Yep. It has been the case forever. The reason we keep/kept getting new tools is because laymen would exhaust their capabilities in the old tools and started requiring a developer once they need THAT ONE feature.
I find that the current way we do Scrum is way more waterfall-ish than what we had before. Managers just walked around and talked, and knew what each person was doing.
We traded properly working on problems for the Kafkaesque nightmare of modern development.
Thing is, Scrum isn't supposed to be something you do for long.
As you no doubt know, Agile is ultimately about eliminating managers from the picture, thinking that software is better developed when developers work with each other and the customer themselves without middlemen. Which, in hindsight, sounds a lot like my previous comment, funnily enough, although I didn't have Agile in mind when I wrote it.
Except in the real world, one day up and deciding no more managers on a whim would lead to chaos, so Scrum offered a "training wheels" method to facilitate the transition, defining practices that push developers into doing things they normally wouldn't have to do with a manager behind them. Once developers are comfortable and into a routine with the new normal Scrum intends for you to move away from it.
The problem: What manager wants to give up their job? So there has always been an ongoing battle to try and bastardize it such that the manager retains relevance. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we as a community have finally wisened up to it and now most pretty well recognize it for what it is instead of allowing misappropriation of the "Agile" label. The bad news is that, while we're getting better at naming it, we're not getting better at dealing with it.
I don’t think people invested in Scrum believe it’s “temporary” or ever marketed it as such.
And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers. It sounds counter intuitive, but agile is about autonomy and lack of micro-management, not lack of leadership.
If anything, the one thing those two things reject are “product managers” in lieu of “product owners”.
> And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers.
The Agile Manifesto is pretty vague, I'll give you that, but the 12 Principles makes it quite clear that they were thinking about partnerships. Management, of any kind, is at odds with that.
> not lack of leadership.
Leadership and management are not the same thing. The nature of the social dynamic does mean that leadership will emerge, but that does not imply some kind of defined role. The leader is not necessarily even the same person from one day to the next.
Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men, which are a special kind of asshole you REALLY don't want to deal with.
Of course the best is to have both hard/soft skills, which is not as rare as people assume.
I know an example. A tech lead who would demand every single task to be done in certain ways and go through a certain processes. Invading other team's PRs and slack channels in order to pick fights because they weren't using his microservice or his libraries. Claiming "if you're not working like us, then you're wrong". Asking people to make PRs but then not approving. Before being demoted, his team had ZERO new features delivered for about a quarter. To me that's an example of slowing down teams.
But if you mean you want someone "brilliant, but an asshole", then I agree with you. I find that the common examples are more about incompetent managers who can't make the best of an IC who can work well in isolation.
I was answering to a specific post that doesn’t mention or imply it, plus I mention exactly what you say in my second paragraph which you most certainly missed.
A few writer friends even had a coffee mug with the alt+number combination for em-dash in Windows, given by a content marketing company. It was already very widespread in writing circles years ago. Developers keep forgetting they're in a massively isolated bubble.
Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for NOT going above and beyond.
I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you then have to burn political capital just to get people to fucking collaborate.
I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.
Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any developer is in shambles.
Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.
HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page.
I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage", but that is already against the rules/guidelines.
AFAIK, not a lot in HN gets outright removed. A decent amount of stuff will get flagged (and thus becomes invisible) especially when it's anywhere near politics.
But even in those spaces, few things end up actually being flagged even when the flames are burning hot.
reply