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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Right every step of every dev task is ticketed, scheduled and measures within a millimeter of its life in many orgs. The people working the tickets aren't to blame when it all goes wrong in the big picture.

I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning.

A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.

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> I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light

Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster.

From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.

It doesn’t sound like the type of iteration matters at all.

If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work.

The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time.

No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team.

I miss those days.

I've definitely been at shops that screen hard in interviews for people that should be given high trust & ownership, but then is agile product team micromanaged.

Sort of worst of both worlds. Everyone develops learned helplessness, checks out or leaves.

Right

If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre.

Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.

Generally you see stuff like this turn into bikeshedding and/or sales features only. Way too often I see companies push for new features because they will generate sales that in the long run cause more customer loss because performance and stability was neglected to implement them.

That's because it's done by folks not up to snuff.

Lots of that, going 'round, these days. Companies are firing (or driving off) all the people that can do it right.

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