Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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1. I think you have a strange idea of what unions are and do.

2. ditto. The 'best case' for a labor union is that their members are highly skilled and hard to replace, with lots of alternative employers.

3. The article clearly states that Agile is not implemented in order to protect developers, but the net effect is the same. Agile team/management relationships cannot be adversarial because Agile.

The point the article makes is that UCD separates the design of the system (the bit that needs management and user contact) from the implementation, which then allows the implementation (as wildgift points out) to be considered a cost and Taylorised (squeezed) into 'efficient' permanent crunch time.

Ah. My ideas of labor unions presented here are in fact strange, because they have been narrowed (for the purposes of this discussion) to the perspective of "the union exists to protect your interests against rampant Taylorism imposed from the management, in the same way that Agile is posited in The Article to protect programmers from something analogous." While labor unions' members may in fact be best off under a scenario such as you describe in yourpost#2, that's not a grand example of a case where you can say "we need a labor union to protect our interests from management or our lives will be made miserable by exploitation" and seems not to relate to the issues raised by the article.

Regarding point 3, I should have worded it differently. What I mean is that Agile is inherently adversarial to what are generally considered the tactics of management, which include being able to replace workers, to move production to different locations, to increase the pace of work, and generally have flexibility. I didn't mean that the programmers and management are going to fight or feel at odds with each other.

They will have a conflict if management decides to use those tactics, but there are other ways to increase productivity.

If workers and managers can generally find alignment with, and achieve, the goals of the company, the conflicts are avoided.

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