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Comment by archeantus | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed this read. I’ve been grinding for so long in the huge corporation version of agile that I don’t even know what is what anymore.

It was refreshing to hear their take on project managers, as it matches how I’ve been feeling recently. They schedule 7 checkpoint meetings per week and I’ve given up on attending, I just can’t do it anymore.

I hope that we can move past agile into a new world that is free of the baggage and process of yesteryear. Even if the core principles are the same, let’s call it something different so we can start fresh and impress upper management.

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Agile should include retrospectives, and retrospectives should allow your team to change anything within the process as you need.

In fact, all agile needs is good retrospectives, and all the rest you can decide there.

IN my experience, the same two or three people speak up in retrospectives… and no one else, ever.

I guess you are one of those?

In that case get the two others with you and decide a new rule: nobody leaves the retrospective before they've spoken.

Warning: might backfire, one team I worked with scheduled meetings right before lunch so they wouldn't stretch out.

It backfired: these meetings continued into our lunch every single time until I think I or someone else started just walking out as lunch started.

Then you might have an inexperienced manager or moderator. All it takes is "Hey John, I didn't hear you in the discussion yet. What are your thoughts?". "If there was 1 thing we should improve, what do you think it should be?". Stuff like that. I know even then it's sometimes hard, but at least you should try pulling things out of them.

> Then you might have an inexperienced manager or moderator.

More likely you have people who are paid to do some workload which they are generally happy with. They aren't going to be motivated into doing more by accident, especially through their own action. This is the vast majority of people in the world, so good luck countering that momentum over the long term.

Effective software project management is an interesting and hard problem, granted, so many people are interested in how to tackle it. I get it.

What I see is that "agile" criticisms are really criticisms of it's inefficacy in giving employers more for their dollar from the employee perspective. I don't see why I should get too invested in minimizing my relative value.

Agile assumes people are intrinsically motivated to do good work. (This is called “theory Y” management.) It doesn’t work if people have to be extrinsically motivated (“theory X”).

If you have a bunch of people who are just doing the minimum they’re paid to do, with no passion and excitement for the work itself or their team, you either need a different method or different people.

This is true. Being agile is, and should be, an ever changing process. You are never done.

It’s like shaping a system of people. I think of it as 50% of the development endeavor at larger shops.

Retros are used to identify ”technical organization debt” starting to build up, in a way.

This is how revolutionary Marxism functions. Nobody knows what the hell Marx wrote in those books, or what any of it means, but it cannot be argued in communist regimes that there is a system in place, and that the vanguard knows whats best. Replace Marxism with Agile, communist regimes with corporation, and vanguard with management, and you have the recipe for soulless employment.

People (read: Twitter users)[0] have discussed the parallels between Maoist/Marxist theory and both Agile and extreme programming—albeit less fever-dreamy

[0] A couple of said theory tweets, from memory

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1352450003231506432

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1323758677099270147

But this is a joke... right? I hope?

Side note: I have never actually read anything written by Mao before. That stuff is a very unsettling combination of stone-cold and unhinged. Maybe it's just because we know the "full" history now, maybe it's just the phrasing of the translation. Yikes.

Reading Mao himself is imperative to understanding why China went through the troubles it did. Maoism was the engine of misery in revolutionary China.

Imagine a revolution with a retrospective

We could call it an election!

> but it cannot be argued in communist regimes

And here lies the difference: agile includes retrospectives. I It's the only thing you need for agile. And if you don't have that, you don't have agile.

Well, it depends. I have seen many teams where retrospectives are basically a lot of personal mea culpas, people talking about what they did not do right, and it was mostly about how they should have done things differently rather than how the process or organisation could be adapted. The overall feeling is that agile works great, scrum works great, so if something went wrong it's because of the human factor and that's what should be fixed... I don't know about communism, but at some places the implementation of agile sounds like a regime.

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