Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlandis | Hacker News Reader

> There have been a lot of times in other jobs where we'd have a slack in our schedule and I used the down time to make a change that was really necessary and took a minimal amount of time, mentioned it in a standup meeting, and got blasted for not working on our "commitments" for the "sprint" (even when I had nothing to do).

That doesn't really have anything to do with agile or scrum though. Just add a refactor/investigation task to the backlog for the sprint. Those types of activities should be justifiable too. If your team doesn't allow those types of tasks for some reason, that's more of a team problem than a problem with agile.

View on HN

"Justifiable" is the key word though. Why do I need to justify what I'm working on daily unless I'm not trusted? I mean, like most programmers, I have a four year computer science degree that was definitely not easy to obtain, I have like 10 years of experience, I've shown an understanding for prioritizing things that actually are important for the business, and they pay me a six figure salary for my expertise, so having to justify myself daily seems, frankly, insulting. I've worked in places where I didn't have to do that, and you know what? The sky didn't fall. Work still got done. (I would argue, more work, because people were more engaged since they felt a sense of ownership). We just had extra time in the day from fewer useless meetings, and a lot less politics from people trying to game the numbers they pull out of Jira and stuff like that.

This is a toxic attitude. Your 10 years of experience and 4 year education don't make you infallible. A high functioning team works closely, and that involves everyone's decisions being subject to scrutiny. If you can't justify your work, then it probably shouldn't get done. If you won't justify your work, then you don't deserve the six figures.

I never claimed to be infallible, and I'm happy to explain what I'm doing if someone asks, but ask yourself, how many other skilled highly educated professions are asked to provide such a humiliating measure of unnecessary transparency? (Hint: not most of them). Does your manager give you such transparency into what they're doing day to day? (Generally speaking: nope!) How do I know they're not just spending their afternoon's playing golf? (I don't: but I wouldn't work for them if I didn't think they were mature capable professionals).

Think of it this way, in relationships, business or otherwise, what's sub-communicated is just as important as what's explicitly communicated. Often it's more important. And what's communicated via most agile processes is that programmers are unimportant cogs with no business knowledge that can't be trusted to not stray from important tasks. I think that's ugly.

The problem is in your team or your corporate culture. Not agile or scrum as a whole.

On my team, agile is a process used among peers to coordinate. No one is a cog. No one is checking up on anyone. We keep each other aware of what's going on because you have to in order to coordinate and collaborate. My manager is just one voice among many on the team. He isn't tasked with monitoring my work because I don't need a babysitter.

I'm sorry that you work somewhere where you feel someone's monitoring or checking up on you. Where I work that kind of situation is called a Performance Improvement Plan. If you're not in that situation and are a highly productive individual, then your culture is broken and you should look for a different job.

But you're wrong that agile and scrum are at fault. If you used any other process, you'd have the same problem.

Well this is an aggregate opinion based on the last three places I've worked, mixed with a lot of conversations with peers at other places. It's certainly possible that I've just been unlucky and my colleagues have also been unlucky, but I would also point out that I've seen pretty much zero in the way of objective proof that agile actually improves anything, and a lot of subjective experience that agile doesn't actually benefit engineers. Frankly, I think it's up to the agile proponents to objectively demonstrate why this is better -- but 99% what I see is vague promises mixed with attempts at shaming people for "doing it wrong" when people say it doesn't work. (Not to mention the whole "waterfall" boogie man. As far as I can tell in the agilista world-view if you're not doing agile, you're 1970s IBM and you wear a blue suit to work every day)

Anecdotally, the last place I worked, I was on a small team that didn't really do agile. This was composed of some of the most competent, extremely smart people I've ever worked with that had decades of experience in the CAD field and had worked together for a very long time. We're talking people with like dual PhDs from very respected universities that have been working in the field for like 20 years; kept very sharp by going to C++ conferences, were very particular about testing and code reviews, and so on. I remember the corporate office tried to impose agile on these people, and after humoring it for about a month the whole thing was mercifully abandoned because everyone felt like it was ridiculous and it was slowing things down and causing a bunch of friction when some ridiculous consultant wanted us to do "planning poker". The only people that really wanted it in the first place were essentially remote project managers that were annoyed with these uppity engineers that thought they knew better (which frankly: they did; 20 years writing CAD software and you're going to learn a thing or two, whereas the project managers were pretty much just dabblers -- and when they couldn't convince people to do what they wanted by merits of their argument, they just wanted to install "process" to essentially strong-arm people into doing their will)

This made me think of the book "checklist manifesto" which argues that surgeons should be forced to follow a checklist to make sure they don't miss anything.

Part of the argument is that often the more junior members of them team know the surgeons are making mistakes, but there's no way for them to point this out without being bullied. Anectodes include the wrong leg being cut off while members of the medical team know it's the wrong one, but darent risk their career to mention it.

I'm not sure how this relates to your comment, except your line about other professions reminded me.

I would think the equivalent of that kind of thing in the software world would be things like automated testing and code reviews. (IE, processes that recognize people are fallible and provides mitigation). I think scrum is a different beast from those kinds of things (especially given that there's very little evidence for scrum's supposed effectiveness)

When a lawyer or consultant bills a client he has to enumerate how each hour is spent. As an engineer in another field I submitted all my calculations for peer review, and all my drawings had to be signed by a manager.

When you buy a grocery product you get a list of every ingredient and all the nutritional info.

It's nothing more than transparency and accountability. The one paying the money wants and deserves to know what it's for.

Your example is much closer to a code or design review than a daily scrum meeting. I don't think he's against design meetings or reviews.

Also, software development is quite a bit different than other engineering disciplines, at least at the application development level.

You may be saying the same things. It seems like the person you’re replying to emphasized _daily_ justification of work, which does seem unnecessary to me.

Being open to having to justify anything that's called into question, and being capable of doing so, and being happy to... are different from forced to.

Yikes... this is a toxic attitude. I'd expect that kind of scrutiny in a hard-hat and lunch pail assembly line job, not a purportedly professional career.

Professional doctors, lawyers , and plumbers are all accountable for their time.

Being a professional means having the self confidence and emotional maturity to justify one's work whenever it is called into question. In fact, one should do the due diligence (including cost benefit analysis) to be able to answer the question with ease.

If you can't answer "why are you working on this?" easily then you're not doing your job. And if you resent being asked the question, then you either are self employed or you forgot who pays your salary.

Yeah, not once have I been involved with a project or team attempting some forced process where an objective benefit to cost analysis was done on the process itself.

I sort of agree with you. A lot of "justification" ends up being such a frustrating waste if time. Usually necessary though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com