Adequately communicating, negotiating and managing the uncertainty is the core part of agile, "do what you want" isn't going to fly, that's why teams don't have complete agency on process.
I agree the politics and "fog of war" in large companies is tiresome and wasteful but it seems to be almost unavoidable once you get to a certain size.
That’s where the fundamental mismatch between corporate planning and Agile lies. Agile is supposed to be resilient to known and unknown unknowns, but corporate planning usually isn’t - as you mention due to very real constraints like cost and opportunity costs and so forth. It’s why you essentially can’t do “true-agile” in basically any corporate setting IMO.
I do still laugh about the fact that I could take a complex problem and break it down with hour estimates well enough to not end up being significantly over or under at the project level but then struggled really hard at figuring out how many hours there actually were in a day to put the calendar together. There’s always things that pop up that rob calendar time and virtually never things that free up calendar time.
Then they should buy their software off the shelf and resist the desire to customise it. For most enterprises building their own software makes about as much sense as building their own vehicle fleet.
Is a symbiotic relationship, the money only exists due to labour.
It is still the same: the value extracted is only possible to exist because of many like me, doing labour to create added value which can be sold, without this there's no management class, there's no administrative tasks to perform around the work.
My comment is a retort to this mindset:
> and they're also the people who pay you.
They are only able to pay me because of the work done by many like me, their power can only exist through this conduit so bending over to view the ones in control of capital as "above me" being the "who pay you" is absurd in my worldview. They have their reason to exist but need to respect that without us they are nothing, absolutely nothing. Just like me without people taking care of a business would be in a less comfortable place.
Again, it's symbiotic and I'm just fighting the notion that someone should shut up or think of themselves as lesser because they are being paid by someone, that's only possible through a mutual relationship.
Being part of a large but parasitized (ill) group is more fit in the evolutionary sense than being healthy but alone.
Monopoly, oligopoly, and market power are a feature, not a bug, and that includes reducing labor to a commoditized asset on the spreadsheet like any other: not only as cheap as possible, but as predictable, and as fungible as possible. (The extent to which the social power of these fiefdoms is not always a means to a "Number Go Up" end, but instead a primate drive for status and power merely enabled by rent-seeking, is left as an exercise for the reader.)
See "Markets Not Capitalism" and "Capital As Power".
Mark Fisher famously said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", well the same seems to be even more true for "democracy", the causal force that Shall Not Be Discussed Critically.
There are clear conservative/progressive ideologies: Progressives are always wanting to try the shiny new thing, while the conservatives want to stick with what works, and disagreements over the languages, tools and processes we use have similar religious fervor and animosity as you see in the broader culture wars.
You can start your own company, or even freelance. And there are thousands of companies to choose from.
Every shareholder and investor wants a competitive moat: for corporate firms to have enough market power (including lobbying power and regulatory capture) to keep labor costs low (with an intentionally managed reserve pool of the unemployed, via NAIRU, to "discipline labor").
The fact that some individuals can beat the odds, does not change the systems dynamic: "the table is tilted, the game is rigged".
The main reason people don't go and work for themselves is that companies pay so much that usually it isn't worth it. They would make money on their own but they make more working for a company, that isn't really a bad thing though.
You can't have your cake and eat it, you either get the risk or you take orders from someone who took on that risk for you and give you a stable income.
Fascism is basically Communism (as practiced); corporations own the means of production rather than the government, and it uses religion/nationalism rather than humanism/atheism.
They are the same in kind, but different in degree. You could even say China under Deng Xiaoping and later Xi blended the two.
Agile is many ways does smack of Communism:
- It proposes egalitarianism (skin in the game), but generally leads to micromanagement/totalitarian situations.
- If it fails it's because you didn't do the "real" Agile.
- If adherents often speak/act in cultist/religious ways.
Need to go back to core values like: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."
I'd posit that this is not necessarily a feature of large corporations; I've been in smaller places (startups, to boot) where I observed almost all of what you've described.
It takes a certain combination of sociopathic, psychopathic, and apathetic individuals in the right places to make this happen -- and they're almost always present in the right (wrong?) places, regardless of size.
Who was suggesting they could or should be?