Scrum is a cancer • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#111

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:52 AM UTC

jdougan wrote: post #56

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #14

From Peopleware: “In the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study [from the University of New South Wales]…they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others…Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (‘Just wake me up when you’re done.’) had the highest productivity of all.” I read 20+ books on management and leader…

While I too despise Scrum, the causation could be runming the other way: the Bosses that have a better team could be more likely to let them run without major pressure.

The people who implement Scrum are insecure managers. They don't understand the development process, don't trust their staff to just get on with it, and need constant reassurance that their project/product is making progress.

So it would have to be both: the devs are good and don't need hand-holding, and the manager is able to deal with the lack of transparency that "it'll be done when it's done" comes with.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#112

Post by Spiwux » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:52 AM UTC

I'm going to get blasted for this, but you *are* doing scrum wrong. Scrum was invented by engineers to defend themselves against incompetent middle managers. The moment you let management take the process over and warp it you are already doing it wrong.

Story points and sprints are a *self-calibrating* tool that will give you an advance warning (nicely visualized in burn-down charts) if an estimate you might have given a middle manager will be missed.

You do not "decide" how many points fit in a sprint, you just work at a sustainable pace and *measure* how many points fit in a sprint.

Nearly every single point in that tweet just screams bad management and bad engineers without any agency.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#113

Post by gedy » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:52 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #101

gedy wrote: post #43

I agree it's rarely "done right", but I've been in career long enough that waterfall was still common early in career and horrible crunch time targeting some date at end of 9-12 months projects was inevitable - Scrum was a total breath of fresh air back in 2005-2006 and saved my sanity. Basically we'd ask mgmt "what do you want next?" and they had to fuck off for the next 4 weeks while devs, ux, QA worked with no cha…

"pushing devs to overcommit to each sprint" Yeah, that's definitely not Scrum like you said. The whole point is that the team promises to deliver features during a sprint and won't overcommit, they might deliver extra if they have extra time. If your sprints continuously fail to deliver, then you need to decrease the team's velocity.

Yeah it was really messed up - their "velocity tracking" was so they could make sure devs committed to at least as many points as the last sprint, even if they didn't finish the last sprint.. I only lasted there 4 months before I quit.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#114

Post by touisteur » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:53 AM UTC

nivertech wrote: post #104

mwint wrote: post #46

I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37134050 > Not everybody knows that, but Scrum was invented to manage a team of dysfunctional COBOL programmers at a bank, not for product-led tech companies, and certainly not for startups. > If you're mostly hiring juniors, low-skilled, unpassionate, unable to work autonomously without constant handlholding, reactive instead of proactive people, then you'll certainly need some m…

I'm also wondering whether using Scrum somehow makes your team become this dysfunctional COBOL programmer team...

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#115

Post by hereforcomments » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #13

Interesting phenomenon happens at my place which is scrum + Safe. Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints, so if we finish our work with 2 days left the manager asks not to start anything new. The process is a performance within a performance, literally getting told NOT to do more work. This is what happens when you have chart-oriented-development (particularly jira's toxic charts). Y…

I can totally relate. We are not told not to do more work but at sprint planning if someone thinks a ticket would spill over then they should add it only to next sprint. So we do less work just to not spill over.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#116

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 5:59 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #13

Interesting phenomenon happens at my place which is scrum + Safe. Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints, so if we finish our work with 2 days left the manager asks not to start anything new. The process is a performance within a performance, literally getting told NOT to do more work. This is what happens when you have chart-oriented-development (particularly jira's toxic charts). Y…

This. I moved from being the Main Tech Guy at a startup to being a backend engineer at a mature company running Scrum. I was amazed by how little work anyone did at the mature company. People obviously doing f-all during the day. If we finished our sprint 3 days early then we just pretended to be working (what is the point in having a standup every day when there are no tickets to work on?).

It was painful. I constantly felt that I should be working, because I was being paid decent money. But there was nothing to do, and no-one wanted me to do anything. I couldn't focus on a side project because I felt so guilty about taking their money and not doing anything.

We adopted Mob Programming. Five senior engineers on one call writing one piece of code. Or rather, one of us teaching the manager some Golang while he spent 4 hours doing a ticket that should have taken 1 hour. No stakeholders present because none of them wanted to waste a day watching us work.

Such a waste of time and talent.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#117

Post by beebeepka » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 6:00 AM UTC

tasubotadas wrote: post #93

beardedwizard wrote: post #67

I would have guessed more HN readers would attempt to understand the desired outcomes, how the implementation attempts to achieve them, then take the good from the bad as a source of constant improvement. The tone on this thread has that jaded and defeatest "management sucks" attitude that I find most often in the least productive engineers regardless of how they work.

The guys here come to the scrum retrospectives, stay silent the entire time, and then complain that scrum sucks.

Or maybe they have tried speaking out, only to be chewed and digested for daring to raise their voice. Life is not black and white

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#118

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 6:00 AM UTC

Camisa wrote: post #62

zug_zug wrote: post #13

Interesting phenomenon happens at my place which is scrum + Safe. Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints, so if we finish our work with 2 days left the manager asks not to start anything new. The process is a performance within a performance, literally getting told NOT to do more work. This is what happens when you have chart-oriented-development (particularly jira's toxic charts). Y…

Great time to tackle some tech debt

Not if you can't work on anything without a ticket, and you can't add a ticket to the current sprint.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#119

Post by lowbloodsugar » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

mwint wrote: post #46

I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…

99.9% of “Scrum” you’ll come across in the wild is cargo cult. People performing the ceremonies with no fucking idea why, in the hope that the giant eagles will come from the sky bringing gifts.

Scrum was created to help good developers communicate with management. But the problem is that management has all the power and couldn’t give a shit. If the management was qualified to “get it” you probably wouldn’t need it.

So yeah, if you’re using Scrum, you’re probably going to fail: whatever the reason that you’re doing scrum? That’s why you’re gonna fail.

Scrum is a fantastic canary.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#120

Post by travisgriggs » Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

mwint wrote: post #46

I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…

Ok, this totally resonates. What I want to know is how I find a place to hang out with those 5 other devs.

I’ve had that “team of six motivated” come together twice organically during my career. But it never seems to last. People move on, the company gets wind of the success and either normalizes it out, or attempts to try and distribute and harvest. If I could figure out the recipe to reliably locate or create that sort of team, I think I’d be very well off.