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Comment by lp4vn | Hacker News Reader

Development in any corp today, even middle-sized ones, is a big red tape festival. You have a project divided in sprints that are divided in (often meaningless) tasks, then you have a completely bloated CI/CD system and then things get deployed to three or four environments where people pretend to test everything. Things that might be developed by a journeyman developer in five days take six weeks to be done by a team of eight developers.

The whole process today exists to support a big class of managerial people(including scrum masters, PO's and PM's) whose salary depends on not understanding that the process is completely broken.

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> The whole process today exists to support a big class of managerial people (including scrum masters, PO's and PM's) whose salary depends on not understanding that the process is completely broken.

I think it's even worse than that - those unnecessary processes only exist to try to help management attempt to manage content they don't understand in the first place.

And I say this as someone who regularly implements said delivery processes for customers.

Wasn't "Agile" development supposed to fix this, by keeping team sizes small and workflows as simple and iterative as possible? AIUI, the fabled "two-pizzas team" size was intended as an upper bound for the most complex projects only, not as the new normal.

(The "test everything" culture was also AIUI in the service of quick iteration; the first versions of Agile are from the early 2000s when dynamic languages were starting to get popular and there wasn't really any kind of static analysis.)

Yes.

Agile depends on not having a “big class of managerial people” micromanaging [1] every move done by the squad.

No methodology will work when someone is actively fucking up the process, and agile is no exception.

[1] In before some smartass comes to say “so you don’t want managers”… I qualified my statement with the word “micromanaging”.

The problem is not with the Agile methodology itself. One of its core tenets is valuing "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

The problem is that companies don't understand what this means, and find it simpler to pay an "expert" who will bastardize this definition, and implement processes and tools that make them appear useful to the company. There's an entire industry built on this model.

Never understood the "two pizza team" since I eat a single pizza alone.

How large are those two pizza ? I can eat a small 8" alone but a slice from a jumbo 18" is enough... Also if someone eats a 18" pizza alone, is he a 10x programmer?

That's why software development teams are bigger in Chicago than in Rome or Naples. The size of the crust is bigger in Chicago-style pizzas, whereas italian pizza has a thinner crust.

On the bright side remote development means you can work 1-2h per day and make management clapping their hands in happiness.

It feels like a jobs program for a LOT of people, ultimately. This is why the ceremony is almost sacrosanct.

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