We always end up with waterfall

Easy, as somehow discussed on the article.

Beyond the IT department everyone else has very to low incentives to adopt "those crazy ideas from computer guys", they care about deadlines, roadmaps, when marketing campaigns can be organised, with what content, what should be on the contracts with business partners,...

Ever since we got those ideas around 2000, the best outcome if agile is adopted at all, is scrumfall as the article describes.

However I have also seen many companies go back to classical requirements documents, and all related processes, as if agile had never been in the building.

People tend to go too far in one direction and then later over-correct in the opposite direction. Waterfall model is too much, scrum is too much. The optimal approach is almost always in-between and yet, frustratingly, nobody advocates for balance and nuance.

Software development requires some planing and also some flexibility. One decade, companies think software architecture is the most important technical role in the universe, the next decade, the role barely even exists... What we need more of is common sense.

For people who worship capitalism as much as folks here do, a lot of you sure don't get business processes. Yes, you wind up having to plan things, because the rest of the business world runs on deadlines and contracts and milestones and deliverables. Agile is, God forbid, almost like being an artist or low, disgusted whisper liberal arts major...when done correctly, in that you're iterating and tinkering and shipping and ideally you eventually get to good software sometime.

Only the business world runs on quarterly results and shareholder value and being able to say "yes, we are shipping 10 great new features next quarter, we have a $20 million marketing campaign, new user acquisition campaign, outreach to lapsed users, and PR campaign all ready to go" gets you bonuses and increased stock prices and new investment rounds.

Saying a bunch of Agile gobbledygook gets you...a job as a product manager or lead but you still gotta hit those milestones

The question that you're missing is: Which works better? Which delivers more better software, more reliably?

Granted, the business world does run on quarterly results and shareholder value and being able to say ..., but you can say any damn thing that you like, only promising it doesn't guarantee that it will happen. Software development is always uncertain, the question is how best to tame that - ignore it or lean into it.

All things being equal, of course the the business world would prefer the most detailed predictable plan. But, they just aren't equal. Software development benefits greatly from short feedback loops. In all phases - from debugging to finding out what the users really need. That is antithetical to big upfront plans.

"The Internet brought agile, what will remote work bring?"

Interesting question. What are the companies doing that have been working remotely already years before the pandemic? How is e.g. Gitlab working? Would love to hear people's experience.

It's not like Agile cannot work with remote collaboration, just that waterfall is more suitable if people have a tendency to isolate and form silos.