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Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we know this. We've known this for a long time actually. Nobody has yet proposed a better method.

- The agile manifesto is a smattering of nice-sounding principles with no suggestion of how to achieve/implement them.

- Scrum is an over-prescribed, subtly-complex theoretical workflow from the 1980s that was carried forward in the absence of any alternative other than Waterfall, in the same wake that created TDD, XP, and other now-ancient methods that we pay lip service to.

- DevOps came and went like a fart in the night. Was supposed to result in better outcomes for developing and running software projects. It's now literally a cargo cult. People who have no idea what it is, saying that they "do" it.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to work, by all means, someone please blog about it, I will read it. But please no more blog posts about how Agile or Scrum don't work. We have a decade of those posts already.

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I will say that my favorite new methodology can be found here: http://programming-motherfucker.com/

That's interesting actually, because it seems written by a contractor. Each role in each industry probably has its own warped methodology, which means a "better" methodology will need to be tailored to the role & industry. So we might need 40 methodologies, not one.

I find that very shortsighted. Unless you're working on your own pet project, programming is like 20% of the job. The other 80% are designing, communicating, and collaborating.

You will not ship complex business software by just "Programming, motherfucker". You will build the wrong thing if you talk to the customer for one hour and then go off on a mad programming frenzy for the next 6 months. You need constant iteration and feedback (agile), or completely up front agreed-upon specs (waterfall), to not build the wrong thing. Both of these are absolutely not programming.

Next to that:

> "We are tired of being told we're socialy awkward idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker."

This seems very stereotyping. Does anyone actually experience this? In this job market? The companies I've worked at are generally very happy to have a software engineering professional in the team, and are trusting of my word/estimations.

If someone would call me a "socially awkward idiot" at work, I'd have no problem finding another workplace that does respect me.

I think you're missing that the website is satire. So the hyperbolic reductions it presents serve a comedic purpose. The site is supposed to make you laugh, not 100% accurately depict reality. What makes it good comedy is that triggers a cognitive dissonance by distilling frustrations with different software methodologies into ever-so-slightly absurd statements that almost represent reality, but not quite.

> This seems very stereotyping. Does anyone actually experience this? In this job market?

While not directly spoken to engineers' faces, there are absolutely people who think this way. And I know former coworkers who have worked in pair programming shops, so that part is actually factual. Innocence is bliss, though (;

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