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Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

"getting the right people in and let them organize themselves"

That's a large part of what agility was/is about. The rest also matches up pretty well.

Actually I disagree. The large part (possibly not the intent) was about building a consulting empire around something utterly vague with multiple religious opinions about the best way to perform these manifesto actions.

A vehicle for rats.

The original meaning of agile, the manifesto, was doing it right. The consultants jumped on the bandwagon and called themselves agile until it stuck. But I don't think the right response is to say agile is now bad, it's to reclaim the word from those who're misusing it.

Good luck.

I don't think a missused word was ever reclaimed, in any language. But while you are on that path, can you do something about "hacker" too? (Or maybe you should start with the easier, less valuable "ordinary" and "literaly".)

> The original meaning of agile, the manifesto, was doing it right.

My impression of the original Agile project (C2), from reading their wiki, was that it was an attempt to make their customer feel really bad that they were incapable of lasting a week without changing the requirements.

Also, didn't the project fail? Though, in a way where it actually got partially deployed.

In much nicer terms as he worked with them, that's the gist of what the article is about. Did you read it?

Yes. It doesn't deserve nicer terms. I've seen companies destroyed, careers destroyed and armies of consultants make off with people's livelihoods on a false promise.

For ref, I've migrated to the side of thing where I get pulled in (Harry Tuttle style) to sort companies out after they've been pillaged by these asshats.

So of course, you'll never see the Agile/Scrum implementations that are successful.

But a good question is who and why brought those asshats?

senior management, of course

Exactly that. The department which is not immune to marketing and is immune to rational thinking.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't organize themselves, and need some sort of structure. So maybe they're not so suitable for agile development, and maybe you shouldn't hire them, but that really limits the labour pool, and in the end, someone is going to hire those people. We still need a way to make those people productive.

And they should be hired; they're often perfectly competent programmers, testers, etc, just not so good at working effectively with this kind of agility.

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