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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#241

Post by replyifuagree »

amai wrote: post #239

Scrum and agile always fails if your company has a finance department. The finance department is never agile an will demand numbers every quarter. They don't care about your sprints. They want a plan for the next quarter and don't care about your sprints or your t-shirt estimates of your Kanban backlog. Unfortunately since they have the money the needs of the finance departments always win over all agile processes yo…

Yep, if the CFO has this kind of power the R&D pipeline is essentially being run by an accountant.

Remember when wall street was complaining about how Bezos was running the company? If an accountant was in charge Amazon would have been quarter packing to please wall street, and would be much smaller/out of business.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#242

Post by replyifuagree »

Spiwux wrote: post #112

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 giv…

Yep, Scrum can't fix bad management!

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#243

Post by replyifuagree »

telltruth wrote: post #60

Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during…

>The truth is Scrum was never a magic bullet and it is downright harmful for many projects. It is useful for highly predictable projects where research component is negligible, for example, CRUD websites AND where you are stuck with unmotivated tier-3 talent who failed to get job at insurance company.

Nailed it.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#244

Post by [deleted] »

ggm wrote: post #41

Scrum puts "feel good" limits around the unknown qualities of time-to-complete and "divide and conquer" You still don't really know when it will be ready, but you now have talking points with management about a) whats been done and b) how complex it is. This builds belief: Belief there will be a solution, and Belief you can find it. Nothing not said better by others here, but I say this as a party who was dragged kic…

[deleted]

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#246

Post by replyifuagree »

If an engineering organization is doing the equivalent of laying on the floor and kicking and screaming that they can't do anything, where signs of this include:

* Split up into multiple teams under different kingdom building directors/VPs

* More time is spent defending Jira SLAs and deflecting blame than actually solving problems

* Dev teams under different managers have an adversarial relationship

If the above is true, just adding a standup for a given initiative that includes all of the team members and just normal human behavior of exposure builds a little trust and collaboration is a miracle pill!

Albeit it's a 'miracle' pill that takes the org from laying on the ground kicking and screaming to slowly making code changes that no customer wants - but comparatively it looks like a miracle to legacy management!

The real solution is to fire 3/4 of the management staff and take the next 3 years to rebuild an effective organization. <-- however, this doesn't sell like a SCRUM Miracle Pill™

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#247

Post by blobbers »

100% scrum might work in very simple projects.

Once things become difficult, challenging, or new, it's garbage.

Projects that are taking more story points than expected are "behind schedule". No, your shitty schedule is the problem, because you were unable to estimate the difficulty of doing something new. And that's the hard thing about hard things. Maybe it will be done in 3 days or maybe you'll need 2 weeks, but you can't do that with very difficult things.

Scrum is an attempt to label Parkinson's Law: that a task will expand to fit the time it is allocated in the schedule.

With people that need to be micromanaged, and tasks that you know how to do but take time, scrum can work. This is because it basically gives you a way to measure whether you believe a junior developer is performing up to the level of expected, rather than slacking off or sandbagging.

Personally, I hate scrum.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#248

Post by theshrike79 »

majikaja wrote: post #224
theshrike79 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I'm not talking about Silicon Valley, it's an anomaly within an anomaly when it comes to hiring. I'm pretty sure that short of John Carmack or a legend of that caliber I can't justify paying 1M to _anyone_ to the people making the budget. Of course you can grab a half dozen superstars if you pay them a million per head, but they'll also leave the second the job stops being 100% interesting. That's…

In Japan they are struggling even to find juniors because of the declining population.

Yea, they f'd up a whole generation because of TRADITION.

There was a good video about this but the tl;dw is about this:

In Japan you're supposed to get hired straight out of school and then you'll stay with The Company until you retire.

The same tradition implies that The Company will _never_ fire people.

Japan faced some very hard times. Companies couldn't afford to hire new people because they couldn't fire the older people.

A whole generation never really entered the workforce because they never got the experience. Now they're mostly doing odd jobs and for the same reason never got married and had children.

Oopsie.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#249

Post by theshrike79 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #231
theshrike79 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember is that every superstar used to be a mid-tier coder. This is not an YA novel where talent is decided at an arbitrary time and that's the lane you'll hold until you retire. =) When you hire people straight off school or "mid tier" people, you can help them grow to be better and reap the benefits. If everyone will just hire the "top tier talent", their prices will inflate and the pool of top tier…

There’s a pretty big difference between carefully seeding up and coming talent and deliberately hiring 40 mids like some folks are suggesting here to build their scrum teams or whatever. There aint going to be no growth here.

If you can determine an "up and coming talent" from a "mid" during a 1 hour job interview, you really should start up a HR consulting company. =)

The only way to figure it out is to hire the ones that seem good and see who blossoms.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#250

Post by seattle_spring »

ivraatiems wrote: post #132
RayFrankenstein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testimony from dozens upon dozens of developers that think that scrum is useless, toxic bullshit: https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README....

Data from lots of people who think Scrum is great and love it: > https://www.parabol.co/resources/agile-statistics/#agile-eff... It's the Internet. You can find a few thousand (or few million) people who love or hate anything. What's your point?

> 78% of Scrum practitioners would recommend the framework to colleagues, friends, or other professionals. (Source: Scrum Alliance)

It’s a joke that writes itself.

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