yea, most agile "experts" don't know shit. They apply the same solution to everything they go to instead of realzing or understanding that very team if not individuals need their own plans and solutions to fit the team and individual. Fuckloads of meetings are basicly them admitting they don't know what they are doing, a few meetings are great for organization, but only when they are really needed.
problem is that if you just have no processes at all, you run the risk of becoming aimless. i think just a little bit of planning and retrospection can go a long way, but if you're having more than 2 hours of meetings per week you are probably doing something wrong. also, standups should just be done in an email or slack thread. no reason to stop what everyone's doing just so you can go talk about what you did yesterday and what you think you're going to do today (it's almost never actually what the day's fiasco will have for you)
Won’t say where or when. But I know of an HR director who on purpose would create conflicts. Things like go to one college, ask them about how they are doing and go dig. Dig for anything, any name attached to anything was plenty. Didn’t really matter what. Then go to that person and say something along the lines of “so x really hates you, why is that?” I’ll stop there but you see exactly where this is going I think. Anyway I know from the person that fired her that she had a lot of chances and was given every benefit of the doubt. The entire team improved as soon as she was gone.
Uncle Bob, Agile's inventor, in an interview said that Agile was meant for small teams to figure out what they were going to do individually, with no one over watching, but then a scrum master took the idea and ran with... something like it XD.
@@anthonyewell3470This exactly. SCRUM fails the very first principle of the Agile Manifesto: people over processes. SCRUM is practically the opposite of Agile, but somehow twisted to try to look like Agile. I'm not a huge Uncle Bob fan, but his Agile Manifesto seems like a natural and reasonable way to manage a small team of independently minded devs.
@@jeffwells641 In my experience the problem is that often the role of the SCRUM Master gets taken over by a project manager..and those are two very different things. Actually did a master thesis about risk management in agile methods and why it can fail, and basically either a tendency to lean towards traditional waterfall methods, witha PM in charge is the downfall, or on the opposite end of the scale just assuming agile equals a free for all, where you ignore the roles such as product owner, scrum master, etc, leads to chaos. You need someone prioritizing what is the most important right now(aka the next sprint), while keeping the long term goal in mind, but let the team figure out on their own how to make that happen(the scrum masters job to organize that within the team). But in reality it often ends up being management setting the goals for the project, but without any daily or weekly involvment, where it should be a product owner - they then assign a project manager, who ends up replacing the scrum master, which doesn't work because the whole idea of a scrum master is that he is a part of the team, works with the prohlems, understands complexities, but a PM is usually just an Excel champion. But in my opinion SCRUM can work, if you do it right, but the important part isn't all the meetings, estimation games, etc., it's the structure, where you have to put the right people in the right position, and a traditional project manager has NO role in it what so ever, he doesn't fit in anywhere.
@AlgoristHQ Notice how SCRUM is all about processes, then explain to me how that's "people over processes". Uncle Bob himself has said SCRUM is a perversion of his Agile Manifesto. They use the terms, but remove the spirit. What's worse is I totally believe the people following SCRUM believe they are following the spirit of the Manifesto, even when they do obviously aren't.
Except that isn't how it works. You can have the best website of the entire world, you'll still only get your meagre 1% sales of the 1% clicks. People don't buy at random.
@@christianconrad242 I get that, but it's a joke worthy of improvement. A good joke contains a hint of truth that nobody wants to say out loud mixed with offense and surprise. The joke doesn't really land because it doesn't reflect the unkind reality. Funnier would have been "I assigned the Sales Team to Customer Care and sales increased by X %", because Sales People usually are all about acquisitions and often neglect their already gathered contacts (they could have easier follow-up sales from).
@@Mayhzon the joke hit too close to home for some people... Considering you are taking this joke too seriously, I disagree with your premise. While there are plenty of things and services sold where they are in need of salespeople, there is an equal amount that don t. Plenty of products get put on Amazone straight from producer, plenty of items that were sold door to door in the past, get sold online without the salesman. Conclusion : the joke is funny.
@@Mayhzon whether you hate or love Tesla, they sold millions of cars without a single ad and they’re only now doing ads. If you make a product interesting enough, your buyers will sell it for you.
Agile developement was one of the worst experiences i ever made. After 3 months i quit, it was so annoying when people were fighting for it like a religion. We need a task, we need points, we need storys and milestones bla bla bla. Leave me alone, I just want to code.
