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

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

#51

Post by rawoke083600 »

js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

>that ideal software development is just a continuous production

This ! Can't agree more... Scrum always made me feel like a production-line-worker making shoes... No craft nor space to discovery/explore problem solving. Urg and all those damn meetings and pulling numbers out of thin air ! What a waste of time those meetings were !

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

#52

Post by fxtentacle »

js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

I remember we had a discussion about 10x developers a while ago and how some developers are perceived as moody divas.

My guess would be that the 10x-ers have are independent enough from any given employer that they can reject Scrum even if everyone else has to follow it. And later on, their ability to work on their own terms is what then makes them 10x more productive than the poor scrummers.

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

#53

Post by MattGaiser »

js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

> Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason)

This has benefits and downsides. One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload.

On the other, I agree. Why are we pulling estimates of effort out of thin air? Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen?

Planning could be far more accurate if we just got a proposed task list a day before planning.

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

#54

Post by Areading314 »

kevsim wrote: post #36

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 scru…

If you read his book, you'll see that he repeatedly drives the point home, that Scrum is not a set of pre-baked processes, but a philosophy around measurement, prioritizing, and continuous improvement. The cargo cult meetings and processes are more a product of the "Agile movement" that is championed by mediocre middle managers.

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

#55

Post by rawoke083600 »

onion2k wrote: post #18

Very productive individuals that don’t work as a team I refuse to have those people on my team. One person who's twice as productive as everyone else sounds great, but if that person's work doesn't fit well and makes everyone else's work harder it always been a net loss in my experience. I'd prefer my team works well together than have some "brilliant loner" join it.

Ja I've seen teams without them (10x, brilliant loner, call them what you want). The times the teams are without that sort of talent(just talking pure problem solving ability here)... was the times the teams, product and company was also just that. mediocre/not-inspiring/meh. And they weren't solving a hard problems !

If we were to take this to the extreme. Where do you slot in someone like Jeff Dean ? Are you going to sit there and make someone like Jeff Dean, play poker-scrum about how long the next "big research jump/product" will take ? Granted not everyone will have a Jeff Dean. But I would never wan't to work in place that is as boring as a place without someone like him.

Yea in my experience, scrum sucks for innovation !

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

#56

Post by js8 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #52
js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

I remember we had a discussion about 10x developers a while ago and how some developers are perceived as moody divas. My guess would be that the 10x-ers have are independent enough from any given employer that they can reject Scrum even if everyone else has to follow it. And later on, their ability to work on their own terms is what then makes them 10x more productive than the poor scrummers.

I am definitely a "moody diva", I think because daily standup in particular forces me to admit more failures than I would have to otherwise (you need to fail before you succeed). And it's ultimately pointless and more stressing for everyone, because lot of these failures get resolved the next day.

In some sense, standup is a nocebo, a mood killer for me. I am there, in the morning, ready for work, my mind firing up, geared towards working the problem, but no, I have talk and listen about something unrelated. It's like going to a movie and having to suffer the trailers for other movies first.

(There was also this funny psychological research that showed that when you tell someone you will do something, you're less likely (less motivated) to do it. Not sure if true, but if it is then standups alone have caused billions of loses in productivity.)

In any case, I think the discussion about individual productivity is somewhat sidetracking the core issues. What I wrote applies to the whole team as well. In my experience, the best design decisions come from individuals working alone, understanding the problem, and then these design decisions are vetted (and possibly changed) by everyone in an open discussion. This cycle can happen on almost any timescale, depending on the nature of the problem. So one doesn't need to be in an ivory tower for this to work.

Timeboxing as such is not a bad idea. But I think conflating it with "being done" is just wrong.

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

#57

Post by ponker »

onion2k wrote: post #18

Very productive individuals that don’t work as a team I refuse to have those people on my team. One person who's twice as productive as everyone else sounds great, but if that person's work doesn't fit well and makes everyone else's work harder it always been a net loss in my experience. I'd prefer my team works well together than have some "brilliant loner" join it.

I've seen my FAANG division manager use brilliant loners quite effectively by requiring them to be remote. They don't join meetings or really check in with anyone but every six months they pop up and say "I re-architected System X and now it can handle 10,000x as much traffic" or something like that.

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

#58

Post by js8 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #53
js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

> Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) This has benefits and downsides. One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload. On the other, I agree. Why are we pulling estimates of effort out of thin air? Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen? Planning…

> One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload.

I think that's a kind of waterfall strawman. In every other discipline, you would ask engineers for an estimate. It's insanity to do otherwise.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

kevsim wrote: post #32
onion2k wrote: post #18

Very productive individuals that don’t work as a team I refuse to have those people on my team. One person who's twice as productive as everyone else sounds great, but if that person's work doesn't fit well and makes everyone else's work harder it always been a net loss in my experience. I'd prefer my team works well together than have some "brilliant loner" join it.

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 ti…

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by remontoire »

js8 wrote: post #34

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 i…

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