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Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

I still chuckle a bit when people get anti-scrum, because I've been around long enough when agile/scrum was the disruptive thing.

Of course in practice agile/scrum/whatever has turned into the same cargo-cult nonsense that the original promoters of the ideals were fighting against.

One thing I thought was interesting was:

> First, the most common jobs among the people who told me I was wrong were "Agile Coach" and "Scrum Master." They feel very strongly in favor of Scrum, but I'm not sure why.

It seems funny to critique people's job titles when the poster's Twitter profile reads:

> I teach Machine Learning and run http://ml.school

I mean loudly critiquing a mainstream practice in a flippant way is pretty much the textbook approach to bring attention to yourself and establish as an expert in... teaching people about these topics. It's content marketing 101.

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Thank you! Personally I started to ignore any post from twitter on HN, which otherwise has fantastic quality on its content, since you just know that the content will shallow and "clickbaity".

My wish is for HN to ban all links from there. It would be better to HN anyways if the discussions got contained within the forum instead.

It would be nice if it became normal for HN users to flag and or at least refrain from upvoting twitter links, since my belief is that they are bound to influence HN negatively.

Failing that I suppose I'll have to mess around with an extension so that my browser removes them automatically instead.

Scrum was never the disruption. Agile was. But really, it started with eXtreme Programming, from which "agile" was the more generalize distillation.

I'll say this: I worked in XP (and then "agile") teams ~20 years ago a couple times with varying success, but the one good thing was it got people thinking and agitating against the delusions that went along with waterfall.

Then I got stuck at Google for 10 years, where "agile" isn't really a thing. (There are teams that are sorta doing scrum... ish stuff. And there's a wide diversity of how things are done there. But on the whole Google has effectively unlimited budgets and headcount so things sorta just ... broken down waterfall ... until they're "done" whenever). When I got out... Scrum or some variant had taken over.

And I don't recognize this as the "agile" I worked with before. It's just a mess of pointless routines and shiboleths without the meat of what made things "agile".

Agile was: developers do their own estimates. Short iterations. "Stories" are 2-3 days and tied directly to a customer's business request. Intense involvement with the "customer" letting them know the trade-offs for every decision. Ship the prototype. "You ain't gonna need it." Informal daily standup just for the purpose of making sure everyone is on the same page. At the end of the iteration, go over the "cards" and triage and discuss why some estimates were off.

What I see now is just going through the motions of some of these, but in the end it's either chaos, or waterfall in disguise and some PM with a hard-on for configuring JIRA in some convoluted fashion so they can pass on reports to their superiors and make people jump through hoops so it looks like progress.

I just wanna code, get things done, fix things and ship things. Agile was the recognition that (good) engineers want to get work done and the upfront design process was often just getting in the way of problem solving and the creative process. The ones who don't? Get them off your team.

Somewhere along the line that message was lost.

I don't think that part is so much about the job titles themselves. It's more about the interests/motivations. As in "I said smoking was bad and a lot of people that worked in selling tobacco told me I was wrong and that smoking was perfectly healthy".

Critiquing Scrum in now way establishes you as an expert in teaching ML

Yes, that seems to be IKantRead's point.

The OP barely has any experience in the field so... One bad gig is maybe 50% of his work experience.

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