How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

Refuse to work at places that practice?

I’m familiar with the way of working described in the Skype web section. One thing this article has made clear is how much responsibility is pushed down to engineering, and removed from product ownership.

The product owner is not even tasked with approving the work done! Nor having any real kind of spec. However in my experience they still have veto power and the power to change what the project is at their whim.

This is all done with the idea of “autonomous teams” held firmly in mind. Yeah you’re autonomous... you can decide for yourselves how you will do what the project owner has decided they want today.

But they are still the owner! And will be the face of success when your project ships.

I suppose it’s a good thing they pay well.

Name me one company that doesn't profile a programmer using the points and velocities (etc, etc).The up-speak and dishonesty can be seen readily when they say "All these metrics and data on your board will not be shared or used to decide your compensation or salary-revision.". The thing is that Agile, Scrum, Safe etc makes management happy that they have data which can infer devs productivity and return to the corporate. Thats all.

The important distinction here is this is a set or principles for agile software development at scale. If you aren't "at scale" and having trouble running basic Scrums, then you aren't solving any problems by scraping Scrum necessarily. If you struggle organizationally to use Scrum principles then you're going to struggle even more with this.

I really want to say this: SAFe is an awful process and a trend that will hopefully go the way of Unified Process/RUP. I won't go into it, but it's largely created and popularized by a vendor to sell their software. It is poison and exists to keep its practitioners employed. It attracts the highest-ego PMs like moths.

I find it interesting that they author references Skype circa 2012. It sounds like classic "uppercase A" agile: they reframe success as shipping and hitting other invented agile milestones, while masking shipping lousy and incomplete product that is not succeeding in the market. That was right around the time Skype started being bad. It may succeed on some metrics because MSFT started bundling it, but anyone that actively used it at that time should know what I mean.

The idea of an "agile enterprise" is intrinsically absurd. Teams are agile, not companies, and teams and products should be loosely coupled. That's why the big tech companies in this link have converged to similar answers to this problem (they are not "agile enterprises" but give teams some latitude to solve their own problems, and rather focus on results). Kanban is better in most ways for most teams.

Also, Tuckman is a silly model that is only popular because it rhymes.

PS: Strawberry-Jam-O-Meter and a Wrong-Order-O-Meter and their descriptions could hardly be more cringe inducing. Skype should be a part of the curriculum looking at less than ideal acquisitions and post-acquisition execution. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic has is a reasonable overview if you're not familiar. They lost the consumer market and failed at enterprise (see Teams) and Teams in turn essentially failed in the general market- where most places that were free to do so went with Slack.