I'm armchair at best, but I think scrum is a management and organizational process, something to help communicate upwards instead of something that is best for a team. That said, some companies and teams need the structure. They compare with Whatsapp, which seems to me like a small, dedicated, driven team with ownership and complete control over their own application. In my experience with Scrum, it was a product owner and management layer operating outside of the team, sending work downwards to the scrum teams while the scrum teams communicated progress and the like upwards. Less ownership, more oversight, etc. The scrum teams were implementation teams, there to do what they are told to do instead of owning a product. Cogs in a wheel, whose individual components (and the whole cog) could be replaced, shifted around and moved without the layer above really needing to worry about it.
How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
121–130 of 452 posts
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#122Shape Up: mentioned for a few venture-funded companies.
Has anyone here some experience with Shape Up? Love to hear your thoughts. I just read about it so far and would love to hear some real-life stories.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#123Name 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 corpor…
I’ve worked now at Facebook, tiktok, and snap. None of my teams used tickets so there are no points to track. Most of the time my tasks were just discussed with my team and main way you could track is by prs. How many points a task is worth is something I’ve only had to do for 1 job at a startup where we did follow scrum. I do occasionally give estimates but they also aren’t really tracked as they’re frequently not written down anywhere and just something I tell my teammates.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
SAFe is beautiful in that it is the ultimate expression of Enterprise Agile Cargoculting: all pretenses of agility are lost, there are ten different levels of decision making, and all responsibility is diffused in a confused mess of worker bees running around under an all-powerful and all-seeing LPM > Individual teams can use whatever they want to manage themselves (Kanban, Lean, Scrum, etc…up to the team) Except tha…
You have PTSD from a bastardized version of SAFe, based on your description.
One thing I've noticed with Scrum and SAFe are that all negative experiences are not _true_ scrum/safe. It seems entirely natural that processes will shift as team composition changes or the rules chafe. Once there's been drift from the canonical process there doesn't seem any way out of that except doubling down, possibly by buying more training.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#125> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…
I work in a "traditional company" and the gatekeepers were installed to keep developers from going insane. When we have too much information back and forth between business and engineering, the loudest complaints from the business side (where the $$$ comes from today and tomorrow) drowns out the team's and department's internal goals, which are usually much longer term (meaning the $$$ is in months or years, not next week).
I believe this is why the author noticed that certain types of companies had engineers say the product owner was one of the reasons they're more satisfied. From when I started at my role, my team went about 2 years without one, and then within months of having one, we have been much more productive and have managed to create much more immediate and future value for the company.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#126> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…
I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.
I have seen it more often that gatekeepers filtered user demands based on their own knowledge and not on technical feasibility or effort. So you are told that a user needs a certain thing in a certain way but when you talk directly to the user you learn that the user actually had a different need which you can fulfill in an easier way than the gatekeeper thought possible.
In general I think there is a huge advantage if developers know first hand how their product is being used and not through gatekeepers.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#127Usually in interviews I check if they use Jira in their day to day process. If they do, I don't join that company.
Why is Jira a deal breaker for you?
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with any system is that people try to enforce it, military style. In my previous job, we did scrum, but not too strict. We had two week cycles, not-too-strict deadlines (most of the time) etc. If I finished my task early, I was free to pick up tasks from the planned list, without having to get permission from my manager. We also didn't agonize over story points, retrospective etc. We did it light hearted…
> debating whether it is worth 5 points are 8 I'm baffled by this behavior. If you know it is the next most important thing, why do you care? What would it change in your behavior if it is a 5 vs and 8? If you are looking at a task that you would choose not to do if it were an 8 but choose to do if it were a 5, then you probably look for something that is more important to work on. I think you are right that much of…
I think there's value in that debate (within reason) even as a developer. If Alice thinks a task is worth 5, and Bob thinks it's worth 8, then there's a good chance one of them knows something the other does not. Is Bob aware of some hidden complexity that bumps it up 3 points? Or is Alice familiar with a convenient library that solves exactly that complexity? Planning poker is a convenient time to get that knowledge out into the open.
Again, this is all within reason, and if it takes 15 minutes on every ticket, the team should probably work on their communication skills.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#129The thing about Scrum is the observations and principles make sense, but then to sell it as a course they've turned it into very specific prescriptions. I went on a scrum course and the takeaway was basically that feedback is a big deal, and you should try to get some repeatedly and quickly. It's also common sense that you should have tasks written down somewhere, and that some of them are more important than others.…
A "scrum course" is to Scrum what a code boot camp is to programming. You're going to learn basics but you won't have the depth of knowledge to handle complexity in any form, nor how to answer questions about Scrum that inevitably are asked by leadership. There's a reason the Scrum leader (or master) role exists. It's supposed to be the person who has a depth of knowledge that goes beyond a simple "scrum course" and can guide an organization when complexity arises. Organizations rationalize why they don't need to hire someone into this role because a Scrum leader isn't a producing role. And they're right that Scrum leader isn't a producing role, it's a role that's supposed to make producing roles more efficient, a force multiplying role.
Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
#130I worked at a big tech for many years and my team never managed to get Scrum working properly. Every year my team commits a delivering certain product/features at a very specific date (some sort of launch event), so we have to know very early in the year what's all the work required and report periodically whether project is on track. The deadlines are also always on the tighter end. The flexibility of Scrum becomes…
You cannot get management buy-in to Scrum or most agile processes unless they can accept the agile manifesto principles. The whole idea that you can be agile while having delivery dates for things several months in advance is a nonsense. Agile is about doing what is important now, not doing what we thought was important a few months ago. The best you could probably hope for is Kanban or the never-ending backlog but s…
the idea that you can deliver a multi-month or multi-year project without ever looking past the next two week sprint is really misguided.