Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxawaytoolong | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced the main point of scrum is simply so that everyone has to be in the office at 9 or 10 everyday.

It's exactly this. Management loves to impose scrum (I've yet to hear being implemented from a bottom-up rather than a top-down initiative) as it's an excuse to micromanage: daily status reports, extra meetings, fixed working hours. That said, this may be a benefit for people who aren't passionate or interested in their work and want to clock out at five. That's fine, but that's not for me: my work is tied very closely to my personal identity, I put in many night and weekend hacking sessions and (voluntarily) work more than the usual 45-50 hours a week. At home, when not working, I frequently hack on personal projects and read technical books (indirectly benefiting my employer as well).

I chose to work for a place that judges me by what I produce, not by when I come in to the office. The beauty of being a software engineer in Silicon Valley (and I imagine this is the same in other technology hubs such as Seattle, Rte-128 and Austin) is that I get this choice. Here's a prediction: companies that micromanage in this fashion simply won't attract the required engineering talent. All else equal, engineers will choose a place that gives them more flexibility. The market seems to confirm this. Here's an interesting thread on hours engineers work at Facebook on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-have-fixed-working-hours

Note: I'm not opposed and frequently make use of "lower-case-A agile" i.e., unit testing, re-factoring, iterative development but they are just common-sense tools; much like editors, IDEs and programming languages they are frequently treated as objects of religious devotion, overlooking the fact they may be right for some (in some organizations, even most) projects, but inappropriate for others.

Yes. There used to be a manager who would schedule a meeting at 10am everyday with me to force me to come in. I was like fuck this, if I have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night, I should have a little leeway in coming a bit late the next morning. I don't want someone to babysit my time.

> have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night

Just don't do that then. In at 9, out at 5. No problem, life goes on.

Never work in a startup?

What difference does that make to the price of cheese?

I once worked at amazon. They hire managers who can barely operate computers and can't code. They like to keep engineers on call.

So for instance, on more than one occasion I was forced to wake up and fix a chronic problem caused by another team at 3-4am,and would show up at 10:15 and miss he scrum.

Got chewed out for being 15 minutes late on only 5 hours sleep.

Worst company ever.

Point out that in most agile books, people should not work overtime. :)

Do the agile books make disclaimer that they are describing fantasyland?

Nope. They are just citing studies (or anecdotes), that in the medium term you can't get more effective work out of people by overtime.

That's also probably what annoys me about it the most :-/

What about dialing in?

Trying to communicate with a mix of people who are A) standing too far from the conference phone or B) driving to work and thus drowned out by road noise, not to mention paying attention to either you or the road but not both -- is a waste of time. Plus, people who are not dialed in can't read body language and so they end up talking too long because they can't see how bored everyone else is but nobody wants to be the one to tell them to shut up.

And that everyone needs to have something to say about what they've done. In other words, they have to have done something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com