Comment by idopmstuff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idopmstuff | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people get way too bent out of shape about this kind of thing - user stories are just one way to communicate, and you definitely don't have to use them. I use user stories, technical requirements and visual designs to communicate the needs - which of them I go with depends on the particular context of the product and team.

If you work at a place that requires strict adherence to user stories or whatever other bit of methodology you find repugnant, then either try to change the way things are done or quit and find a place that suits you better. I get the impression from some posts on HN that people are toiling away under Agile regimes for years, letting rage build inside them at the indignities of having to estimate/write user stories/whatever else.

If you feel that way, consider joining an early stage startup - there isn't strict adherence to much of anything, and you can have a lot of impact on how things are done. You might take a pay cut, but if you hate the day-to-day so much, that's probably worth it. If you won't leave somewhere that you hate working because they're paying you $500k and you don't want to make less money, I don't think you really deserve sympathy anyway.

> I get the impression from some posts on HN that people are toiling away under Agile regimes for years

I think this is either because they believe all companies are like this, or they can't get hired elsewhere.

> If you feel that way, consider joining an early stage startup

This isn't the only option. There are plenty of teams to join tucked away in corners of big companies that have all kinds of different approaches. Or, another option is to just become a manager at a big company, and then you can lead your team towards whatever system you want. You don't have to work at a startup and live in poverty.

In my anecdotal experience, the "Agile regimes" most commonly take root at non-tech-industry companies pretending to be tech companies. A lot of those places treat software engineering like it's factory work.

One tell-tale sign of a horrible place to work is the "scrum masters." That could be another metric to guide the job search, too — if you see a scrum master, just say no.

There are articles about us being in the 'post-Agile' world.

https://riskfirst.org/misc/Post-Agile

In an industry where it's common for customers POCs to sometimes span 6 months, never mind 6 weeks, we expect product teams to deliver mana from heaven in 6 week sprints.

Big ticket deliverables just don't work that way any more.

We can't go back to pure waterfall. But pure Agile is also a fictitious goal.

Whatever methodologies we use today tend to be different strata all happening at the same time, only at different layers. Some things can be solved in a week or two. Others in a month or two. Or a quarter or two. And some jobs are so big they are literally super-annual deliverables. Each happening in parallel at the same time, but on different tracks or lanes of traffic, fastest to slowest.

Any extreme software development ideology is at least partly wrong and lacking the introspection to see that fact. Real world dev shouldn’t be subject to any ideology, in my opinion. Scrum master just sounds like some bad management books advice from the 80’s. In the real world, large projects and large teams are rarely efficient and focused, it’s the nature of the beast. One can only hope to improve upon what one has, not solve all problems with a hammer you happen to really like, because most problems aren’t nails

> We can't go back to pure waterfall. But pure Agile is also a fictitious goal.

What leads you to believe that "pure Agile is also a fictitious goal"? Unless you're using weasel words to refer to Agile in a way you can cherry pick claims to argue that practices that work aren't Agile because they are not "pure", Agile is ubiquitous and is used in countless success stories.

I don't really see what this adds to the conversation. It basically boils down to "stop whining and leave".

If we can't talk about bad practices, we can't fix them.

Corollary: how do you get someone who has partaken of the kool-aid to recognize that a practice involving their pet dogma is bad? In my experience, kool-aid drinkers (regardless of the dogma in question) always go hammer and tongs to defend their position. Any questions as to the goodness of certain dogmatic practices -- or the lack thereof -- are considered to be personal attacks, and summarily dealt with.

A similar thing can be said about those who see certain ideas as dogmatic. They're so resistant to hearing what the categorize as dogmatic thinking, they often can't hear good ideas.

User stories are great, when they make sense and the people reading them and writing them agree on the methodology. Agile is fine for those who like the model but so is (trigger warning: anti patterns being complimented ahead) waterfall. I prefer Kanban but it works well for my team I'm ways agile doesn't. I like it so much, I talk about it. I also like user stories but for a different use case: SLOs. Surprise! I subscribe to the SLOs.

Any of the things I just said could be portrayed as one form of dogma or another. It's only a bad thing when people don't align. When people share or at least agree to a methodology, they're great.

Methinks the burden of proof lies on the person making the claim. The dogmatic aspect enters the picture when questions are fobbed off with non-answers. Do note that the discussion is _not_ about personal preferences, but about "best practices".

> Corollary: how do you get someone who has partaken of the kool-aid to recognize that a practice involving their pet dogma is bad?

What leads you to believe that just because you disagree with something then it's automatically a dogma and bad? If you're trying to debate the merits of an idea and you start your argument by dismissing and discrediting proponents, regardless of what they might say or how weak your points are, and to make matters worse you admit the proponents of said idea invariably win over your arguments, doesn't that suggest that there's some likelihood you're in the wrong?

Touchy much?

If you read the rest of my post, you'll see that "questions as to the goodness of practices, or the lack thereof, are treated as personal attacks". There are other symptoms too, like questions being answered with non-answers.

Again, when someone claims that their way is the true way, and that everyone else _must_ follow the one true way, I believe that the burden of proof lies on them. Your opinions might vary!

> It basically boils down to "stop whining and leave".

I think you missed a branch in your case statement.

GP comment stated:

> either try to change the way things are done or quit and find a place that suits you better.

To my reading, "do this thing about it, or do this other thing about it " doesn't resolve down to "quit whining".

To merely "quit whining" implies sullen, passive, acquiescence.

Whereas the person you replied to framed it as a choice between two paths, neither of which involved passive acceptance.

Putting aside the oversimplication of what I wrote, "stop whining and leave" is precisely the way that you fix this problem and many similar ones. If Agile (or whatever component of it) is horrible, then vote with your feet and go to a place that doesn't use it. If using Agile makes your company unable to recruit good engineers, then the cost of it is clearly going to outweigh the benefits, and so it'll go away. Writing blog posts about how user stories are terrible, on the other hand, won't change anything.

> I don't really see what this adds to the conversation. It basically boils down to "stop whining and leave".

I see it as adding a solution to a blog post describing the perception of a problem.

Isn't there a catchphrase of sorts that reads something like "either change company culture or change company"? If you can't change the company culture and you feel strongly about that, why do you think it's not in your best interest to change your life for the better? Sometimes you and your job are a bad fit, and there is no way around it.

> I feel like people get way too bent out of shape about this kind of thing (...)

I wouldn't read too much into it. At best the author is just venting steam, and at worst he's complaining about things he doesn't quite understand. The blog post reads like a rant to get things out of the author's chest without much care on coherence or intent to express well founded opinions.

Sometimes stuff that random people say online is just that.

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