No! You have to spend 2 hours filing out paperwork and jumping through hoops before you can start work. Starting your task right away is inefficient! How will management make it seem like they are necessary?
If you "just want to code", then that means you need someone to micro manage you. While I hate the bloody meetings I will take them over micromanagement any day.
Oh I wish I had the power to do that, I go to so many useless meetings its not even funny. But the higher ups has their rules about having "update meetings" every x amount of time with no exception. "absolutely nothing new happened to this dormant project since our last meeting" is not a reason to not spend 3hrs of everyone's day to have a meeting about not really changing anything.
@@RenaxTM91I have a meeting each week with my boss. Sometimes it's productive and long, sometimes it's short and productive. It's not useless at any point. :)
@@assortedsubscriptions4012, a few of us got pretty close - at least close enough I will take it over waterfall any day. Now and then I need to deal with an idiot that wants to measure productivity or care that all tasks have hours in them, but once you bombard them with enough "why?" and "how will measuring X not break Y? I have managed to fight them off so far.
Exactly what I did after starting my own web agency. Triple the salary, awesome clients and full freedom. Jared should figure out that he can create his own startup.
hey, that's a great idea. manage your own company, rely on your senses to make, well, sensible decisions, instead of some flashy buzzword terminology that makes things sound good on paper to appeal to some board of shareholders. in the long run, management is still necessary for the scaling of an organization, but i'd never trust anyone to manage people to do the work that they don't know how to do themselves. only when people have had practical experience will buzzwords stop being buzzwords because people actually know what they're talking about. only then will management be effective and not just a destructive collective that can only talk the talk, but gets in the way of any meaningful progress.
@@ethanfreeman1106 I've got a good brand and existing network of steady high paying projects. It's built around digital nomadism, work anywhere you want, we don't care as long as you deliver. You keep the lion share of the income you generate. Don't be a Jared and make the company rich, make yourself rich.
Reminds me of a hospital i worked in, back when i was a Psych NP. We had 3 meetings every day, an hour and half, to two hours long each, and each meeting they complained we were taking too long to get our reports done. One guy finally had enough and said "so, you meant to say, we are running 3-6 hours behind on paperwork. Funny isnt it, that thats exactly how much time we spend in these meetings?
A couple of sprints back, I got almost no work for the entire sprint cause the testers wouldn't be able to test my tickets. The scrum master and PO told us that we can't do more work cause we'd violate our definition of done. It was GLORIOUS!
This is. Kind of just the difference between a Large corporate business that has to go through a month of squabbling and waiting for everyone to give a green light. Versus a much smaller team/Business who all trust one another to do their given job. Just look at gaming industries. Takes a Studio of 1000+ people months/Years to make changes versus a team of 10 friends in a basement to make an amazing experience and fix it each week.
The bigger the team, the more you can do. However it also makes doing things more complex because you just added so many more failure points and clear communication becomes exponentially more difficult. You do absolutely start getting diminishing returns at some point.
@@CreativityNullyeah definitely if you look at the amount of work done on Diablo 3 once it got pushed to afaik a single dev on the legacy team, he got more done than what the previous team did with management interference. Though on the other hand you have path of exile that had a bug where monsters were more tanky cause they work fast and 2 devs increased the toughness of monsters.
This is pretty accurate to the way I work best - I prefer waterfall for organization and sanity reasons, but I appreciate the responsiveness that agile tries so hard to have. So, I generally develop/maintain "Agile-ly" (see need/fill need), but my planning and documentation is rooted in waterfall.
Yall realize Thor will be seeing this? If yall don't know who I am talking about just move on. Just mean you're not that special since you don't get my inside joke.
As a software dev, if I had to do everything through Jira the company would be a worse position then it is. I have done MANY things off the "Jira" books that save time and money, or saved grace with a customer, because it didn't have to go through the whole jira bs.
In my team, the EM routinely tries to remove unnecessary meetings so we have daily standup of 30 min and retro and assigning task meeting of 1 hour for a whole sprint.
