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Comment by sandoze | Hacker News Reader

Here’s the thing. If I could just code without being a slave to a scrum master or being product micromanaged.. I would never leave the industry. I worked five years in mobile gaming when the Apple Store first opened. Released 13 titles, had my hands in a half a dozen others, three teams in two countries, 15 employees at our height (95% remote). Never had a standup, planning meaning, grooming.. etc.

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> If I could just code without being a slave to a scrum master or being product micromanaged.. I would never leave the industry.

My current job has zero planning meetings and a standup twice a week with 20 people attending that lasts about 7 minutes on average; standup is literally "what are you working on and are you blocked?". If the person rambles in standup, our boss cuts them off and has the next person go. It's been this way for at least a year and a half (when I started). We're given wire-frames or high-level designs of what needs to be built and the target goal date. Developers are then left to code with nearly full autonomy. We always deliver the product early. I've worked in so very many places over the last decade and a half - from huge corporations to small startups - and if all of them took this approach, they would've increased their productivity at least 10-fold.

This is almost exactly what we do and I love it but there's one exception. We have sprint review meetings on the last day of our sprint where several product teams present what they accomplished during the sprint. It works fine for people in time zones where it's the end of their day but for others they have to present what they achieved during the sprint, while the sprint hasn't ended. It's been shocking to see how vehemently the scrum masters have fought to not move it to the first day of the new sprint. Cargo cult agile is probably the worst part about the industry.

There do exist corporate positions with a high degree of autonomy and as-needed coordination. I have one of them right now. I will be sad to ever let it go.

What were your main means of coordination and planning?

We knew what needed to be built. Sometimes it was easy, we were doing a direct port, other times product and design would write it up in somewhat detailed documentation (can you believe no stories/tasks?!). Because they were games you’d start with the play loops and continually tweak them. Assets would come in from designers throughout the lifecycle of the project and they’d just document what they wanted to see (fonts, colors, animations, flow).

We had a product manager who would regularly play our builds and speak with the clients. If the clients were unhappy, had feedback, or found bugs, he would chat or hop on a call with the lead developer (usually me). We’d write it on a sticky note or put it in our mind palace as a Todo (or if you were a defensive programmer and planned that a certain piece of code needs to be flexible, you were fixing it while he was explaining the problem).

So, we had communication, but not in the form of formal meetings. Product set the delivery dates, we set goals/cadence as engineers around those dates, and based off of continual feedback we iterated on the design.

As a footnote. Let’s face it, good devs are good communicators. We do it constantly with our team members. I’m blocked, I need help, why don’t you work on, what if we did..

Daily scrum and weekly grooming and quarterly planning. That’s for product. That’s counting beans and making sure no one goes rogue and accidentally innovates.

Daily scrum is nothing more than a product status meeting. If you’re a dev and you’re waiting for that meeting everyday to tell someone you’re blocked or need something.. then there’s a communication problem.

I'm surprised you made it 5 years. It seemed like the App Store collapsed to free within a year or two.

You make it sound like there's no money to be made in Apps, but that's clearly obvious to not be true. Switched to freemium with In App Purchases is the model I see every where, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that $0.99, $1.99, etc are paid multiple times by the user to the point that they could have bought a AAA console new release with the IAP paid.

These apps also include ad sales to the IAPs. The money no longer needs to come from the initial download.

We made the switch from paid, to ad driven, to freemium/IAP for our in-house games.

Zynga was one of our biggest clients. Hasbro came in second. As well as a few white label advergames (eg. Vans shoes). We rarely made more than a small cut on profits (if that) and were generally paid upfront and on delivery.

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