The ‘weirdos’ in the first paragraphs were primarily nerdy men. The landscape has changed tremendously since then - Agile is terrible for many things, but it does not incite racism or bias. Perhaps the only bad thing it does not do.
I was hoping for a better ending to this read.
I personally don’t think it’s ok to refer to a person like that, it’s a rather gross oversimplification of a human being.
We ought to be more sophisticated than that.
Embarrassing.
I saw the transition of the industry from a complete waterfall process to the overhyping of agile, the pushback and now the land where agile as per the manifesto is more-or-less a given. The old ways were so much worse...
The bad sprouts from agile are the multitude of processes and bullshit methodologies that tried to ride the hype and create "The Agile Way". Scrum and others are a side-effect of this and I'm very glad to see Scrum being shunned for the past 4-6 years and instead engineers being attracted towards much more lightweight processes.
The problem with agile is that it only works when people had experiences, bad and good, and a team can tailor how their agile process should look like given their constraints. Throwing a bunch of juniors under an agile methodology and telling them what's right or not only creates friction and useless rituals, you need experienced people (PMs, EMs and at least one engineer) to cut the bullshit and stick to the points that matter: collaboration, communication, re-assessment of priorities, etc.
If you ask 10 people what agile "really" means you'll get 10 different answers, many quite incompatible with each other.
Beyond that, 10 people might find that the processes they've refined from Agile really do differ. That might be because of differing (and broken) application of Agile itself, which is a common claim. It might be, though, that continuous improvement of process has lead different teams in different directions that function well or well enough for those teams.
You could replace the entire thing with "shorter feedback loops" and it would be significantly more meaningful.
If you actually read it it really is just a bunch of words that doesn't specify much of anything at all. To me it reads as something incredibly vague and hand-wavy and how on earth modern Agile has been inferred out of the text of the agile manifesto is somewhat beyond me.
It's vague exactly because it's a manifesto, not a handbook on how to apply it.
1. Mike (Miguel) Beedle was latino.
2. "Al Tenhundfeld, one of the manifesto’s authors" - NOPE.
I could go on but what's the point.
If you want to learn about agile I recommend reading Alistair Cockburn, James Coplien and Craig Larman. They're old school and know the history of this stuff amazingly well.
That said, however, the article is correct to assert that Agile, as implemented in real organizations, addresses the corporation's needs and only those needs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been adopted at all, but dismissed as the snivelings of whiny insubordinate programmers who forgot just who signs the checks.
That we've gotten to this point must also be old white men's fault.
Please, if you are writing an US-centric article, state it in the title. Example: "Agile and the Long Crisis of Software in the USA".
That explains an awful lot. When people think that it's enough that they're right, bad things happen. Agile doesn't actually need a theory of society to understand that, just a little humility.
Author misses the part where the majority of the working force is also "white men" who see no benefit from this either, because it turns out, the decisions of management aren't for "white men" or even "old white men". The decisions are for "our management".
> We’ve long known that eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and documentation feels great, until you’re the person who needs rules for protection.
I think the article eventually makes good arguments for this, at least if you are willing to say that code review and pair programming are things that spring out of the spirit of the manifesto.
Basically they author is claiming that the goal of the agile manifesto is to remove oversight from developers so that they can focus on "the project". The downside is that you are losing oversight of bad behaviour, which gives space for work-place bullying. (and the other downside argued is that developers, who are also stakeholders, do not have a voice in questioning the utility of the project overall).