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

If you do "Scrum, exactly", then when things don't quite work out, being "on your own" is the best case scenario. Worst case is that someone yells at you and blames you because Scrum Objectively Works so it must be your fault.

I see no reason to believe that Scrum is a tightly tuned machine that must be precisely run to work at all, and any deviation from it makes it fall apart. In fact, if that is the case for Scrum I'd consider it a fatal objection. I don't believe the effectiveness landscape for project management techniques is shaped like that, I don't believe that the effectiveness landscape is a black pit everywhere just around Scrum only for a sudden spike of effectiveness to exist precisely where Scrum is located, and if it were shaped like that, I don't believe in the capability of anyone to have found and proved that spike. Since the only practical algorithm to explore this landscape is gradient descent, anyone carefully and thoughtfully exploring this landscape should never have found Scrum.

Or, to put it in less mathematical language, the idea that Scrum is super effective but if you deviate from it just a bit it all falls apart is complete garbage.

Do real agile, all the time. Scrum's only useful for raiding for ideas, and I'm not particularly impressed with it for that purpose, either. But it's not quite literally bereft of good ideas. I wouldn't give its ideas any particular credence for coming from "Scrum!", through. I don't see a lot of evidence that it is specially deserving of respect. It seems to work for some people, yes, I don't deny that, but the rate at which it works for people is sufficiently low that I don't think it has any sort of special claim.

>Most of Scrum's bad rep comes from people who think they know better, tweak it to suit their needs, then realize they made a ton of holes in the system and their Frankenscrum doesn't really work.

I remember when Scrum came out. It's a very specific method for a very specific company type that was sold to work with any company. Before scrum, each company kinda figured out their own processes based on their size, team composition, output requirements, and their risk tolerance. Ticket systems existed before scrum, feedback loops existed before scrum, bug tracking existed before scrum, prioritization existed before scrum. Scrum just took all the things that already existed and put them in a very specific and somewhat restrictive process. It was eye candy for the execs who had no idea how their department worked, it was a cash cow for the consultants selling it. It's ok if you don't have anything else or you're dealing with high turnover or something like that, but if you have a mature department already, it's probably more restrictive than not.

Nice to see big companies working like this. I wish more places would understand that different approaches work for different people, teams, products, technologies and contexts. There is no one true way, and most attempts to impose one tend to create something that is bigger and more complex than any single team needs. It's like the human equivalent of a code library that is trying to solve too many problems and so becomes an unweildy mess of config and options and meta-problems.

We (Bugsnag) are a relatively small engineering team, so have the advantage of low comms overhead, and we do have an overarching approach, but each of the teams works a bit differently. Even from project to project I'll adjust what makes sense based on complexity/risk/size.

The way we do things at Gordian is similar in a lot of way to the Big Tech methods but it stands out in a pretty unique way IMO.

The approach is described here https://www.gordiansoftware.com/news/two-weeks-too-slow and in practice it’s even better than anything I was hoping for. I can legitimately say this is the most productive environment I’ve ever seen.

As a Dev, I loved SAFE. It changed everything about how our program operated to the point our delivery became extremely predictable and we still had every 9th and 10th week to tinker on new ideas or do refactoring and cleanup where we wanted. That program purred like nothing else I've ever been a part of. Senior leaders sat with devs, started talking to everyone about their priorities - people we had never seen before we started doing PI events. Antagonism dropped. We went from not being trusted to deploy during an annual heavy use period to being totally trusted to deploy and given additional contracts for maintenance. And this was with the exact same people who had been there. We just weren't working very well before we got into SAFe.

I think one of the keys to this was the buyin everyone had. It wasn't totally consistent at the beginning, but over time everyone got on board, we did trainings, actually incorporated feedback consistently.

I hear SAFe hate all the time, and when I ask how things went, inevitably it turns out they never actually did SAFe. Somebody made them email a 10 week plan and used the acronym and that was it. If you're gonna do SAFe, do SAFe.