Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

> Work with honest, intelligent people

I'll let you know when I find this communist utopia.

Well the parent made sort of a case for why being reasonable is part of being intelligent, and your response was to claim there was no correlation without an argument.

I happen to believe that reasonableness is part of being intelligent, by the following criteria:

1. when you are reasonable you do not make unreasonable demands that will just be troublesome and cause workflow issues because in the end they are unachievable.

2. a reasonable person will be able to determine what other people are capable of in given situations, and be able to structure things in such a way that other people can perform to best meet expectations.

3. the root of reasonable is reason, a reasonable person can be reasoned with because they possess the quality of reason, in most of the history of philosophy if you do not possess the ability to reason you are an idiot.

Agile seems to have ended up as a way for PMs to report upward to senior managers who also need to report upward.

You can see why. These people have to decide what will be worked on out of all the potential things that can be worked on. Someone has to make that decision. Will this feature make us money? What about that bit of work that doesn't add a feature but reduces resource costs? What about tech debt that I'm told is building up and slowing the ability to deliver features?

I'm not a senior manager, but ultimately someone up the chain is responsible for the company surviving and making money and paying our salaries. They are just like you and I, trying to make decisions based on what little information that can glean. So part of that is "what will this cost and how much will it be worth" vs "what will that other thing cost and how much will it be worth".

To that end, they need some way to estimate this. They latched on to agile as it was being promoted by tech as a way to do this. Whose fault is that?

And so with that came all the frequent estimations, are we on track, rituals, etc. Some people don't believe this should naturally follow. I agree. But somehow all those rituals have become part of the cult.

We abondanded scrum. We abandoned refinements and estimation of stories and story points etc. Now we meet with a PM once a month formally and as a team perform a t-shirt size estimate on where we are. Otherwise we update her as frequently as she asks (which isn't often) or we want. This gives power to us but because of that we're conscientious and make sure to inform her timeously when things are looking sketchy or whatever. Yes, we still have to give "estimates", because ultimately, senior management want to make decisions, but it is otherwise quite lightweight.

It is so liberating.

Its tricky to get credit when your skills are x10 or higher compared to your team. 2 companies ago, a team of 40 engineers took 4 years and $29M to do a generation product update. The next company I worked for took $1M 5 engineers and 2 years (product from scratch). My current company I did the whole thing myself in 14 months (@ < $0.5M), basically on autopilot. Unfortunately, the stakeholders are unaware that they got enormous value by being lucky of hiring the right person for the project. And I still fight management/budget constraits and hot headedness. Almost enough to drive me to next employer.

This is kind of a problem with preventive ethics in general. It seems to me that given two bad choices, the best option is actually neither - that is, to prevent the choice from being necessary. To use the common example of the trolley problem, the best answer isn’t to choose one option or another, it’s to prevent the trolley from being about to run someone over in the first place.

Unfortunately the visibility of these non-events means that their heroes go unnoticed. Noticing them would require a fundamental reorganization of how we perceive time and the future.