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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

> Hopefully you have good managers (and high level ICs)

Looks at Jira and weeps.

So many of the popular management techniques look at the output of well-trained, highly experienced and very motivated teams and think that if they can just replicate the outward characteristics of those teams, they'll get the productivity as well. Needless to say, the same practices with recent bootcamp graduates suffering under JIRA-inspired micromanagement from a manager who has zero training except "being a developer for three years" will not have the same output. It's cargo culting at its finest.

I agree. Looking at the "final practices" of a well-oiled team and just picking them up without any of the context about "why" they work "for that team" is half the reason no good idea (Agile, microservices, Jira) stays that way in software industry.

As an anecdote of this, I'm in an R&D department of a small company. I'm basically a team of one with an intern (which is its own challenge because he likes to be somewhat micromanaged). My manager just recently was finally convinced to shift from a waterfall module to something agile, except now it's just becoming a micromanagement tool... for a team of essentially 1.5. We had a conversation the other day in which I was given to understand that if we thought some documentation was finished, but had to go back and make a tweak with no more than 15 minutes spent on it, we should be creating a ticket in Jira to do so. I'm currently cursing all the people who've sold agile because this is insanity (imo). Feels good to get that off my chest haha.

I have multiple juniors but you just described my life and it makes me want to literally scream.

There's few things that are more mind boggling to me than a very rigid interpretation/implementation of agile.

That's literally not how it works too. Agile has a robust and rigid structure that you then pull from and adapt to make your team and processes better. Few teams have the same implementation. It's important to understand the full scale of agile practices and tools but do not try to do it 100%, that's not the idea at all.

Just sounds like overkill for a team of 1.5.

I'll take that manager over one that has 20 years of experience but hasn't touched a line of code for the last 10.

I’ve only had one manager that far removed from coding and he was amazing. What pitfalls are you referring to?

A manager that has experience with development? I wish.

Our team of four (frontend development for our two main products) has a "team leader" (not included in the team), two "product managers" (one for each product) and a "director of IT" (our actual manager), none of which have a background in software development. They all have a background in our product's domain.

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