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Comment by paskozdilar | Hacker News Reader

The "event-based" paradigm is a useful way to orchestrate software. I wonder why it's not used to orchestrate people. A rule of thumb would be "every meeting must have a reason - an event that lead to it".

Why do we even have to have a fixed, recurring meeting? That's equivalent to polling a server periodically and asking "hey, any event happened?" - which is extremely unscalable, and should be done only in situations when malfunction of event-driven mechanics is expected. Same with people - if an employee is trusted, meetings with them should only happen on an event - when there is a change of plans, some new work to be done, et cetera.

We have asychronous communication - so why not asychronous organization?

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Global infantilization.

The most common counter to the idea is "but some people don't communicate because "new/inexperienced/personality". Despite being expected to be fully functional adults in many ways and frequently given far more freedom as kids, status quo management seems hellbent on making adults seem incapable of basic communication in a corporate setting.

I don't necessarily disagree with that notion, but there are a lot of inconsistencies if that's the limit of what can be expected from an adult (Why are drinking, driving and taking on massive loans allowed?). Plus in the context of software development, we can easily set up automated communication frameworks to catch the majority of it.

An infantilized workforce is a weak, controllable, unthreatening, cheap workforce.

Because project managers, who invent these things, don't know enough computer science.

The next question you might asks is, why other people need to know immediately what other people are working? Why cannot there be a dedicated thread (aka PM) who collects this information and makes it available?

Project management would benefit by bringing concepts from operating systems such as scheduling or task switching.

Ha ha almost. It should be:

Because project managers, who invent these things don't want to make themselves redundant.

It's only by pushing the falsehood that the team is so incompetent as to require handholding from someone who likes moving tickets around that they're able to stay in a cushy job.

Alarmingly accurate, I think most PMs accept that their role is a sort of well-intentioned grift.

Was Agile invented by PMs?

That's a bit of a red herring. How Agile looks today doesn't bear much resemblance to how Agile was described in the manifesto.

Fair point!

The interesting thing is: if Agile was invented by software engineers, how come it ended up disfigured in the hands of PMs, reinvented as Agile Coaches? My 2c theory: because the tenets of the Manifesto do not generate interest on the average developer demographics.

Because it's much easier to implement a set of concrete guidelines (have a daily meeting, use story points, etc) and turn them intro strict rules, than to implement the more fundamental but less concrete guidelines (individuals and interactions over processes and tools).

The same reason folk religion often focuses on hard, measurable rules (don't work on X, don't eat Y) instead of the more fundamental abstract ones (treat your fellow man as you want him to treat you).

> Project management would benefit by bringing concepts from operating systems such as scheduling or task switching.

I agree.

Perhaps this is a good time for a Free Software organizational tool, built on such principles.

Because it was invented for enterprise/consulting shops, not for product/tech companies.

For any real dev daily standups sounds as an idiotic practice.

If you're team is so disorganized that they can't collaborate effectively using bazillion of existing tools, and without hand holding/baby sitting of the "Scrum Master", then it's better to fire everyone, and build a new one.

Since you’re convinced about it, have you considered trying it out?

I feel some negativity from this question, but I will disregard those feelings as unfounded and try to answer in the best faith possible.

No, I have not considered trying it out, for a simple reason - I don't control any organization nor work in a management position, so I don't really have a chance to do so.

I'd like to believe that I would try out all those things that come to my mind, if I were to have a chance to do so.

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