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Comment by aard | Hacker News Reader

How about letting engineers do what everyone else at the company does? Get together in teams, divide up the work, and check back later. You are asking for an alternative thing to mandate upon engineers from above -- something formal. I say, just let engineers manage themselves. No mandated process.

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Scrum, Waterfall, XP, Kanban - these are the tools engineers created for managing their work. I've never worked at a place where the way your engineering team manages their work has ever been mandated.

I've never met a business stakeholder who gives two shits how engineering manages their work - all they care about is when am I going to get it and how much is it going to cost me - and how accurate and reliable are these answers?

As far as letting engineers manage themselves - if the scope of work is small enough and there's no dependence on other teams or vendors delivering needed components then sure, do whatever you want. It's often inappropriate to apply much rigor to such small projects. Skunk work projects can also be managed that way.

This is sort of true, but it's common for engineering management to force Scum on their engineers. It's not being forced by a VP but it is still forced.

"Engineering Management" is still engineering. Nobody outside of the engineering department is telling the engineering department how to manage their work. This is what it means for engineers to manage their own work.

If your engineering department is being heavy-handed in how they apply project management to all their projects, then that's on them. But realize it is their job to ensure the work is getting done.

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