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Comment by salmonlogs | Hacker News Reader

I briefly worked for a large non-tech corporate in between two FAANG jobs.

What really surprised me at the corporate was how much they love to TALK about Agile. We had Agile Coaches, an Agile Centre of Excellence, dedicated Scrum Masters (literally their entire job), Agile Squads to try and improve the Agile Process, mandatory Agile Training and we constantly talked about how things were Agile and if we could be more Agile.

They even experimented for a quarter by adding a mandatory agenda item to every single meeting to review how Agile we were and what can be done to be more Agile.

We got absolutely nothing done. Progress was glacial, decisions took months, it was painful to do anything.

In contrast, at both FAANG tech companies I'm not sure I've ever heard someone say the word Agile directly. It just happens by default, no ceremony and rigour required. Shit gets done, at pace, and people are excited and motivated to do it.

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For the love of me I fail to find an article again about the different approaches, Scrum, waterfall or whatnot, and hoe they are used at start-ups, FAANG, large non-tech companies. I found it through the HN front page...

Gist of it: FAANG is very flexible as long as things get done (hinting at really understanding how things work), large corps somewhat flexible between teams (understanding in principle how it works but still being big corps) while start-ups stick to one methodology (sticking what some founder knows, or thinks to know). Brackets are my interpretation.

Based on what I saw in the last year in my current job, that rings true. Agile is the latest shit, so we aoply it to everuthing, from hardware development to ERP roll outs. Not sure if in those two cases it is the right approach.

Was it this? https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big...

Exactly this! Thanks a lot!!!

It's not my understanding of that article. What I understood is:

- most FAANGs are using either informal or formal mini-waterfall SDLCs (i.e. starting with small upfront design/product/marketing document).

- most non-tech enterprises and consultancies are using Agile/Scrum

- startups are somewhat in the middle

There is a google sheet with the detailed list of companies and their SDLCs.

Lastly I do agree that SDLC should be adapted to company size/stage and the industry/vertical.

I.e. don't use Agile/Scrum/SAFe over waterfall/RUP for mission- or safety-critical software (i.e. missile, aviation or automotive). And don't use waterfall/RUP for in-house enterprise software over Agile/Scrum/SAFe, etc.

Use something like Shape Up for a small web SaaS product, use EventStorming for a bank or insurance company, etc.

That's what you get for working from memory... Just re-read the article and your way of reading it is actually correct.

I also summarized from my memory. I've read this article about a year ago ;)

> Progress was glacial, decisions took months, it was painful to do anything.

... but you still got invited to weekly meetings to be questioned on why you weren't meeting your quotas ...

Absolutely.

There were multiple daily standups, weekly standups, twice-monthly retros, monthly project updates, bimestrial project updates and quarterly workshops and offsites.

Which meant once a quarter you had at least 2 solid weeks of nothing but sync/update/standup/retro meetings to talk about the work you talked about planning to do, but failed to do because you spent all your time talking about planning to talk about planning to do it.

Ironically, retros are the additional meeting where you can air grievances about everyone having too many meetings.

The two big weaknesses of teams I've experienced are this and not having decision owners.

It doesn't have to be the same person for everything, but having a single designated person to own each decision avoids meandering too much when you're uncertain, or getting blocked by debate when you're confident.

My favourite leaders have come in and quickly said "you guys spend too much time talking about making a choice, X is in charge of this decision, move on".

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