Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think "Agile" is responsible, but it is a supporting character here for sure. Let me give a little history from my perspective. I got involved in that movement before the word "Agile" existed; I was really interested in the ideas coming from the Extreme Programming folks and had tried them out on a small project in 2000. All of the people I met early on really wanted to do software well; the question was how…
> Why, then, did it become the predominant way to organize software projects? Because it feels good to managers. For most of the project, it gives them a feeling of control and competence. That feeling is false, as it just delays all of the real-world feedback until near the nominal end. But they can perform confidence and competence to their boss, which is vital in managerialist [5] organizations. Waterfall is not j…
And I'd add that at the end of the waterfall cycle, metrics often (and incorrectly) show that the workers failed. After all, they said they were 95% done just a bit ago, and now they're suddenly not done. It's very easy to shift blame to them.
As contrast, a lot of the effective Agile techniques don't actually fix problems; they just shorten the feedback loops so problems surface sooner. That's part of why fake Agile won out; managers didn't adopt any of the bits that would make them feel uncomfortable or expose the very real problems with how they run things.