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Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

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Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#101

Post by mathw »

jyriand wrote: post #91

What i don’t like most about scrum is the sprints. Doesn’t matter if it’s one or two weeks long, we never have a successful sprint, the velocity chart looks like random numbers, and we spend hours on debating what the story points really mean. Sprints are artificial deadlines that don’t really make any sense, developers don’t care, business people don’t care. A project i could complete in a month will take at least t…

I raised a similar idea with my team a while back and we stopped doing sprints as an experiment.

We haven't restarted. It has been mentioned a small number of times, but the consensus is always that we don't think it will help. For our team, for what we do, how our work arrives and the nature of the systems we're maintaining and developing, sprints were just artificial lines in the sand.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#102

Post by danjac »

While there may be success stories out there (and usual arguments apply for No True Scotsman), a company that proudly states "we're a scrum shop" is at this point most likely shorthand/signal for "we love meetings and micromanagement" and is to be avoided if possible.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#103

Post by irrational »

js8 wrote: post #56
fxtentacle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember we had a discussion about 10x developers a while ago and how some developers are perceived as moody divas. My guess would be that the 10x-ers have are independent enough from any given employer that they can reject Scrum even if everyone else has to follow it. And later on, their ability to work on their own terms is what then makes them 10x more productive than the poor scrummers.

I am definitely a "moody diva", I think because daily standup in particular forces me to admit more failures than I would have to otherwise (you need to fail before you succeed). And it's ultimately pointless and more stressing for everyone, because lot of these failures get resolved the next day. In some sense, standup is a nocebo, a mood killer for me. I am there, in the morning, ready for work, my mind firing up,…

> and then these design decisions are vetted (and possibly changed) by everyone in an open discussion

But don’t you dare try to have an open discussion at a stand up meeting. The moment a useful discussion starts the scrum “master” will tell you to schedule a separate meeting to discuss it. Honestly, that just kills the flow of communication. I have never scheduled a separate meeting to continue the discussion. We just end standup, go back to our desks, and don’t talk to anyone.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#104

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #79
alexashka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. When Michael Jordan was an asshole to everybody, I hear they refused to have him on The Bulls and won multiple championships without him. Remember how The Beatles decided it's not worth it and didn't make any music? What a great decision by them, nobody would remember them long after they're gone anyway. When I look at giant corps with their HR departments and filtering out of anyone who isn't a 'team pla…

You're getting downvoted but I think you make a valid point. Brilliant loners can be really useful for a business. They're the visionaries. They're the ones who change industries. But imagine having Steve Jobs on your team, and trying to get the best out of him within the constraints of a project. It'd be impossible. Brilliant people like the ones you've listed need to be the ones leading. That's why I don't want the…

[deleted]

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#105

Post by sergeykish »

aliante wrote: post #88
jay_kyburz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. Many of us do believe this. Absolutely. >It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because it takes time and experimentation to come up with the correct way to approach a problem, but if you do it right, you save yourself an incredible amount of time. But on the flip side, if you get it wrong you waste an inc…

I am fine with the small improvements to code part, but I at least want an idea of where I am going. Small improvements to solve the problem? Sure. But I at least want an idea of what the entire problem is, not just the two weeks of problem shards I am given.

I have seen project made three turns based on users feedback until it found niche. SCRUM has not denied our vision but made it possible to continuously roll out to tighten feedback loop. Something else wrong in your case. In SCRUM you should be able to voice your concerns, to work with Product Owner.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#106

Post by danjac »

Areading314 wrote: post #54
kevsim wrote: post #36

I interviewed a long time ago at a med tech company in Boston where Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of scrum, was the CTO (I believe). I had recently been through scrum master training at my current job and was quite keen to see how scrum was applied in the place where the guy who invented it was working. I asked my first interviewer how they used scrum on their team and his answer was that they didn't use scru…

If you read his book, you'll see that he repeatedly drives the point home, that Scrum is not a set of pre-baked processes, but a philosophy around measurement, prioritizing, and continuous improvement. The cargo cult meetings and processes are more a product of the "Agile movement" that is championed by mediocre middle managers.

That's the problem though: any philosophy that cannot be implemented by a "mediocre middle manager" (i.e. most managers in most companies) is doomed to fail. And if it requires an "amazing" manager to succeed, the question is whether it's down to the philosophy or the manager.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#107

Post by watwut »

waschl wrote: post #28
watwut wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with scrum was that it makes issues around bad team dynamic, pressures and weird contracts worst. Basically, it makes it impossible for individual to react to them and defend against worst consequences. When it is good, scrum powerlesness does not matter, maybe. But when it goes bad, it does.

I would agree that Scrum makes bad dynamics more transparent, yes. I would not agree that it generally makes bad dynamics significantly worse. This may happen and it’s certainly often claimed, but that is not what I can confirm from my experience.

I did not said more transparent. I said harder to deal with and harder to solve.

Those are fundamentally different things.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#108

Post by danjac »

mattmanser wrote: post #78
alexashka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. When Michael Jordan was an asshole to everybody, I hear they refused to have him on The Bulls and won multiple championships without him. Remember how The Beatles decided it's not worth it and didn't make any music? What a great decision by them, nobody would remember them long after they're gone anyway. When I look at giant corps with their HR departments and filtering out of anyone who isn't a 'team pla…

Beatles/music analogy rather backfires, no-one remembers Paul McCartney albums or Freddie Mercury solo projects. I could spend years listing bands that have split up, the lead singer or guitarist tries to go solo, utterly fails, band goes for reunion tour 10 years later. It's a known band cliché. A large software project is a lot of hard work of basically a bunch of people trying to write a story together. It's diffe…

Counterexamples: John Lennon, Sting, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Phil Collins, Lou Reed...

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#109

Post by sergeykish »

MattGaiser wrote: post #53
js8 wrote: post #34

We use Scrum at work and I have to say, I am pretty annoyed by it. I think it is fundamentally rooted in the idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. And from this come all its micromanagement failure modes (which there are plenty). I think in reality, SW development done right is nothing like that. It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because i…

> Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) This has benefits and downsides. One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload. On the other, I agree. Why are we pulling estimates of effort out of thin air? Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen? Planning…

It is to inform Product Owner. Quickly estimate with "trivial", "small", "medium", "big" and move on. Wrong estimate should not hurt. Managers are not allowed.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#110

Post by watwut »

riffraff wrote: post #39
watwut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Scrum leads to resignation for many people, because it takes away control out of individual and insists on everything being collective. So your personal options to improve or make decision becomes severely limited. Some people like it, because it allowed them to push themselves on the rest of the team. But people who dont thrive in such constant dominance conflict end up resentful and helpless.

what control do you feel is taken away from individuals? I mean, you discuss tickets with the rest of your team, but that doesn't seem such a big loss of freedom.

All the control and all the autonomy I would say. There is nothing I would be responsible for where I can make own decision and have them right or wrong.

In the teams where I liked to work, I felt control over order in which I do tasks and general shape of something I was responsible for. So I could make my own decisions, decisions that would be really mine.

So when there was mess or something was late, it was my fault. I was not due to other people forcing me do things their way and I did not had to fight about every single detail, just because college happen to be anxious or control freak.

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