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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Agile methods, without the cult and hype, are very reasonable. They took Toyota from a producer of second-class cars for a local market to world domination.

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There's real problems applying assembly-line optimizations to things that are not assembly-lines. Those problems are mostly related to the need for turning the operation into a sort of assembly-line before the optimizations can be performed, regardless of how poorly that model fits the reality of the work.

Ultimately, in a big enough org, software becomes an assembly line. Lean used right protects people and stops management from enforcing bullshit on the rank and file. But at a macro level, the only reason any dev has a job is because an end user says "I need the software to do this thing it can't already do." So how do you get it to them right with a minimum of fuss? That's Lean.

> Ultimately, in a big enough org, software becomes an assembly line

Only when badly managed, if software production is like an assembly line it means the software produced is mostly worthless because there is no freedom for anyone to diverge or improve anything, meaning they don't add any real input so you don't actually need a programmer there.

Anything that can be structured as an assembly line of programmers should be automated or abstracted so that a large group of programmers don't need to touch the same change serially (assembly line), instead that assembly line of programmers can be much better done by a single programmer that does all the serial work himself, that way you can gain the benefits of programming.

Large scale software organizations should focus on parallel workflows, not assembly line workflows (serial). Serial team workflows in software just leads to worse products.

I'd argue that assembly lines create large organizations, rather than the other way around. Large organizations are not a positive thing in software development, as it scales very poorly with org size.

>"Agile methods, without the cult and hype..." - Do not exist in practice. And I am not producing cars. Rather what I do is a form of art.

Expectations get in the way of agility.

What execs really mean by "we're agile" is, "We'll be changing our mind a lot, and you'll be agile enough to suck it up and get it done quickly."

As long as they're paying you by the hour, that should be fine.

And of course I’m super important and always right, never humble.

And at the same time very quick to criticize management because they’re so dumb.

> Rather what I do is a form of art.

Found the pretentious CS undergrad/junior dev. Sure, there's an element of creativity and craftsmanship in software development, but come on already.

You've found "the pretentious CS undergrad/junior dev" and I've found somebody who has no fucking clue what they're talking about. So we are even.

I design and implement software products from scratch for various clients. Some I own and it brings me some extra money. Been doing it since 80s. Products range - various middleware, enterprise backends, desktop multimedia applications, deep sea scanning, firmware for microcontrollers, device control and real time data processing etc. etc.

From scratch? Assembly scratch or transistor scratch?

Do you sell your art by the inch or the hour?

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