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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is an "agile" operation. A few years of "agile", and they'll be burned-out husks. Then you fire them and hire the next round of naive kids.

Another article cited today on HN, from the Paris Review, says it better:

"When you begin programming, one of the attractions is the certainty that you will never run out of things to learn. But after a few years of working in a corporate cubicle under exploitive managers, after one deadline too many, after family and age and a tiring body, learning the ins and outs of the latest library can feel like another desperate sprint on a nonstop treadmill."

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Anyone that hates Agile should watch this and at least be comforted by the fact that the community that came up with agile in the first place do recognize that there are problems and that it has become something different today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG4LH6P8Syk

Personally, I've gone from an organisation that was starting to implement what their version of agile was, back to one that has no such thing whatsoever. While I had my complaints about agile, it's sure as heck a lot better than having no agile practices at all, in my experience.

That's a good talk. Very slow start, and many long pauses, though. The important part starts around 00:31:00:

"You cannot have speed without quality. ... You cannot have speed while you are carrying technical debt."

With the Paris Review printing such things no wonder there is rampant ageism in the tech industry.

Political correctness is a dangerous tightrope.

You try to uncover X'ism in tech by pointing out ways in which common industry practice Y disadvantage people in group X. But to do this, you had to claim that people in group X would perform worse when practice Y was in effect. Oops! You're an X'ist yourself!

E.g. X = age, Y = working to deadlines/long hours, X = women, Y = speaking up in meetings, etc.

Agile and learning continuously is not something that only programmers out of college can do. You can still do it while having a family, even.

That's how I feel and I'm unmarried and not yet 30.

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