Deadlines and sprints are bad for you (2019)

This article puts to words my exact experience with Scrum. It has done irreversible damage to my mental health, which fortunately I learned how to manage with the help of a professional. Fortunately I get to work on a relatively more relaxed environment now, because I couldn't stand working in an environment like that another day, let alone the rest of my life.

I've yet to read an article like this where the person had experienced Scrum done properly.

Here's a check point that will tell your organisation if you've adopted Scrum properly:

You fail to deliver everything you bring into the sprint backlog 50% of the time and this is not a problem and is accepted.

I’ve had some bosses who felt very strongly about finishing the sprint commitment, so I’ve learned to get good at it, often by spinning off portions of a ticket into a new one. Yeah it’s just shifting work around, but if that’s the game to keep people happy, that’s fine by me.

I’ve been programming for about 30 years now - since long before “agile” and “sprints”. The mentality of those in charge has never changed: if you were smart, you’d be able to state immediately, with 100% accuracy, how long it will take to program something. You got it wrong, so you’re stupid. This mentality ate at me for a long time - in fact, I was terrified because I felt so incompetent yet I wasn’t qualified to do anything else. One day I realized that nobody I worked with could “estimate” accurately either - and I had become the person most other people came to when they had a problem they couldn’t solve. That gave me a lot of peace.

My take from the article is to not sacrifice good engineering principles (e.g. code quality, tests, scalability, performance...) and re-scope, adjust number of feautures, etc when needed. That’s just the nature of engineering. As Product owners get more experienced (contextually) and better communicate with Engineers, scopes get better and sprints are more accurate.

Can sprints be used as highger level structure grouping pieces of work together, without any hard deadline involved? I think that happens in some organisations, with no or soft deadlines.

What’s the alternative?