16 thoughts on “BTW

  1. Cris (without an H)

    My experience of Agile was the Christian Rock of software development: a huge corporate entity desperately grasping for some superficial trapping that will make it more like those little powerless independent entities it envies.

    1. cleek Post author

      yes, that is exactly it.

      giant company realizes it’s turning into a rigid, soul-crushing IBM-style machine, decides to spice things up with agile! .

      and since that didn’t work out, we’re now in some hellish hybrid of agile terminology and waterfall practices where everyone is a slave to Jira.

      arrrrrgh!

      1. Rob Caldecott

        You just described my company, Jira and all.

        We laid off all our scrum masters but are still doing agile apparently.

  2. Rob Caldecott

    “We want to foster a startup mentality!”

    But we’re a huge American corporate. We couldn’t be further away from a startup if we tried. Something not working? Throw another manager in the mix. Quality problems? Don’t release so often and hire more people in India. Because everyone in software knows that the more people you throw at a project the faster it gets done, right?

  3. Rob Caldecott

    Meanwhile all the really productive stuff is the result of teams of one or two people that work outside of the Jira straitjacket. But don’t tell the management.

  4. Rob Caldecott

    I’m lucky. I’m an enterprise architect that gets too build the tooling and components that the sitting teams use to get shit done. But I don’t use Jira and I don’t work using sprints. I shut myself away and code. But I’m a dinosaur and it won’t last forever.

    1. HinTN

      Now I understand why they started advertising on NPR. They suck and thus need to get their product in front of the uninformed.

  5. Rob Caldecott

    Sorry for hijacking this thread. And no disrespect to our colleagues in India but that time difference and the language/cultural differences are really really hurting productivity. We tried teams with a mix of people from USA/UK/India and it’s just impossible to get it right.

  6. Rob Caldecott

    We have some teams in India that work UK or West Coast hours. Imagine that. The time difference between the West Coast and India is 13 hours. They get to work at 9PM and work all night. Would US or UK staff put up with that? Would they bollocks. It’s shit.

    1. cleek Post author

      we have teams in China, but i’ve yet to interact with them directly.

      i do get (what seems like) a lot of customer issues with companies in the UK, so i have to wrangle conference calls with people in the UK, east coast US and west coast US. sometimes the UK customers have teams in India, so we have conference calls that span the globe.

      but they’re all based on my work hours :)

      nuts

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