Scrum disempowers developers

I get it, but it's now how I do my best work, proxying questions and discussions through a gatekeeper.

I'm told I work too slow, dive too deep. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do just 80%, "good enough".

When I was a kid, I published shareware. After getting a few 3:00am wake up calls from irate customers, I said "never again". I spent 15 years designing, engineering away technical support calls. It mostly worked. Later on... When my team(s) burned a CD, we rarely had to issue patches, hot fixes.

Customers loved us.

I thought that was the pinnacle of human achievement.

Now, I feel like I'm still fighting battles over things no one cares about any more.

That's one way to break down the set of tasks/concerns you've identified, sure - but only one. I don't think that the industry as a whole accepts your categorisation into three, or even your paradigm for which tasks do and don't need addressing in this way.

You're coming across as far more ideological than the thing you're attacking, assuming that your particular breakdown must be the canonical one when it simply doesn't have a level of industry acceptance that would justify that.

That's not true at all. The whole point of organizing projects around scrums is precisely that there is no well defined goal nor can one exist. What exists are the client's needs, and those needs do and will change frequently and radically as projects move on.

Therefore, the classical project structure followed by grey beards does not make any sense in software development. What does make sense is to acknowledge that requirements specified by the client do and will change, and it's better to adapt to the client's needs and get everyone involved in the project. Therefore, projects are organized in small bite-size units of work that gradually contribute to implement a product based on the feedback received by all stakeholders, and that these small bite-size units of work are implemented in small time windows. These units of work are short-lived and the amount of effort invested in planning is limited to the goals set forth for that unit of work, which need to be manageable.

What are you saying here? I was questioning your original statement that I mistakenly thought Scrum should fix bad management practices. I do not think that, and no part of that is a criticism of Scrum. The criticisms are other things. Your follow-up just seems confused about your own parent comment.

> "There we need evidence that it is actually so. Haven't seen any convincing data for that."

I've seen a lot of that evidence, in threads like this, in the original post, and also empirical evidence in my own work experience with Scrum as both a developer and a manager across several organizations of various ages and sizes. I'm not asking anyone to take my word for it though. I'm happy to look into randomized controlled studies about effectiveness of engineering teams with or without Scrum. Much like with open-plan offices, I'm confident the evidence shows zero efficacy (despite huge planning overhead costs and time wasters) for using Scrum even after controlling for whatever confounders you think are the scapegoats for Scrum's badness.

It's a good thing we don't have to worry about what you've seen as our standard of evidence for discussing this topic, and we're free to make useful written arguments and discussions, like the linked post in the OP, that also appeal to important qualitative aspects of the problem, like how developers are disempowered, or how management always misuses Scrum-related progress tracking data.

> "The sentence before claimed something else: Scrum makes it worse, quickly."

This is pedantic to the point of making me suspect you're just trolling to argue with anyone who doesn't like Scrum. Yes, indeed, two different sentences claimed two separate but compatible and related things. Shocking!

> "True, but that's not the case. Scrum can be used with advantage in average to good companies"

You're demanding evidence but then just making equally unsubstantiated claims in the opposite direction. What's to say that instances of well-delivered software you've seen weren't done in spite of Scrum rather than because of it. That would need evidence too. And particularly because Scrum requires a far-reaching and globally prescriptive implementation (e.g. do team planning exactly this way and exactly on this timeline, estimate your workload exactly like this, use exactly these meetings, etc.) it strongly suggests the burden of proof is on Scrum proponents to explain why this is better than customized, individually and organically developed workflows that teams use because they are demonstrably working for them.

> "Scrum is really on a tiny framework addressing a few basic things in small team organization."

This is abject nonsense. Even a framework that did nothing but prescribe that teams must do some form of estimation every X weeks would be hugely overbearing bloatware. Scrum goes so much further, prescribing a huge overhead of different meetings, a bunch of specific named positions that have to have specific responsibilities in teams, and overbearing principles that superficially look small in writing but really are huge bureaucratic nightmares, like mandating that all teams should be cross-functional, which is totally disconnected from business realities in many cases, especially for teams whose sole business value is highly specialized domain area.

> "Personally I'd rather work in a company willing to learn how to successfully develop software in some reproduceable way."

This presumes that there always exists some "reproducible way", and that it is one-size-fits-all for the a whole company. You're just denying the premise that customized, situation-specific or team-specific workflows could be the right way.

It's fine if you want to deny that claim as a personal preference or opinion, but you're just taking that as your own assumption, and then tacitly basing various claims about the superiority of Scrum on this built-in, hidden assumption.