I’m meeting up in a few weeks with a close friend I haven’t seen in around a decade, who went hard into scrum and project management in the intervening years.
How can I cause the most psychological damage and work flashbacks in a single sentence?
I’m meeting up in a few weeks with a close friend I haven’t seen in around a decade, who went hard into scrum and project management in the intervening years.
How can I cause the most psychological damage and work flashbacks in a single sentence?
Some of these are more than just one sentence, sorry.
“I just do what I’m told. That’s why I’m paid the big bucks.”
“Yeah, I quit <previous position> because the management wouldn’t step in to help me with <problem>, so the team was just completely run by the biggest personalities.”
“They don’t pay me enough to be on call outside business hours.”
“Yeah, I never turn my camera on in Zoom meetings.” (Particularly good if you have a remote position. Triggers scrum people because “Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication”.)
“Oh yeah, all the tickets where I work are super detailed. Really helps avoid distractions like having to go talk to the person who filed the ticket.” (Have you heard agile people “working software over comprehensive documentation” or “a ticket is a placeholder for a conversation”?)
“Why? Oh, I don’t know why they wanted me to do <such-and-such feature>. I just did it because they asked me to.”
“How is the business supposed to plan without the dev team coming up with an estimate in days up front?”
“Yeah, we’ve gotten better with our daily scrum meetings. They’re only like an hour now-a-days.”
“Yeah, we do demos every sprint. They go a lot better now that product doesn’t attend any more.”
“Yeah, <name of most senior dev> is the person who always works on the sprint goal. Everyone else works on whatever they’re a SME in.”
“Yeah, we missed the Big Deadline™. It was <intern>'s fault.”
“I think it would be better for the company to outsource its IT department.”
“Our JIRA board columns and swim lanes are standardized across the department ever since the JIRA Enforcement department took that over.”
And this next bit is just me editorializing. I personally have mixed feelings about agile in general. I’ve seen it completely disregarded to great peril, and I’ve also seen it taken extremely seriously in ways that actively cause problems. (Problems bad enough to be dealbreakers that prompted me to leave that particular employment position.) I also have great respect for the agile coach at that place, but there were definitely things he did that pissed me off too.
So, in the debate of agile vs. not-agile, I guess I think what’s best is for everyone to just appoint me supreme dictator for life so I can teach them all the right way to do things. 🫡