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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had."

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. Nowadays you have to attend meetings and always have somebody breathe down your neck. Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works.

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Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions.

I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

Yeah and it doesn't. In practice, it just enables managers to become even more useless by blaming devs for their poor project management.

Agile projects can still fail obviously, but when they do they tend to fail in smaller ways (eg 4 weeks late instead of 6 months late, or almost hit the requirements instead of completely missed). That's a massive win.

And in the process, you burn out your devs, and have constant churn. How late are things happening in the long term, because teams prioritize the Agile rituals over cultivating long term technical excellence, craftsmanship, and team satisfaction? The way many teams practice Agile has a huge opportunity cost that's very difficult to measure, but still real.

My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.

I am currently succeeding at this failure.

You just didn’t do enough stand ups /s

Exactly. Teams that drink the Agile Kool-Aid seem to fail and build the wrong things just as often.

Besides, why can't we be lower case agile, and avoid all these meetings anyway? I write very detailed PRs with high level summaries, screenshots and videos, explanation of risks and trade offs, and deeper technical dives. Everything you need to know about what I'm working on is literally right there. I push up code early and often, it's not like I just want to sit in an isolated cave for 6 months and then emerge with a finished product.

They failed because you were overmanaged and leadership didn’t trust people to do the right thing. We were very agile back then, iterated quickly towards the goal but we didn’t do rituals, stand ups and other ceremonies. We just talked to each other and stakeholders.

God, the thought of being treated like a skilled professional and trusted to actually do your job, rather than a code monkey who has to report their progress every single day on how many of the endless "user stories" they got done the previous day...

I also started I the 90s and now that you mention it I don’t think I had any meetings at my first job at a small software company. And even after we were acquired I still think we had at most semi monthly meetings.

My first job with daily standups was 2008 or so, and I just realized I left less than a year after they were implemented.

In short, I probably had less meetings in my first ten years in software than I did last quarter.

> Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works.

That said, the industry matured so much that experimentation that fold up as planned are generally doomed by large structural issue in the approach. 20 years ago, tweaking and digging your way in trench was the expected path since having to work around implementation details and bugs happened whatever you wanted to get done.

We are still fiddling endlessly with edge cases in Kubernetes or AWS. I don’t see much difference.

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