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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> that weirdo version

It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"

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I remember being on a team that spent a little over 2 weeks doing detailed project planning and estimating. We said the project would take 8 months.

The leadership team came back and said upon further review, the project would take 3 months.

I was so relieved to hear we could get 8 months of work done in just 3!

That’s why executives get paid the big bucks!

I’ve seen teams do 2 weeks of detailed project planning and estimating where the entire project could have been done in 2 weeks by a good team if they just set their nose to grindstone and did the work.

It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.

Dealing with that right now. I have multiple PMs and directors involved in requesting another team to literally do five minutes of work because we didn't insist they put it in the current iteration and they put it several iterations away.

In a lot of places that was the real waterfall method, and also how waterfall earned its illustrious reputation.

Waterfail FTW

I'm now curious. So for how long did it actually take?

Probably got cancelled after 2 months after they realized it was going to take 6 more months.

Not sure, my contract ended a year later.

I want to believe that you are joking, but I'm afraid you are completely serious and also correct. I'm seeing an increasing drift with both this pattern and "safE" toward exactly what you describe.

Don't forget your tps reports.

It works better when you realize a lot of corporate senior leadership doesn't actually want to empower their employees. They only want to say they want to empower their employees. And then go back to being the Big Important Manager in the Big Important Office making Big Important Decisions.

That's true. Sometimes it is flatly stated too.

You see, this is how scrum really works as without this, how would we be able to control development timelines? Also mumbling compliance means it just has to be this way for unspecified reasons!

Scrum is the equivalent of top-level management needing a baby rattle or else they'll start crying for metrics because they're lost without them. Trusting their engineers and seeing their progress for themselves, rather than an abstract bastardization of that progress, would destroy their er... productivity.

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