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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

> We have fast changing application and we use scrum and sprints to fend off business people. Because one day they want one thing, next day 10 things more.

Then you are using Scrum to obfuscate a core communications problem in your company. Either the business people are clueless about what they want and are flailing around in a panic, or they are not able to communicate their needs to you properly, or you are unable to understand their real business requirements, or they insist on micromanaging every aspect of your product. Or some combination of these factors.

You should not have to "fend off" your professional colleagues, you should be able to have an adult conversation with your peers and frame requirements and expectations accordingly. If your company culture prevents this then that's what you need to fix, not further burden the team with the demands of Scrum.

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It's nice of you to write that and you aren't even wrong but what is he supposed to do about it? File a case to have the business people fired?

You're phrasing it as if OP is the problem but he isn't, at least not the most significant part about it. Have you ever been in an enterprise environment where people simply and subtly tell you to fuck off if you want to "have an adult conversation with your peers"?

Now you're stuck with the shitty situation and need to start fending idiots off because there is often ZERO interest to improve things like communication. It's often not a startup with 10 people where you can grab a coffee and go "Hey guys let's talk about our communication issues!".

These topics are highly political once a company is large enough and they are extremely rigid and hierarchical. Exceptions exist but they are, well, exceptions.

Sorry, but I felt this post was almost accusing OP of inaction when that's a pretty easy thing to say from the outside.

I’d like to double down on your defense of OP.

Communication overheard is an inherit trait of large organizations. To some degree we can improve this with digital technology, but it’s a fundamental problem.

If you need to rewire the communication pathways of 10 people, the complexity can be up to O(n^2) because you might need to make adjustments for how every individual is getting signal from other individuals. As organizations grow the old pathways of communication are less optimal, but it’s also more expensive to rewire communication. To some degree corporate communication overhead buys stability and consistency across the organization.

You should attempt to optimize communication with those nearest to you in a large workforce, but at a certain point all you can do is give feedback to corporate about the communication pain points. If you work in a large organization and you can optimize your local communications to be completely optimal you probably aren’t communicating with enough people to have a full impact on the organization.

I'm not accusing the OP of inaction: on the contrary, they are attempting to rectify the problem with Scrum, so they are trying to do something.

What I am saying is that using Scrum to paper over a dysfunctional organization merely adds more dysfunction. It's a bit like the old joke: you have a problem, you adopt XML as the solution, now you have two problems. If you have a dysfunctional organization, then you either fix that if it's in your power, grin and bear it if you can't, or leave if that's an option. You're not going to fix it with Scrum (or for that matter, Kanban or any other off-the-shelf process).

You’re offering criticisms of what OP is trying to do, but you have not offered an alternative. What is your solution?

Thus far, your position on this is too rigid and does not account for the spectrum of: org size, type, age, etc. It lacks maturity and awareness of the realities of many organizations.

If you’ve found a place where you can implement this stance: great! The vast majority of people are not in that position, and criticizing them for it is not a great look.

The vast majority of software engineers can’t change employer?

No, this is obviously not what I said. Nor is changing employers automatically better. There are (as I suspect you already know) a myriad of factors involved in choosing an employer and choosing to leave.

The implication that this is “the solution” is pretty naive.

Then you are using Scrum to obfuscate a core communications problem in your company.

No, they're using scrum to guarantee a minimum level of effective communication. Business people don't have to be "clueless" to be constantly shifting priorities: they are reacting to the day-to-day business realities of client requests and biz dev opportunities. They're acting professionally, and in good faith. But if the dev team constantly reacted to those shifting priorities, the constant context shifting would kill their productivity and morale. Scrum provides a minimal set of tools and practices to ensure stability for the dev team, so they aren't constantly in reaction mode and have space to think about the product and be proactive.

