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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

The best results I have ever seen have been projects that people on the bottom did themselves, because they needed it without the people on the top ever knowing about it.

The worst results I have ever seen have been projects where the people on the bottom stopped caring because the people on the top tried to make them ignore the laws of nature.

Also: God is dead

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I'm not really sure what you are arguing. Of course if its a one man job (or a couple) and the .. product or whatever isn't system/safety critical even having a PM is probably overkill and the overhead of "any" process likely just wrecks the output.

But if you need to organize 50+ engineers and actually produce a ... product? That people/agencies/customers expect things of you sure as shit is going to need a definable goal, verifiable output and a somewhat chronological way of achieveing that. Waterfall it is (with reasonable iterations).

Good luck building a chronology for 50+ engineers ahead of time that isn't either horrifically over estimated or instantly wrong.

Waterfall is a pacifier for people who would rather have lies than uncertainty.

Sure time estimation in developmentprojects is hard (impossible?), but thats hard in both waterfall and agile or whatever.

But the often used CER -> PDR -> CDR -> TRR etc. is damn useful.

>Waterfall is a pacifier for people who would rather have lies than uncertainty.

This is the truth. It's painful to see, but some people would prefer to light millions of dollars on fire than admit they don't know.

It's not just about "admitting they don't know." It's about giving up the control that they've used to define their entire professional lives as "managers." Thank you Frederick Winslow Taylor for your outdated ideas.

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