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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

I got laid off at a job where this applied, then at another company got rejected because they cancelled the position altogether to use Agentic Coding by Microsoft instead.

Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important.

While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs. Maybe it is to streamline newcomers? Because it took a bit of time to gather all the project info, but after that it was pretty relaxing.

I don't know, the market has shifted so much that I feel like I should probably be contempt with what I have.

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> it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs.

Scrum is so woefully misunderstood.

It makes sense for small teams (yes, those 4-5 devs), if — and that's a big if — they work together on a single product. It is intended for developers to coordinate with each other, and also provides feedback loops for reality checks and for improvement of collaboration.

If those 4-5 developers work independently from one another, don't have to coordinate, don't need business to tell them what, out of various options, is the most important thing to work on right now, and don't need feedback from users to correct them along the way, then of course they don't need scrum.

Yeah, it's basically just formalized rules for communication, and I've been on teams where it worked great

I think it's awful when people follow it slavishly -- you chuck out anything that doesn't fit your team. And yeah, in the example you gave, it's a terrible fit lol

I have some stakeholders that do not know what they want and can't define it, so in desperation I dragged them thorough making fucking user stories -- user stories --and oh my god they loved it lol

They immediately started trying to apply it to everything too. I have regrets.

In my view, Scrum is a way to force dysfunctional teams to have some process, it is not useful for a team that is already delivering and working in a samll-a agile manner.

If you were to write down a guide on how to avoid team dysfunction, it would get a name or maybe an acronym.

If it worked someone would say, hey let's use this in more places.

If it worked really well others would say these aren't guidelines they're dogma.

Now we have scrum 2.0.

A wise person once said "scrum turns dysfunctional teams into average teams. It also turns highly-motivated teams into average teams".

Scrum is management consulting companies trying to keep their job by turning something that would make them irrelevant (the agile manifesto) into something that requires tons of billable hours and useless qualifications like "scrum master". Seems to be working great for them.

The agile manifesto is about how to run a consulting company. "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" is not something non-contracting software teams have to worry about, customer collaboration is important but there's no contract negotiation to prioritize it over.

I've worked at three very different companies where at least one member of the software team had to essentially negotiate for their project's budget and scope (and tacitly their jobs in some cases).

You're right, but you're going to be inundated with

"but real scrum has never been tried" types.

> "but real scrum has never been tried" types.

Im one of these people. I do think for real that what most companies do is basically project management that wears the skin of scrum, and in most organizations beyond a certain size having that type of agile work and flexibility is basically impossible.

Scrum is just one of the early signs for me to start looking for a new job

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