I hate scrum
I hate stand up
I hate sprints
Fuck Toyota
How have we taken the most autistic job and tacked a stupid, worthless, autistic unfriendly process on to it? (the answer of course is capitalism)
I want to quit but I can’t get another job and even if I could it would just be more of this shit.
“AGILE”™®© wouldn’t be so bad if any of it weren’t a manager tool. Like all “project management” paradigms AGILE™®© is driven by sales, marketing, and business types. There is a lot of worthwhile “Project management” frameworks and tools, but because of the stupid profit motive and other capital-driven nonsense all of them turn into them into eternal sprints into oblivion.
No time for retrospective analysis, to build quality worthwhile solutions, no time to do the “Agile” stuff really.
It’s really stupid that software has been MBA’ed into whatever the current abomination it has currently become. “Agile” assumes that developers have autonomy to create great software, build meaningful relationships with stakeholders, and even have the power to say no. Of course, AGILE™®© removes that on purpose. AGILE™®© is a tool for managers and bosses, not for the actual people who do the actual work.
As always, the capital holders and their minions love to wear the skin of systems or frameworks “benefit” workers but as always they are just the skin of the thing not actually a thing that would help workers.
Oh one more thing, the rise of AGILE™®©/SCRUM™®© has created so many “Bullshit Jobs”. David Graber really nailed when he described “Duct tapers”, software development in most shops is just duct taping problems because there is “never time” to actually fix the problem or address the root because we have to sprint on to something else.
Only a stupid system like neoliberal capitalism would allow for the creation of “Agile Industrial Complex”. The amount of branding and certifications and all that nonesense is such a waste of time and resources.
A place I work on data stuff continuously shoots themselves in the foot by not fixing things despite being in a pretty critical industry where the things their software fails to do would logically imperil the entire business. But by all means convert the 10 year old sign-in flow to a react app…
I think about this all the time. Before I got laid off from my MEGACORP software gig, we always had time for stupid bullshit, but never any time to fix the core issues in our software that was like years old. Delivering new things is the only thing that matters in most firms. Fixing existing things is a negative which is so goddamn backwards.
I worked on such a project in my old job. The application was the core product of their business and it was a sprawling mess that had evolved from constantly adding layers to a small proof of concept application.
There was never time for anything other than adding new features. You never got to fixing the architectural flaws or streamlining things. We couldn’t even fix the ugly and confusing UI that every customer was complaining about.
A former co-worker once joked “we should find a way to make fixing infrastructure a new feature”. Fixing the giant holes in our code-base as a service.
And the sign-in flow was working just fine, right? Slap a new coat of CSS paint on it and move onto something that is actually broken!
At my workplace I am the duct taper. I’m not a real developer myself - I’m a person with development skills whose job is to clean up the mess that the real developers mindlessly create in their rush to get cards from one side of the screen to the other.