231–240 of 339 posts
I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience. One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have…
I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience. One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have…
any notion that engineers should not be on customer calls, or driving engineering specs is the opposite of what i would consider the best implementation of agile.
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The reasons behind the creation of Scrum and the reasons behind the adoption of Scrum are different. Plus, most implementations of Scrum are bullshit. Scrum does not recognize the role of a "project manager". There's the product owner, the scrum master and the development team. That's all. The scrum master only exists to guarantee the process is followed. The scrum master is just a scrum evangelist, not a real leader…
And product owner and scrum master need to be highly skilled people with a lot of responsibility instead of whoever has nothing better to do at the moment as is so often the case. I still can’t figure out how line managers and architects fit into a well run scrum environment. Seems they would be losing a lot of power.
You can read the official Scrum guide here, it's a few pages long:
https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...
I think Scrum exists only to expand the adoption of Scrum. That is at least the reason behind the role of "Scrum master".
By maximizing adoption, the authors can personally benefit and become rich and famous.
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Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to run the business as general problem solvers. The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry of "scrum c…
Keep in mind that Agile (using the term loosely) was invented by software consultants who wanted to maximize the value they provided to the business they worked with. It’s a formalization of the ideas to make them more “acceptable” to execs and the decision makers (who care about such things). When applied to in house engineering teams, it is largely ineffective if it doesn’t come with the same kind of freedom that h…
It's regretful that it caught on so well and has (incorrectly) evolved into a concrete process in most places rather than an ideology.
I suspect another important part of the story here is that SV companies are more selective in their hiring. Part of the reason SV engineers use their extra freedom well is because they're better at what they do.
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Sure, but Le Creuset will never describe themselves as "a software business"... (And if they did, I'd immediately be looking for a different cookware supplier.)
Ah yeah I don't think asking if they are a "software business" is actually a good question. But I'd still be wary of working for them if their software engineers were in IT.
No focus on a structured product definition and leaving it to engineers to 'figure it out' does not bode well for the end user or business itself. This is a real experience in a FAANG company - we were developing a new product in enterprise space targeted to small enterprise IT admins who may not be highly trained or experienced. One of tiny feature was the ability to download and self manage security certificates (u…
A subtlety complex feature took a couple sprints to iterate on stakeholder feedback and fully define the business need. The story doesn't seem that bad to me.