This.
I understand that some managers want graphs, points, velocity, etc. Those things makes it easy to point at something and tell the team to improve. A good (imo) manager on the other hand, would just ask the team how the sprint went and what problems needs solving.
Projects are discrete work efforts with a specific business objective and an end date. They’re effectively waterfall, and managing a whole program with multiple work streams is at least possible via scrum (if you have the right feedback loops into the product team and execs). I suspect this is the kind of work people really hate. This is the kind of work consulting companies generally do.
Product development should be much more free form. The product manager should own P&L for the product (or at least some proxy) because it aligns incentives. The dev team need not be 100% utilized all the time as their ability to quickly and effectively develop functionality is valued above cost efficiency (because again, product owns P&L so no business case has to be made). You can then use the “extra” time to deal with tech debt or take on special projects.
The companies that really suck to work for are the ones that confuse the two. They are two different mindsets — one requires a developer who thrives on tight deadlines and can turn around functioning code and toss it over the fence, the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly. Put a project developer on a product they’ll be lost without the structure; put a product developer on a project team and they’ll quit within 6 months because they hate being micromanaged.
> the other requires a more deliberate approach where doing things right preserves the ability to do things quickly
Yes. There is a surprising nonlinearity of benefits to doing something properly.
It’s not about over-engineering to “best practices” or being a “cowboy coder” tuned only to your own preferences. These two are the Scylla and Charybdis of pursuing quality in software.
Scrum does have a lot of processes and artifacts and things to measure. They all had a decent purpose: to give the product and project managers (Product Owner and Scrum Manager in Scrum parlance) information that allowed them to do their jobs more effectively. Story points and velocity estimates were supposed to drive decisions about what to build and when by giving the product manager some sort of signal they could use to decide things like, "Let's skip this feature; it's going to cost more than it's worth," or, "Let's push this bit a few weeks forward in the schedule, because it's looking like it's bigger and more likely to go quagmire on us than I had been hoping."
There was supposed to be an understanding that generating this signal would reduce the speed at which the development team could churn out features. (Of course it would; that time spent playing planning poker had to be taken from somewhere.) But this was understood to be worthwhile in the long run, in a, "Work smarter, not harder," sort of way.
On paper, it seems like a pretty good idea. The critical flaw, I think, is that, when you take a system that produces all those numbers, and even do something boneheaded like name one of them "velocity", and then drop that in the middle of a crowd of people who went to business school and have had heavily indoctrinated into Taylorist ways of thinking, well, it's like a will-o-the-wisp to them. They'll see something that looks bright and shiny, and follow it straight into deepest part of the swamp. And, since they're the manager, they'll be able to drag the whole team, or even the whole company, along with them when they do.
Years ago, I had an interesting "A Tale of Two Scrums" experience. I was on a product team that had been doing Scrum as their own internal thing for years. Quite successfully, too, everyone was happy, it was possibly the highest morale team I've ever been on. But then senior management decided they wanted the company to go Agile. So they brought in $FAMOUS_AGILE_CONSULTANT to deliver a week of workshops which was mandatory for all the developers and skipped by all the managers, including product managers. And then we had this very top-down, Taylorist, how-much-blood-can-we-squeeze-from-this-stone brand of Scrum rammed down our throats from above. Half the team left the company within 2 years. I found later that, not too long after I left, the company had subsequently divested of the product I worked on. While I was there, it was the market leader and cash cow.
Long story short, there's Scrum, and then there's Scrum. I can't tell you how much I loved doing Scrum, but I also can't tell you how much I hated doing Scrum.
Taylorism was known to only work on short interventions at the time it was created, and it's known to create all sorts of problems (one being absolutely demotivating everybody).
People are not cogs.
> I guess the real question is why the fuck are management courses still founded in Taylorism?
That is why.
So, are the developers somehow responsible for the problem, since the managers were never exposed to the consultant?
Scrum, per se, has no defined measurable bits. If a process has lots of things to measure, that's due to decisions besides the one to use Scrum.
The desire for metrics is also a major driver of surveillance capitalism and why every web site and app is now larded up with telemetry.
Some of surveillance capitalism is indeed about making the user the product, but a decent chunk of it is about people having metrics to show to people higher up the chain.
People who sell advertising need metrics to sell it. Managers need metrics to show the value of feature X or Y or the application in general. Companies need metrics to woo and placate investors. Investors need metrics to show to their investors/LPs. It goes all the way up the chain.
I'd say there is a general lust for metrics on the part of everyone who answers to anyone. Markets are not DAGs, but undirected graphs of power relationships, so everyone has a boss somewhere and thus everyone wants metrics.
That’s why it exists.
Our free speech society relies heavily on sticking to jobs, economics, and service to industrialists.