I'm constantly amazed by people who talk about the "burdens" of scrum, like it's a lot of work that wouldn't otherwise happen. Really? Let's look at all that "extra" work:

- talking to your teammates daily to share progress, but more importantly raise red flags if there are impediments

- demo-ing your work periodically to verify that the stuff the team says is done actually meets expectations

- periodically taking some time to design the software, maybe refactor stuff that isn't correctly modeled, and planning your work

And that's pretty much it. Do people really work in places where they don't do any of that stuff? They just wing it, test everything at the end, and hope for the best?

Agreed. Most of the complaints I read that aren’t just related to awful management are typically to the effect of “I’m being required to function as part of a larger organization instead of doing what I want.”

There are no perfect solutions to project management, and if you prefer to work in tiny organized communes without corporate direction then that is your prerogative. I’ll be right there with you. Otherwise, it sounds like some developers here are just annoyed that their team and departments don’t revolve around their individual desire to not be managed.

> Business people don't have to be "clueless" to be constantly shifting priorities: they are reacting to the day-to-day business realities of client requests and biz dev opportunities.

That makes the business people sound a lot like the guy in Office Space who takes the specs to the engineers. If they are just a secretary who will rapidly oscillate priorities based on what customer yelled the loudest yesterday that isn't very useful to the business. The purpose of a product team or anyone in that capacity is to try and understand client needs prior to the client actually having them, rapidly changing priorities is generally evidence of that not happening.

> If they are just a secretary who will rapidly oscillate priorities based on what customer yelled the loudest yesterday that isn't very useful to the business

This is a gross mischaracterization, and depends greatly on the industry, stage of the product, nature of the customer, etc. I've seen major organizations shift an entire 6-12 months of roadmap to cater to one or two key customers with unique requirements, just based on the sheer size of the revenue from the deal.

Re-prioritization happens for many reasons, and while it's absolutely true that rapidly shifting priorities can be a major red flag and may be extremely detrimental, it's also true that sometimes this is just the nature of the beast. And when that's the case, having a good business/product/whatever you label it layer to shield the engineering teams is critical.

> The purpose of a product team or anyone in that capacity is to try and understand client needs prior to the client actually having them, rapidly changing priorities is generally evidence of that not happening.

Again, this depends on the kind of software shop this is. If you're building the next social media platform, you have an entirely different set of problems and concerns from a behemoth enterprise software platform trying to beat the other behemoth for that next $30M deal.

Totally - you shouldn’t. But sometimes you have to use common tools and practices to protect your teams workload and manage the expectations of an often frustrated larger business.

Plus not everyone has the privilege of a good base experience, or the option to just find a better cultured company.

How do you solve it when you have Billy and Bob. Billy is working on customers X, Y, Z. Bob is working on customers C, F, G.

Billy and Bob want different things for different customers. Billie gets commission on solving stuff for his customers, Bob for his own. Both of them promise their customers everything next month.

Now you have 10 developers and Billie convinced 5 of them that building his things is important. Other 5 devs are convinced by Bob to work on his ideas. Developers are not informed about how much each customer is worth, as they don't need it for their jobs (just as Billie and Bob don't have any access to source code, databases and servers). Remember you need to have "least knowledge/privilige" principle because you don't inform all employees on all details of company deals (because I am writing about B2B products).

For me professional way is to have a product owner who listens to both of them, knows how much each customer is worth for the company, checks with the team how much each feature costs and makes priorities. You create a single line of communication and defined process. You communicate in a clear way what can be achieved when, well maybe with a bit of a slip here and there. Billie and Bob get one person to communicate with, get clear forecasts that then they can communicate back to the customers.

Maybe that is different if you have B2C products because then you don't have such scenario there.

Or there are just multiple stakeholders with differing needs.

The benefit of having a single PO is that they reconcile the competing priorities and the developers don't have to do it themselves.

All true but do you have any practical solution to dealing with incompetent micro-managing middle managers when you don’t have the power to fire them?

Yeah. I'm glad this person is not on my team. The whole attitude sounds toxic as fuck.

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