What Agile does to your best people is just next level cruel. They are bombarded with constant meetings, status progresses, forced to be playing childish games with cards, and are being "led" by incompetent snot-faced BAs who happened to finish a single week's course and suddenly became certified SCUM masters or POs. Thus, your best people either leave or are rendered powerless and incompetent by the mire of mediocrity and cult-like ritual following that SCRUM drags you into.
One thing I can never forgive Agile is that it claims to be one thing: "people over process", but then just goes ahead, and it's the exact opposite. It goes and defines a gazillion processes and its practitioners scream bloody hell if you don't follow them, because then it's "not real SCRUM". Let's be honest what each thing is.
- Standup is a scheduled management upgrade, so the manager has some progress to report.
- Planning poker is a useless waste of time so the manager has some false sense of security when something will be done (usually badly and incompletely). They will share that info with other managers, who will add that in their calendar as a deadline, and then will blame the devs when it fails to materialize on time. The real culprit for the delay, of course is obvious. It's the fact that the devs spent more time in meetings estimating things and explaining to the walking tool that is their PO why it's not so easy to simply do X or Y, instead of actually doing real work.
- Retrospectives are actually useful, if the manager is out of them. By retrospective I mean all iterative methods of improvement, not only every sprint or every incident. All types of structured or unstructured improvements are good.
- The Scrum Master role is made so the owner's son has some well paid work to do after dropping out of college. Also, the role was created and because some old dudes wanted to sell courses online or books, costing $$$. This should go to show you that making stuff up as you go into random processes and then writing a book about to give it some validity is a totally viable career in life.
- The PO role is where the money people (vaguely called "Business" or "Stakeholders") wanted to initially give agility to the devs, because they read somewhere it's nice. However, after giving it some thought, they thought better of it. At the end of the day, they decided that a person with no technical knowledge and no understanding of the inner workings and details is a much better qualified decision maker than any of the people with intimate, in-depth knowledge. After all, a totally incompetent dumbo's mindset is much more relatable to the "Stakeholders" than those pesky devs, so of course they are gonna trust the PO's "wise" judgement.
- Sprint is just a cleverly crafted ploy to make the developers endlessly hurry towards endless micro deadlines, sprint after sprint. Who sprints all the time, all year round? Sprints should also be called "The Death March". The way sprints break down everything in dismally small pieces also serve as an excellent reminder to the devs, that just as they are replaceable cogs in the machine, the thing they are building is just a bunch of badly fitting factory assembled parts.
That's to eliminate any illusion that our work requires careful curation, ownership, ingenuity and patience, and that it's a craft. No, our work has to be thought endless sprint from one small insignificant feature to the next, in the pursuit of "value" (much like factory workers produce parts with repetitive moves, day in and day out).
- Agile Coach role. I have to admit, when I first heard that there exists such a role, and that people have it as a career, I was out of words. The mere fact that there are people who are "agile coaches" and that there are companies who employ and take the service of agile coaches is a solid proof to me that humanity's days are numbered.
Agile and Scrum, like every other religion, are basically the result of people giving up thinking for themselves and wanting an easy packaged guide to follow from snake oil salesmen. Such easy cures could never do anything but disrupt a company. Nothing can beat smart people thinking and communicating, because dumbness is not curable.