Live data from Hacker News

Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

151–160 of 462 posts

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#151
post #149
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That similarity is superficial. It is observing that no ideology perfectly survives implementation - which is true, but there is no alternative option so it isn't a useful observation. We don't have any successful countries that use communist ideologies because central planning is destructive and the abolishment of private property is catastrophic. Calling for communism is tantamount to wishing for death and destruct…

>So scrum as an ideology seems to be net-successful even if implemented wrong. How do you get to this conclusion? I haven't seen any implementation of scrum that didn't slow down development speed, due to unnecessary meetings and micromanagement. This might be that I've only seen 8 or so "implementations". If there's any evidence that scrum is a key net positive I'd like to see it at this point. Kanban IME can work w…

The company isn't optimising for fastest development speed. They typically optimise for low variance, consistent value in support of existing processes.

Interestingly, if you want highest value then for software it is best to use a high-variance strategy. But that is never going to come out of a company large enough to need professional management because it is pointless to manage large numbers of people to a high variance strategy. Google is an interesting case study where they tried that and, by and large, flopped. It makes more sense to spin out separate companies VC-style. I assume programmers occasionally quit companies, build something and sell it back to the company at extortionate prices which would be the right way to do fast development.

That isn't to say professional management is bad - large companies need it. It is just a fact that large companies aren't good at development and something like scrum elevates them from total failure to unproductive but fumbling in a good direction.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#152
post #131

What I dislike about SCRUM specifically is that if you're having a rough week at home, recovering from illness or you just have things to do outside of work, you can't really just have an easy week and make up for it later on. It's a kind of constant grind and we always have a way of "filling up" our sprint. If we don't meet our target, it always feels like a fail. I know it shouldn't feel like that but it's human na…

The sprint goal is a team target. If you're sick that shouldn't endanger the sprint goal because anyone in the team can pick up any work. Of course in mediocre or low-performing teams that's almost never the case but still not the fault of a product framework

This seems like a disingenuous answer to me - the rest of the team will take up the slack? And if they can't they must be a low-performing team?

The OP may have some things wrong, but the 'constant grind' aspect of scrum sprints is spot on, there is no slack.

Add to that the 'radical transparency' aspect of scrum. That works great among a tight-knit team, but it can be insidious and actually self-defeating when certain types of manager get involved and weaponize it.

I'm sure there are many people who love programming, but hate being a programmer as a job, and to some extent that has always been true, but scrum seems in many cases to make it much, much worse, IMHO. The attitude displayed here is exactly the problem.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#153

I refuse to stress about it. If I don’t get the things done in the time allotted by the points, oh well. If I don’t get them done by the end of the sprint, oh well. And, while my manager might bring it up in one-on-ones, I’ve never seen any consequences from not stressing about trying to meet artificial deadlines.

Same here. I have become stressed about deadlines that were actual deadlines imposed by external dependencies (e.g. API deprecation) or stakeholders (e.g. launch of feature needs to be coordinated with efforts in other departments), but never about "deadlines" I've just had a hand in making up out of thin air myself during sprint planning.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#154

nobody has ever done "waterfall", it's a strawman created to explain why traditional project management doesn't work in software development. The fact that the article starts with "in the good old days of waterfall" takes away every expectation that I'll read anything intelligent in the article, I believe this post doesn't deserve your time and definitely doesn't deserve mine.

Early in my career (mid-90s) I worked for a defense contractor working on avionics for the F-22 and for GE working on a real-time automation OS. Both used waterfall exclusively. The defense contractor had a multi-year plan with monthly deadlines that could not be missed and the same was true for GE but the deadlines were more delivery based. At GE there were 400 engineers working on the overall project and we had a 40 foot long wall where the GANTT chart for the project, generated by MS Project, was taped to the wall - it was about 4 feet high.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#156
post #151
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So scrum as an ideology seems to be net-successful even if implemented wrong. How do you get to this conclusion? I haven't seen any implementation of scrum that didn't slow down development speed, due to unnecessary meetings and micromanagement. This might be that I've only seen 8 or so "implementations". If there's any evidence that scrum is a key net positive I'd like to see it at this point. Kanban IME can work w…

The company isn't optimising for fastest development speed. They typically optimise for low variance, consistent value in support of existing processes. Interestingly, if you want highest value then for software it is best to use a high-variance strategy. But that is never going to come out of a company large enough to need professional management because it is pointless to manage large numbers of people to a high va…

>scrum elevates them from total failure to unproductive but fumbling in a good direction.

Where's the evidence for this? I kind of agree on big corporate not being able to achieve great development speed. But they had a system before scrum, and I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planes fall from the sky far less than, say, some agile/scrum-based web app shitting itself constantly, which happens all the time. Maybe waterfall has its place.

Eh. Waterfall adds risk to iterative approaches, not value. Wait 3 years to do integration testing because that’s what the schedule says. The smart projects get better quality and use iterative models. Additionally, there are other iterative models than Scrum. That's pretty much the worst one out there and its only value is to inexperienced teams needing training wheels or overbearing management that doesn't trust th…

Good example is SpaceX vs. all the others

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#158
I was less stressed when doing scrum. When a new VP came in and tossed it out, he didn’t replace it with anything. The void has been filled with chaos, where our priorities change based on who the last person to speak was. I’ll take scrum over chaos any day.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#159

I've learned to hate software process. If you have team sizes set sanely and empower devs to do what they need to do in order to accomplish the goal, they'll be fine without the management overhead of arbitrarily imposed productivity flow. Agile et al, along with 99% of the features in ticketing systems, exist to make managers feel like they are justifying their paycheck. If you are a manager and this makes you angry…

Just keep in mind that a lot of people equate Agile with Scrum, which is incorrect. Agile is about exactly what you said: empowering devs to get shit done. None of the extra “keep managers happy” crap that Scrum introduces is in any way covered by the Agile manifesto.

1) scrum is even more democratized than agile

2) no matter what "agile" was supposed to mean - managers anyway interpret it as devs having to be very agile for them all the time ...

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#160
post #110
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long.

> They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long. I'm Head of Development in a midsized SaaS company. Another team's PM went for paternity leave and I stepped in to lean in on any needs. I discovered that the team of 10 people were using close to an hour a day on stand-up. A culture thing, apparently. I joined he stand-up a few times, slimmed the scope of the conversation to roughly 10-15 minutes. This worked for…

Why is the PM still employed?

Hasn’t the team all quit?

Post reply on HN