Why don’t software development methodologies work? (2014)

Here's the deal:

Skilled, knowledgeable programmers with strong work ethics will produce well-crafted software in a reasonable amount of time.

Unskilled, unfocused developers will take an excessively long time to produce crappy, buggy, unmaintainable software.

That's the starting point. Methodologies will not magically produce above-average results from below-average programmers. But the evangelists of various methodologies never seem to acknowledge that. They claim that if you follow their recipe, you'll get stellar results, and if you didn't, well, then, you didn't follow the recipe correctly.