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Comment by binaryapparatus | Hacker News Reader

Agile in almost any form is there because we, as a programmers, allowed HR 'professionals' to imagine what would it be to run our job. They have no idea what our job is but they certainly make sure to be needed even if they are not.

In parallel universe they are on the same space ship with telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, jingle writers and accountants.

And before anybody tells me how rude I am I want to clarify I have been extremely nice and understanding.

Agile is in almost any form just waste of time. Wannabe mangers or HR professionals are parasitic foreign body in almost any IT related profession. But they talk better than we do.

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Agile can be used in such a way that it gets management off the developers backs and empowers the developers to take their own decisions about how to plan their work and their time and to control how feature requests end up in their personal to do list (i.e. the feature request has to wait until the next sprint).

Things that help are:

1. Having a project manager with at least several other projects to manage (discourages micromanagement).

2. The project manager should also be good at defending the dev team from distractions by triaging incoming requests into urgent bug fixes vs. waits until the next sprint planning meeting.

3. Having a product owner who does not act as a manager but as a consultant on a day-to-day basis (the dev team has to however appreciate that the producer owner is the person they are developing the software for). Ideally the product owner should be available but with some other work to be getting on with.

4. Having a professional development team that are more focused on delivering a product than building a CV/blog.

The worst thing about agile is zero autonomy and zero ability to make decisions and be accountable/responsible for them. You never even get the feeling that you achieved or at least did something. And managers were not the biggest problem. Fellow developers with strong micromanaging tendencies were.

The Agile Manifesto was written by programmers for programmers. Never forget the principles, even as the reality has been taken over by cargo-cult MBAs:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

* Working software over comprehensive documentation

* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

* Responding to change over following a plan

Yes, that all sounds great, but "agile" has morphed into things like SaFE in the real world.

Just want to point out your core argument is incorrect. Agile is a result of software engineers' decisions and ideas. Not HR professionals.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

agile just became a buzzword clueless people started using. we need a new word

Agreed - In my experience, there are a small group of people who use it as originally defined... and for everyone else, it means, "Not waterfall."

i find that "everyone else" means they do whatever by "they are agile" (meaning nothing)

It usually means micro-waterfalls on an atomized feature basis.

Accountants are pretty important once you have a sufficiently large organisation to manage.

is there anything more cliche than the jaded software engineer rant about how great they are and how bad everyone else is? In even tech. companies code is probably less than 25% of the overall picture of a successful company. get over yourself.

You are (1) generalizing and (2) responding to a rant with a rant.

Even if your imaginary 25% were true, sales people can't sell what the company doesn't have (a product). Or at least they shouldn't (sadly I've seen sales people sell thin air many times).

depends on whether we're talking Agile(tm) the package sold by Professional Management Consultants or agile, the handful of complementary practices and processes that can help a team run itself more efficiently.

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