). And there’s always advertising or mergers to mask the real problems.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#126

Post by insertnickname » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

theworld572 wrote: post #48

Tharkun wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My biggest criticism of Agile and Scrum is that it assumes that you can just plan out how a feature will work by sitting in a meeting and talking about it. No, it doesn't. It wants the team to discuss features to help find preventable issues up front and to make it as clear as possible. The unknown unknowns remain unknown, which is why an estimate is an estimate, and a sprint is a best-effort attempt at getting a t…

Whats the point of SCRUM then? If all it does is to tell you "do what makes sense" why do we even need it? Thats a rhetorical question, I already know the answer is that we need it in order to keep SCRUM consultants, certifications, training etc. a profitable business. Whether or not you think SCRUM is good or bad, you can't argue that a sizeable (if not the majority) amount of companies are "not doing it right" and…

Scrum, not SCRUM. It's not an acronym.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#127

Post by amsheehan » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

We don't

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#128

Post by insertnickname » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

pfooti wrote: post #20

crazygringo wrote: post #5

This post feels a little disingenuous... First of all, it's not like most engineers at Google are working on Bigtable or Borg, with a "very simple interface and tons of hidden internal complexity". Plenty of them are working on normal consumer-facing products, the "software with a simple core and lots of customer visible features that are incrementally useful", although maybe that's not the hype people want to believ…

This is true. I'm a swe at Google. My team uses scrum methodology, and is responsible for a customer facing but thoroughly "normal" product. My work doesn't involve building heretofore unknown planet scale computational resources. It's just a normal product where I'm a full stack dev. I'm sure there's ways we can improve our canonical agile-ness, but it's not lip service. We set quarterly goals sure, but they can cha…

Quarterly goals are not necessarily anti-agile. Extreme Programming has both a weekly and a quarterly cycle.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#129

Post by heyoni » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:38 PM UTC

fourthark wrote: post #98

ryandvm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so fucking sick of people being offended by everything

I'm so tired of people being sick of people being offended by everything.

And I feel sick...probably because of something I ate.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#130

Post by tootie » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

I would speculate that this philosophy is so far removed from the customer that it's the reason they deliver so many consumer-facing duds and exhibit a completely schizophrenic product roadmap in so many verticals.

Amazon is relentlessly customer focussed and is now a veritable hit factory And mostly in industries that were already seen as mature.