A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management • Hacker News Board

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#11

Post by fsk » Sun, Mar 15, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #10

michaelochurch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfall is a straw man. Waterfall and agile are two possibilities within business-driven engineering (a euphemism for "you just code what we tell you to do, we make the decisions"). I don't think Scrum is that terrible for junior engineers, but it provides no exit. It's the terminal juniorness of it that has me bothered. I'm 31 years old and have been programming for almost a decade and I'm too old to work on "user…

How many people have you managed? How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable? I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine. Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

That is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?

I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only spending a couple hours a week on it.

They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad they dropped it. Having a daily 30 minute status report meeting that never started on time was killing almost an hour of productivity per day.

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#12

Post by dasmoth » Sun, Mar 15, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #10

michaelochurch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfall is a straw man. Waterfall and agile are two possibilities within business-driven engineering (a euphemism for "you just code what we tell you to do, we make the decisions"). I don't think Scrum is that terrible for junior engineers, but it provides no exit. It's the terminal juniorness of it that has me bothered. I'm 31 years old and have been programming for almost a decade and I'm too old to work on "user…

How many people have you managed? How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable? I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine. Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric.

Can't we judge people by results?

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#13

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Mar 15, 2015, 7:41 PM UTC

dasmoth wrote: post #12

maxerickson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have you managed? How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable? I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine. Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric. Can't we judge people by results?

I'm not judging anyone, I'm asking if a conclusion is informed by a specific type of information.

There's perhaps some phrasing problems with the question, but I think if you are talking about managers being a useless component in organizations it might be good to have >0 years cumulative experience managing people.

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#14

Post by michaelochurch » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:52 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #13

dasmoth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric. Can't we judge people by results?

I'm not judging anyone, I'm asking if a conclusion is informed by a specific type of information. There's perhaps some phrasing problems with the question, but I think if you are talking about managers being a useless component in organizations it might be good to have >0 years cumulative experience managing people.

Where did I say that managers were "a useless component in organizations"?

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#15

Post by maxerickson » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:04 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #14

maxerickson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not judging anyone, I'm asking if a conclusion is informed by a specific type of information. There's perhaps some phrasing problems with the question, but I think if you are talking about managers being a useless component in organizations it might be good to have >0 years cumulative experience managing people.

Where did I say that managers were "a useless component in organizations"?

You're right, that's probably not a fair summary.

Maybe go ahead and write a more fair one (I think you can probably see well enough what I'm getting at) and address that?

Re: A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management

#16

Post by sheepmullet » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

fsk wrote: post #11

maxerickson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have you managed? How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable? I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine. Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

That is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum? I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only spending a couple hours a week on it. They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad…

"If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?"

As if it was that simple. My company is 80% waterfall and yet none of our agile competitors can keep up. Is that because waterfall is better in my industry? No, it's because there is a lot more to success than picking the right development model.