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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Nö amount of arguments can deny that the vast majority of Agile nowadays is just a blatant MLM scheme. Some people ripped off other people selling them BS "Scrum Master" certifications and then promptly proceeded into roping management into hiring them, so that more scrum matters and agile-related jobs are created.

In practice, I'm still to find a single developer that likes agile or scrum, and doesn't have to battle against the constant nagging and interruptions.

Agile is all about "letting developers choose what to work on" but in practice that's a delusional fantasy, everyone has people or customers above them that do not understand the slightest thing about how coding works and that want to prioritize some things over others.

For most people scrum is associated with shady figures with nonsensical diplomas that try to sell snake oil to their managers, and that's a hard reality any fan of Agile has to confront with.

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I’m pretty sure most of the agile hate comes from developers who have never worked in a real agile company/project.

As many comments here already mention the majority of companies are just cargo culting.

I’ve worked on a few agile projects and it was great. It just doesn’t work in a factory like manner, that’s the problem, it can’t really be ‘defined’. You have to get people who know what they are doing and don’t require handholding (helping each other is fine of course) and you have to give them an environment where they can work with flexibility and trust.

I agree; I've had one recent job that was agile, and it was done pretty well. Neither management nor customers were overbearing, if things didn't get done on time we'd talk about why the estimate was so wrong, if things took longer than expected we'd just push them to the next sprint, etc. Overall, the whole thing was just a useful way of keeping people on-track, and aware of what their coworkers were doing, and organizing and prioritizing work tasks in a flexible manner, and providing a process to keep things that way. The stuff with Fibonacci numbers was a bit silly but it was fine; it's just a rough way of estimating the difficulty of a task (which is different from the time needed, because this varies by developer skill). It was also good for making sure that new code got reviewed and tested properly before being merged.

Of course, it doesn't work well if you use it in a cargo-cult manner. It needs to be applied intelligently to what your team is doing.

I can introduce you to multiple developers who love agile, including me.

Believe it or not, if you asked me before I joined my current team, I would say that agile is corporate BS and I detest it, but turns out I was wrong. You can do whatever you want and call it whatever you want (scrum/agile/kanban/etc), it doesn't make it agile.

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