Unpopular Opinion

Agile is better if done properly, because it recognizes the fact that things change ovar time.

The problem is that business never does things properly. Setting artificial deadlines, or the opposite and being completely unguided

At it's core good agile is just shorter waterfall.

Also I would suggest code that can not handle requirement adjustments without becoming bad was never good to begin with. After all even waterfall finds things have changed at the end of development and the need for a new waterfall design afterwards

The problem is that it's a lot easier to implement agile poorly, than it is to implement it in a way that works.

You've essentially described what agile shouldn't be. The fact it's called agile, means people assume it just means you can change things whenever you want because that's being "agile". That isn't what agile methodology is meant to be. If that's what you're experiencing, then it's being done wrong. And it's frustrating because this is extremely common.

Waterfall can be just as bad. I've worked on plenty of waterfall projects only to spend months of my time on things that never see the light of day. Things change, and waterfall can rarely deal with change mid-project without starting over. It's completely dependent on the context of the work.

You haven't developed waterfall software have you.

Agile, SAFe, V model, waterfall. I've done a shit ton of different models of software development in my twenty years and each one leads to the same damn scope creep if you don't have leaders that push back against the customer and their expectations.

Every methodology sucks until you've moved to the new one but I will say that waterfall belongs in a special level of hell and at least with the agile framework I as a tech lead can push back more effectively against the acceptance of increases scope and push things to the right.

In my experience, it's better when people are accountable for defined stories without scope creep in the name of being agile. Or having entirely blank story descriptions "that will be filled in later" but make sure you add a story point!

Drop the dogma, know what you want, have a plan before each step starts, and work incrementally. Agile doesn’t account for the reality of programming for corporations, although I think it can still be useful in consulting contexts…. Maybe

Delivering small chunks of functionality is much better than waterfall in a major project. Big waterfall projects can spend so long in analysis and design that they get cancelled before they really get started.

The real issue with “Agile” is that short term task level estimates are pointless and inaccurate. You can’t estimate really until you understand the task, know who is doing it, their area of expertise and skill level, and how focused they will be without being pulled into other projects, questions etc.

Delivering regularly without micromanagement, removing scope to shorten deliveries, and providing very high level project estimates make more sense.

These methods are merely ways for management to hide their incompetence and/or micromanage the people who work.

what if I am both the developer and the project leader?

In my experience, Scrum (which is an implementation of Agile), if done properly, can work faster than the waterfall. Especially in bigger teams where you would have people on standby to wait for other things to be done. This lets the bickering Architecture team to bicker while we, the developers, implement the things that have been settled on. It's nasty when the Architecture team decides to change things already settled on because they are very detached from the rest of the development challenges, but at least we know who to put pressure on and why

No fucking argument here.