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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

Typical immature bullshit where someone describes their own company's screwed-up incompetent so-called "Scrum" and "Agile" implementation, and then claims that that's universalizable amongst all companies everywhere.

Just because a so-called "Scrum Master" not worth the title is forcing you to do BS things that inhibit your flow does not mean it's emblematic of the species. I mean, how would you feel if someone generalized all developers as a bunch of fat neckbearded social cripples reeking of BO? Same thing here.

I ought to bookmark this post in case anyone thinks that people on HN don't try to farm karma Reddit-style. What a crap bunch of outrage bait.

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Typical Scrum apologist who describes how someone else must have screwed up Scrum or Agile. They then claim that pure "Scrum" or "Agile" has never been implemented anywhere.

If only people weren't so ignorant, we could give pure Scrum a try and solve all the world's problems.

> They then claim that pure "Scrum" or "Agile" has never been implemented anywhere.

They are right, however the conclusion that should be drawn from this is that the most likely outcome of your organisations implementation of agile will be equally as poor, and that it should prolly be skipped.

Typical argument from an engineer arguing from math and not understanding that math does not describe human beings and their social relationships.

The guy in the Twitter pretty much mentions every red flag implementing scrum.

What did you expect the parent commenter to say? "you've done well and have shown that scrum doesn't work"?

This is like complaining that because the shittiest sports team you follow doesn't win that playing that sport well is ipso facto impossible.

This is a No True Scotsman argument. The guy enumerated a list of ways scrum failed in his experience; it's always interesting to hear honestly about failure modes from people who have actually used something a lot in their work.

It's interesting to hear about failure modes, and anyone whose job it is to teach stuff like this is interested in hearing about failure modes. It's the taking of one person's experience and extending it to encompass everything that's wrong.

Obviously the people charged with implementing this in OP's company are doing it wrong. That doesn't mean it's OK to insinuate that everyone who ever tries to implement Scrum or Agile is doing it wrong. For every clueless toxic manager who doesn't understand how to use Agile correctly, there's an egotistical or lazy dev who also wants to throw what the Brits would call a spanner in the works for purely personal reasons.

But to call it a No True Scotsman argument is a lazy rebuttal which won't engage with the argument. There are plenty of shitty Agile practitioners, and no one is trying to dispute this.

> For every clueless toxic manager who doesn't understand how to use Agile correctly

Anecdata Of One: I have worked at many places since 2005 and the most successful projects have been those without any Agile[1]/Scrum imposed by management. In contrast, the places with the worst outcomes[2] have all had distinct Agile/Scrum imposed by micro-managers[3].

[1] Plenty of places with iterative development but solely due to the nature of the work (changes required by external QA, experiments, etc.), not imposed.

[2] Software quality and speed of development-wise. They're all still alive and limping along despite the horrific nature of their internal systems.

[3] Who have always been there in a place with Agile/Scrum. Only once in a place without. I don't think it's coincidental.

The same thing works the other way. People see and experience shit Scrum and then they No True Scotsman it to mean that all Scrum must be shit.

It seems to me that most American software companies use Cargo Cult Scrum. They basically take the terms and maybe read a blog about the processes and just wing it from there.

The only way an Agile/Scrum process works if you bring in a consulting company that's expensive enough to make even the top brass buy into it. You can theoretically try to bring it in from the ground up, but it's really hard to do Agile when the rest of the company is either waterfall or flying by the seat of their pants.

Sheesh, no wonder everyone is doing it wrong.

Are you a scrum master and feel personally slighted that the popularity is slipping?

And there's the typical internet argument!

"I disagree with you and here's why!"

"I'm sorry that you're personally offended. See, you disagreed with my pure, sweet, logical opinion, which means you must be personally offended, because no REASONABLE person would disagree with me. And because you're offended, you operate on emotions, as opposed to my high-and-mighty self, who operates on pure, sweet logic. Thus I am right and you're a crybaby, because you dared to disagree with what I consider to be my pure, sweet logic."

Are you a scrum master? Going to school for it? What is your experience with scrum? Have you tried it? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Do you even code?

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