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

If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base.

Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857

> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

> Working software over comprehensive documentation

> Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

> Responding to change over following a plan

How many big companies do you know that are organizationally capable of valuing individuals over processes and tools, or responding to change over following a plan? Almost all big companies have the opposite value system on those two points, imposed from the top down by the CEO (with the exception that they do value individuals if those individuals are senior management). Many big companies also have incentive structures that strongly countermand the other points, too. Comprehensive documentation is crucial ammunition for redirecting the blame for bad decisions, for example. (Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674388: "we not only need very thorough clarity on what feature development will yield the greatest returns, but also deniability that we had good reason for doing what we were doing if it turns south.")

A perfect example of using agile rhetoric without agile practices comes from today's post about what tech managers do—"standup" meetings where people don't stand up! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677250 This results in the meetings lasting half an hour, doubling or tripling their cost per participant, even before you grapple with the increased number of participants that likely results!

I have my doubts about how effective Scrum could be even if practiced perfectly, but Jeff Sutherland, Mike Beedle, and Ken Schwaber are among the authors of the original Agile Manifesto (not just the signatories!), so at least they endorse those four core values and tried to make Scrum reflect them. So I think it's justifiable to say that if you value processes and tools over individuals and interactions, or following a plan over responding to change, you're not really doing Scrum, or any other agile process.

Creating a sports car, or paying someone else to do so, is a lot more expensive than just stealing one, if you can get away with it. Robbing a bank is cheaper than building a bank. If you can do this kind of thing at scale, well, to the extent that you only have to spend money on capturing value instead of both creating it and capturing it, you'll be vastly more profitable than the "suckers" you're capturing it from.

Same thing is true of Fecebutt: creating the mountains of data their users go to Fecebutt for (restaurant recommendations, family photos, thoughtful essays, sexy bikini shots, social-network data) took perhaps a trillion person-hours, but Fecebutt gained control over it at a cost of under a trillion dollars. Ballparking, they had to spend less than 5% of the cost of those assets to acquire control over them. Now it can leverage them to organize genocides, rig elections, and extort photos of government IDs and use them to out promiscuous women and closeted gay people—not to mention selling you tens of billions of dollars a year of stuff you don't need through advertising.

It's hard for positive-social-value companies like Shopify and Datadog to compete on salaries with that 20:1 value multiplier. The fact that they manage it at all is not only a testament to the enormous value they're producing but also the enormous destruction of value implicit in Facebook's business model.