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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

But is there evidence the force is actually multiplied in practice?

Pretty sure there isn't, otherwise FAANG would enforce it top down. They already enforce other practices top down like hiring etc, so if they had data saying that mandating Scrum would make the company X% more efficient they would absolutely do it.

It might be a force multiplier in other types of companies, but it probably isn't in FAANG style companies. Similar to how FAANG hiring can make sense to them but still be bad for typical companies.

I mostly agree with this perspective. Alternative agile methodologies may fit better with certain teams (e.g. Kanban, lean, etc) and so having a top down prescriptive method of "agile" doesn't make sense. Another perspective is that Scrum is agile training wheels. Once a team can discipline themselves enough to follow a Scrum workflow successfully for a significant period of time, it shows they are ready to follow a more flexible agile approach and therefore may no longer need a Scrum leader guiding the team.

> They already enforce other practices top down like hiring etc, so if they had data saying that mandating Scrum would make the company X% more efficient they would absolutely do it.

lol, as if their top-down hiring practices are at all driven by concerns for company efficiency.

Why do you think otherwise? The whole reason they do it is that they looked at other big companies and noticed that everyone ended up with mediocre workforces after a while, so they did this to avoid that scenario. Then as they grew bigger they could hire a lot of data people to analyse different methods and see how well different things works to optimize further. When you spend tens of billions on engineering salaries at a data driven company you will do that.

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