Scrum Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrum Sucks

#101

Post by eevo » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:31 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #52

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

> everyone meeting This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings. Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup) I think it's emblematic of a few things about the founder/cofounder/lead: 1) they are an egomaniac and just needs to see everyone reporting in, 2) they don't…

Time spent with the team ebbs and flows depending on complexity of projects, where in the roadmap you are, seniority of the dev team, and more.

The agile manifesto was too abstract in it's original state, and folks who needed a rigid framework created capital A agile in order to adapt it to their cog in the machine role.

For my team of 6 in a ~20-25 person (remote) startup, we have a 30 minute dev meeting in the morning, and a 15 minute full team meeting where the agenda rotates daily around departments. I quite like it honestly, remote can be lonely and isolating otherwise.

Generally I think it's important to structure team responsibility around who ultimately needs to make the decision (although they need to consult others and get team buy-in). And hire people you trust to make the decisions. Then the meetings become about problem solving and getting through the work, rather than performance art and politics.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#102

Post by thr0way120 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:31 PM UTC

most of the discussions on SCRUM come from people running scrum or commenting on scrum as employees.

scrum exists because companies are paying salaries for engineers and dont want them sort of milling about doing random sh*t all day in an aimless fashion.

my experience is most engineers are incredibly passive and just want a paycheck and are barely productive.

except management is often completely clueless / non-technical / not interested in technical topics / view technical stuff as being "beneath them" sort of like taking out the garbage or cleaning the windows.

solution is to create a pseudo-science pretend self-governed democracy.

let the engineers manage themselves! genius!

It is a zero-interest rate management cop-out for badly led highly mediocre companies with a lot of dead weight.

make the over-hired engineers engage in a lot of activity so they seem to be making progress.

scrum needs to be looked at in context of past economic conditions and the structure of the market. lots and lots and lots of engineers work in these environments of non-technical management who just want to see "activity that looks like progress" and dont have any intention of getting more engaged or involved than that.

compare to startups where the ceo is often an engineer and doing the work themselves

I think scrum is going to die a horribl death in a high interest rate environment with AI.

the mediocre overpaid middle in tech is going to get a very hard re-evaluation

so is mediocre middle management

all of that needs to go away

mediocre middle management and scrum and over-hired, bloated organizations are all phenomenon of low-interest rates.

in a tight environment, I hope that talent is what matters and all that gets the chop.

I think scrum will be categorized with "sitting in cubicles" as a productivity method in the near future.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#103

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:31 PM UTC

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #56

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

Just by switching from Scrum to Kanban one can improve progress a lot. For being two very similar pull based systems the difference in effectiveness is just incredible.

This is what we've done of late. Massive improvement. Much lower time commitment and we get a good (enough...not perfect) view of the metrics we really need to focus on.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#104

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

lucidguppy wrote: post #47

Holy shit people - scrum does not work without a fundamental understanding of the theory of constraints. If you're burndown chart isn't burning down, something is blocking your team. A manager finds out what is blocking the team and works on it. If your team has a bunch of tickets in process- then your WIP is high - that's bad. Someone taking on more tickets to just get to work should be pulling the equivalent of an…

[deleted]

Re: Scrum Sucks

#105

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #52

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

> everyone meeting This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings. Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup) I think it's emblematic of a few things about the founder/cofounder/lead: 1) they are an egomaniac and just needs to see everyone reporting in, 2) they don't…

> Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup)

It was even worse than this: The Scrum operators wanted an engineer from every team they interacted with to also join their meetings.

So if a project made an API request to another project, they'd insist on pulling an engineer from that team into their weekly or daily meetings.

I had daily meetings with 10 people, half of whom might be engineers from other teams who didn't need to be there.

Meetings became so useless that everyone stopped listening until their name was called so they could work through meetings. Then every time someone's name was called, we had to spend 5 minutes recovering the last 5 minutes of the meeting to bring them up to speed.

The inefficiency was out of control, but the worst part was that some people thrived on this level of inefficiency: Lack of progress meant the empire builders could argue for more headcount, too many meetings meant the Program Management department could hire more program managers. It was like a case study in adverse incentives.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#106

Post by iLoveOncall » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

We did a planning exercise every sprint at work to see how much time people had to work on features once you removed meetings and other ceremonies, RTO, holidays, oncall, etc.

We were tracking that per employee.

Everything was fine for a few months and then I added a "total" column next to each row and it became apparent that we were spending close to 60% of our sprint on non-development related tasks. On 45 work-days per sprint we had something like 19 days for features.

Needless to say it shocked my manager. He's not against change thankfully but we're still evaluating what could be better alternatives.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#107

Post by torginus » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

Never in my life have I encountered anyone from the engineering side who spoke positively about scrum. It's always the consultants and scrum masters and their ilk who push the agenda.

Never have I ever heard about any story about agile making things better.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#108

Post by unethical_ban » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

_ea1k wrote: post #54

"Way of work should be defined at a team level by its people, not by the company." - This is basically the origin of scrum. Essentially every problem ascribed to scrum is its departure from this origin story. Scrum is about making each team work better, but somehow it turned into the same weird top-down imposed structure that it was supposed to replace. 2 week sprints are mandatory for all teams? They all have to sta…

Ha! At my old employer they used "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe).

About a dozen teams of developers and operations people got together once a QUARTER to determine what big epics/objectives to complete, and then develop stories and estimates (points) for those stories and roughly which sprint they would fall into within the "iteration", as the quarter was called.

Every team on the same sprint schedule. Fibbonaci story rankings across the org. Product owner and scrum master would be shared between several teams, IIRC.

And of course, middle management observing the aggregate amount of work estimated vs. completed every "iteration".

Re: Scrum Sucks

#109

Post by nso95 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

lucidguppy wrote: post #47

Holy shit people - scrum does not work without a fundamental understanding of the theory of constraints. If you're burndown chart isn't burning down, something is blocking your team. A manager finds out what is blocking the team and works on it. If your team has a bunch of tickets in process- then your WIP is high - that's bad. Someone taking on more tickets to just get to work should be pulling the equivalent of an…

Aren't story points (estimates) usually part of scrum?

Re: Scrum Sucks

#110

Post by robterrell » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

Cpoll wrote: post #82

robterrell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Scrum proponents will rush in and tell me that we were doing it wrong The "no true scrumsman" fallacy at work.

It's not a "no true Scotsman" (scrumsman :)) if the counterexample is in fact not a Scotsman. Whether it is or isn't depends on your feelings on scrum, but it's not a fallacy to try to defend the initial definition before it was co-opted by anyone with an Agile cert. "Hammers suck at driving nails." "You're holding a rubber mallet." "No true Scotsman!"

You make a good point! But scrum as we know it today is not Agile:

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

Processes and tools (i.e. Jira, sprint planning, retrospectives, etc.) dominate all implementations of Scrum I've seen.