Man, I love that kind of pm especially in my side job. I just fuck around, waste time & use those time in my own startup. 5hrs meeting? Hell yeah, I'm here for their money to support my own business. I can just mute myself & ignore the entire meeting and do something useful meanwhile
@@harithsami843notice periods don't always have enough time. Your standard (at least in US) is two weeks. At a small company (from personal experience) I have way too much tribal knowledge to get that over to someone else in that timeframe. Two weeks is just enough time to get my current project over to them but proper documentation would greatly assist them getting up to speed quickly on all the other stuff
Based on my experience, scrum is endless meetings, people competing about putting as few points as possible on each task, never learning from prior estimations mistakes... shoddy and bug ridden code that is supposed to be refactored and fixed later, but usually turns into never. Always stressed out about not being able to meet deadlines because the serioulsy underestimated tasks and total frustration that I never got any actual work done. I had 3-5 meetings every day. My only save was that I came a lot earlier than the rest of the team so I had a few blessed hours before the meetings started where I actually could get some stuff done. The funniest thing was when I decided to just shut up during a planning meeting... normally I was always the negative one, arguing about how tasks should have more points, but this time I just sat there and listened... in the end they had managed to plan an entire six month project in a single two week sprint :D The confusion when the meeting was about to end and I asked if anyone actually believed in it was palpable... and the silence when I pointed out that they had just managed to plan a six month project into a single sprint could have been cut with a knife :D I woiuld have to be desperate indeed to even look at a job where they say they work "agile" today... to me scrum/agile is nothing short of a horror show.
This guy is entirely "huh, duh, I don't understand working as a team". Also completely not understanding what story points are for, which is separating time estimates from individuals and giving your TEAM an amount that it can complete in a given time period.
@@plukerpluckstory points are dumb, there should be prioritised and deprioritsed tasks, estimates are silly as they all have uncertainty, should be roughly same effort size, ie a 3 day ticket. Jira is dumb, agile is dumb. Creates hours of work that could be completed with one meeting per week for status update. Agile is just an expression of non-trust and favouratism.
@@ravenecho2410 What is a three day ticket? Is it 3 days when the new hire works on it? Or when the senior dev picks it up? Does one person take 3 days on a 3 day ticket, or more because they have other meetings and trainings? Story points account for this. They are related to time, but not actually time. The uncertainty is WHY you use story points. It averages out over a block of time (often a sprint) Sprints are designed specifically to bring the client(s) in more closely during development. The intent is to deliver something every sprint. If you're not delivering something every week, you're not working in sprints, you're just sticking tasks into weird buckets. Stop that. Prioritised and deprioritised tasks is just kanban, which is also agile, just without sprints. Kanban doesn't need story points, but it can be useful in giving long-term estimates to management, which is a requirement unless you want your company to go bankrupt. As for wasted time, that can happen in any flow. I've done old-school waterfall projects that still had a daily meeting so the manager could know what was done each day. If you're wasting time, then stop the meetings. That's literally part of the agile methodology. Adapt to your team.
Repeat with me: INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS OVER PROCESSES AND TOOLS INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS OVER PROCESSES AND TOOLS INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS OVER PROCESSES AND TOOLS
I once fixed a typo & punctuation mistake on one of our intake forms we used with clients that was also client facing. I got politely gripped out on the fact I didn't make a f-n jira task for it, took me all 10sec to fix. They hadn't noticed it for 3 years and wouldn't have if 8 hadn't said anything
Man, replacing bad manager with a good one is just day and night difference. I had a chance to be that person who walked in after years of decay. People were hungry to change / actually do their job. And yes, you don't need a PM or a manager in every single unit or team. You need to think before assigning one.
The only thing I agree is that you shouldn't push code without a task. It keeps good tracking of what is being done. Anything else is optional. And of course, do not have 5 hours of meetings!
So I worked with an Agile process as part of my team. I was part of the team for two years and due to staff turnover I ended as the second most senior team member. At no point did I ever understand what the fuck Agile was. I did learn that if you ever hear a platform is an MVP, run like hell away
Just built a new tool for my team. I'm a dispatcher not a developer (by title). Half of the dispatchers I sent it to responded with positive feedback. The other half just didn't respond. Management heard about it and told me to shut it down because there are "ways we need to do things" corporate America is a joke
At my job, it once took like 2 weeks to get new whiteboard pens, while the manager responsible for providing said whiteboard pens complained we did not keep the whiteboard updated with process interruptions.
The only downside is when you're so direct in your pipeline that testing is done in production. Part a working + part b working doesn't always mean part a+ part b will work
Team lead: "hey did you get started on the work i gave you this morning yet?" Me: "dennis... Ive sat next to you in meetings all day... When have you seen me sit at my desk?"
