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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?

#71

Post by bosswipe »

fergie wrote: post #41

(The linked article is a piece of content marketing and not the reflections of an individual expert in the field.) Typically for this type of article the merits of "Scrum" are debated without Scrum first being defined, thereby making any reasonable appraisal impossible, and inviting a "your doing it wrong" conclusion. At this point I am genuinely unsure whether this is some sort of master-level content-marketing trol…

It is blog spam that rips the content from the decent stackexchange discussion here https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4104...

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

#72

Post by WalterBright »

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.

You just gotta trust that your top guys know what they're doing and let them do it.

It's how Lockheed let Kelly Johnson run the Skunkworks however he wanted to. Johnson delivered the impossible again and again, and Lockheed was smart enough to not interfere.

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

#74

Post by augustk »

remontoire wrote: post #60
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…

what does YADIW mean?

YADIW = You Are Doing It Wrong.

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

#75

Post by jevgeni »

andi999 wrote: post #49
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.

Actually the brilliant loner should be the norm (to have one), not the exception. If you believe in the 20:80 rule, that 20% of the people to 80% of the work. This rule doesnt sound so bad but actually (lets take these numbers as strict and not as a probability distribution). It means your top perfomer are 16 times more productive than the lower performers. Lets say you have a team of 10 people doing 100 work units.…

I'd agree with that, but it doesn't require that productive people are "loners". Best programmers I know are brilliant in communicating with people, setting standards, and so forth. Even if they sometime crank out a library or two on their own over morning coffee.

What is way more toxic, are people who consider themselves brilliant loners, because they've just implemented a web server using only Python's list comprehensions. And that is surely evidence of their unbridled genius. You know, people who are decent enough programmers, but are so egocentric in their work, that it borders on being inconsiderate.

For example, I used to work in a team where we wrote a lot of Python. We were three and one guy out of us considered himself above PEP-8 (he was good on the SW subject matter and was tight with the manager, so that went on unchecked). For example, all indents were done with 2 spaces. Meaning when some of us had to fix or change his code we had to fight our editors/IDEs. We ended up autopeping his files by default and ignoring any complaints.

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

#76

Post by jariel »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #21

In the one place I saw Scrum work really well it wasn't because of scrum we succeeded it was the amazingly talent team that groked their goals and understand how to build software well. The complete lack of an enforcer manager was a huge win, being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering, that worked really well. They executed well despite s…

"being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering,"

Lucky you however, letting 'raw' Engineers interface with customers is usually a disaster. Engineers build tech, the company builds products, and they are very, very different things. A lot of pieces in there - support, training, docs, price, risk, leverage, IP, know-how, relationship management, legality, confidentiality.

Experienced Engineers who have a lot of exposure to Product, Sales etc. can do this, there's usually a role there for a highly technical person to support sales.

If it were only a matter of 'the customer saying we need XYZ and Engineers doing that' then great, but it's almost never that.

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

#77

Post by js8 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #61
MattGaiser wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Planning could be far more accurate if we just got a proposed task list a day before planning. Why don't you work that in to your process. It's called Agile for a reason.

Why don't they put it into Agile books? They're called books for a reason.

Snark aside, that's the difficulty. The fix for everything in Agile is - instead of adopting some sensible practice (that could actually have been discussed in academic literature), have an argument about this with your team members, maybe they will get it.

It's a return to medieval times, where all the expertise was just the experience of the master.

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

#78

Post by mattmanser »

alexashka wrote: post #38
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 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 pla…

Beatles/music analogy rather backfires, no-one remembers Paul McCartney albums or Freddie Mercury solo projects.

I could spend years listing bands that have split up, the lead singer or guitarist tries to go solo, utterly fails, band goes for reunion tour 10 years later. It's a known band cliché.

A large software project is a lot of hard work of basically a bunch of people trying to write a story together. It's different to sport. One asshole pulling in a completely different direction is enough to drag everyone down.

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

#79

Post by onion2k »

alexashka wrote: post #38
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 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 pla…

You're getting downvoted but I think you make a valid point. Brilliant loners can be really useful for a business. They're the visionaries. They're the ones who change industries.

But imagine having Steve Jobs on your team, and trying to get the best out of him within the constraints of a project. It'd be impossible. Brilliant people like the ones you've listed need to be the ones leading. That's why I don't want them on my team.

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

#80

Post by jariel »

js8 wrote: post #56
fxtentacle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

1) Communicating is part of the job 2) Don't think about it in terms of 'failure'. You're just doing work. Sometimes the route is direct, sometimes it's not. 3) 'Time boxing' really has to be done, because products are not made in a vacuum. Time is money and it's a huge constraint. So everything really does have to be boxed up and parameterized by 'time' in the most reasonable means possible that doesn't screw everything up.
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