It's the other shit people pack on top of calling it Scrum that usually sucks ass. I've found the best way to fight back against shitty-Scrum is not to fight it, but actually feign puritanical allegiance to the actual doctrine, it's much less repulsive. I makes you look like less of contrarian and it's easier to make an impact that way.
I don't want to make an impact in any organization where experienced engineers are treated like children.
So Timmy, what did you do today? Ah, cool, make sure to raise your hand if you make a boo boo, and involve your little buddy Mike, okay? Mhm, thanks.
Hey guys, let's theorize how difficult it would be to make a tree house? Would it be 1 candy? 2 candy? 11 candies? No, that's too much, let's agree on 5, parents are eagerly waiting for the tree house to be built. Okay? Thanks. Well, 2 hours passed, time to tuck you in bed.
Hey children, this is Jake, he is a bit slow in the head. He can't read yet but I have decided to make him the one deciding what is most important in your reading curriculum. I also have decided to talk only with Jake and check only with him what is your reading progress. If you haven't read all the books in the curriculum by (deadline made up by the first number which comes to Jake, and he can count max to 3), it's your fault, not Jake's cause let's be honest, he is a tool and he can't read. But if you all read your books, Jake gets cake.
I believe all those methodologies were invented because manager types are terrified of depending on people who are different from them and who they don't understand. So they decided to embed one of their own business types (who also has 0 qualifications to judge whether the engineers are doing a good work) to make sure the engineers are not playing ping pong all day.
Yep, stand-ups and retros literally feel like presenting my homework and saying what I've "learned" today most of the time. I've found myself as the ic that must speak and present on behalf of the group and this is all too accurate.
Very true, after being told many times “that’s not what it says in the Scrum guide, we need to do it like …” by a Scrum Master and a PO I decided to read it. I was astounded to find that the guide says very little and they were just using it as a weapon to push their own controlling desires on to the team. All the devs read it and the next time they used that line we asked them what it actually does say, they just made stuff up, clearly they had never read it either.
Yep. In pretty much every team I was in, devs would always push for "their own version of Scrum" that differed from the PO, which always ended up being much closer to vanilla Scrum than whatever some crazy PO or Scrum Master wanted.
Also funny: when the PM is is actually good, you barely have to discuss "the process". Almost any shit just fucking works. Who knew.
You don’t have to use Rails, Boost, Spring, or Scrum-XP-Rational-Waterfall. Sometimes back to the basics of the tool is needed, but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
Let's throw the guide as well, cause it's the people reading the guide who made the ecosystem.
If one is faced with a guide that essentially tells them: communicate well, don't be a douche, improve constantly, and do hard and smart work, and they are shocked by the guide's revelations, maybe we went somewhere wrong along the way.
I strongly doubt it’s the people who read the guide. It’s the people who learn about it from word of mouth that produce Jira-driven behemoths. Really, try the guide. It’s minimal.
I'll just say that if you look at Scrum itself there is really nothing objectionable to it.
https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
It's the other shit people pack on top of calling it Scrum that usually sucks ass. I've found the best way to fight back against shitty-Scrum is not to fight it, but actually feign puritanical allegiance to the actual doctrine, it's much less repulsive. I makes you look like less of contrarian and it's easier to make an impact that way.