this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
460 points (96.0% liked)

Programmer Humor

32572 readers
96 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't read such books because they're almost always written by "consultant" grifters trying to make money off of proselytizing the latest bullshit corporate fad. And it's almost never based on actual data or a coherent theory, just gut feelings and a few anecdotes. My own felt experience and that of my colleagues is enough to confirm that it's all just corporate ideology bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You've never read the book in question... Because you think it's filled with gut feelings and anecdotes... Which you know, because of gut feelings and anecdotes...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Okay different question then. Judging from your stance towards scrum, I’m assuming you have worked with it before and it didn’t go so well? What parts were terrible and how was it set up if I may ask?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I worked in a large company where they used scrum and I just don't see where it ever helped me. Sure I guess forcing you to write down in Jira or whatever all the features/bugs you worked and will work on is good practice but I can do that without scrum too.

Daily standups were annoying and rarely ever helped people resolve issues that wouldn't have been resolved by just talking to some people directly, which you would have done anyway regardless of the standup meeting.

Sprint plannings were useless and amounted to either taking 3-4 things off the top of the backlog or the manager forcing their priority feature in the sprint.

Story point estimation was awful, everybody pretends the points aren't just measures of time but rather this complex abstract of multiple factors and whatnot but everybody still just converts them to time in their head anyway because of fucking course they do because the time estimate is the most important thing to know and the only truly objective measure of task difficulty.

In the end management gets what it wanted when it wanted no matter our complaints because that's how things work in privately owned companies. Scrum for the manager at worst just becomes another bureaucratic hoop they need to jump through to get what they want.

This is also the experience of my colleagues from other companies, and also I read a lot of similar anecdotes online. I have literally never heard anybody seriously claim scrum works great in their company that also wasn't personally invested in the ideology like a "professional" scrum master or consultant or whatever.