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I once worked at a place full of Agile cultists, including a bunch of "certified" "coaches." They spent about 1/4th of the time in planning meetings, retros, grooming sessions, sending emails about updating percentage complete on jira tickets, etc.

They made some of the dumbest technical decisions I have ever seen, were perpetually rewriting things, changing core APIs, breaking other parts of the system. The stuff barely worked, and this was after 5 years and dozens and dozens of developers.

The place was so dysfunctional, you could not even create your own branch in source control. You had to request it from the IT group that maintained the "enterprise" SCM server. The IT groups were doing their own form of Agile, so these requests could take weeks.

Truly awful.



Heh centralized teams to request something as simple as a branch to commit code... or to deploy a feature, and not at scale or anything, where “services” are a simple CRUD API with like 4 people who are customers.

Bloated IT organizations. Reminds me of working in the energy industry. Made up jobs, unmotivated workers, and incompetent management including the CTO. C level exec magazines says to literally eat shit? Here, let’s eat warm turds everyone.


Seems to me that place would have been dysfunctional with or without their dysfunctional form of ”agile”.


You are correct. The Agile-esque nature of the place was just added icing on the cake, so to speak.


I've worked in several places that each had their own unique snowflake take on "Agile".

With Agile being constant, the experiences were wildly different between them.

The key variable to whether they were dysfunctional or not wasn't Agile. It was the quality of the people in management.




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