My company recently started working in Agile. I’ve been in pseudo-Agile environments before, aka a bunch of little waterfalls that management wants to think is Agile. This post gave me some food for thought.

I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again:

Which absolute fucking maniac in this room decided that the most sensible thing to do in a culture where everyone has way too many meetings was schedule recurring meetings every day?

‘m going to explain this very slowly in the desperate hopes that you can understand something that isn’t on a Confluence page if it is delivered at a sufficiently glacial pace, and if you demonstrate sufficient comprehension, I will refrain from operating this guillotine.

You’re agreeing to everything because your stakeholders are whiny children with a deficient understanding of business and no one can say no to them.

You have outsourced your thinking to people that don’t have brains.

If you’re going to insist on overpromising and otherwise being utterly incompetent, just choose to do it with a method that doesn’t involve all the meetings and ceremony. Like, literally just join a more considerate cult and we won’t have to do pistols at sunset. This is a very good offer! You don’t even have to start being useful!

The three best managers I’ve ever worked for, with the most productive teams (at large organizations, so don’t even start on the excuses about scale) just let the team work and were there if I needed advice or a discussion, and they afforded me the quiet dignity of not hiring clowns to work alongside me.

Written on October 28, 2024