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

I tend to agree, though as an engineering manager, the brilliant loner poses an interesting challenge. Can you actually work to turn that person into a team player, see the value of collaboration and transparency, etc. Sometimes there's some insecurity or simply lack of understand behind their behaviors, and a behavioral shift is actually possible.

That being said, I've tried this a number of times and most of the time it doesn't work out.

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 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. It's more like mathematics, where it takes time to discover that things are actually rather easy (this quote comes to mind https://micromath.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/andrew-wiles-on-d...).

Of course, if you look at the project from the longer time perspective, it can appear as continuous production of improvements. But it has a kind of quantum nature, if you decrease the scale of time, you will see less continuity and more discrete bursts of code production. There is something like uncertainty principle that on certain scale, it's pointless to try to predict things, because making the correct prediction (which is needed at least to define thing DONE) will take as long as doing the thing in the first place.

I don't consider myself special, but it is possible that Scrum ruins great minds because they seek conceptual clarity (we sometimes humbly call it "lack of technical debt"). I am not sure how to make that work with Scrum. Perhaps if everything was done three times, punctuated by a team discussion, each time with shorter code.

Second thing that I dislike the most about Scrum is that it threw away (or at least "conveniently" renamed) pretty much everything that was ever known about project management. Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) are the biggest loss. (I think it comes from the fact they actually realized the quantum nature of development is a problem.) To me, that is a huge red flag that it is, in fact, a snake oil.

P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let's have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed.

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 scrum. I was pretty shocked. Then he explained that scrum didn't fit well with their team and the way they worked best together, whereas on some other teams they were really happy with scrum. Made me realize that's there's no one size fits all process for software teams. Some of these "pre-baked" processes can help teams depending on their composition and maturity, but teams/companies really need to find the way of working that works for them.

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 player' - I am inspired. When Microsoft announces another ground breaking product - I forget all about the mediocre music and art created by small groups of difficult people.

When I compare Steve Jobs and his lunatic behaviour to Tim Cook, I am reminded that getting along clearly leads to better outcomes.

It is corporate culture of getting along that inspires me. It is people who think like you.

That's an insightful concise description of "agile" experience.

As an anecdote, I have an acquaintance who is a psychologist in silicon valley and he has mentioned he frequently works with patients suffering from mental health issues related to being subject to "agile" at work. I wish someone would do a proper study on this topic.

Personally, agile hasn't driven me to depression but it has made me target roles that avoid it at all cost. Life is too short and precious to suffer through a detailed status report meeting every.single.day.