ResearchCode

That has more to do with discrimination against the unemployed.

Stores existed before the MBA, but MBAs could be why food prices are up 30% since last year.

The person who does not do any deep work probably gets automated away first. Doing simpler office tasks with a lot of context switching sounds like something for an LLM.

Don't forget the 3 month - 2 year probation period. You're at-will for a large part of your average tenure for a quarter of the US pay. US might be more progressive than large part of Europe in some regards, like protection against discrimination of people with criminal records or those with different political opinions.

Retail or manual labor in US is probably worse.

They're the open office plan of project management. Tech workers have open offices, other professionals don't. I think we're just treated more poorly in some regards. Sprints tend to create lots of of tech debt and they're used for micromanagement. You want to work in 3-6 month projects, not 2 week arbitrary deadlines.

Not sure your average PhD at Microsoft Research or Jane Street would put up with them. Linux Kernel developers don't use them. Mathematicians don't story point conjectures.

But creating CRUD apps for a non-tech enterprise, you might have lots of "sprints" but no software is delivered reliably or high in quality.

Unnecessary overhead and micromanagement. You don't need "sprints" for any of that.

They do, and if you need to adjust a project you don't need 10 hours of weekly planning meetings (the Linux kernel developers don't need it, so your CRUD app developers don't either).

The higher you go, the less agile it gets, because that's a horrible way to develop software, or any high-skill professional service or product.

That works great in FAANG companies, you might have 1-3 hours of meetings in total a week. That is how your typical PhD program works too, meet with your supervisor once a week. And low meeting culture seems to work just fine for the Linux kernel developers too. You're always free to engage in extracurricular activities, but it's not mandatory.

It's the lesser tier, often non-tech companies doing this kind of micromanagement.

The good software companies do these projects in the 3-6 month length instead of 1-2 weeks.

Do Linux kernel developers do that?

I don't think that's the case for most of the substantial software projects. The plan for the Linux kernel doesn't change each week (do they have "PMs"?).

15% seems very excessive. Almost a whole day a week and two days lost of deep work. Try to aim for 1.5%. Do as much of the planning as possible without a meeting.

It's busy work if you do it more than 1 hour any given week. If you do it full-time, you're something like a -10x engineer.

Generally the good jobs don't have "sprints".

That doesn't mean it's the best model. Successful in the sense of the career ladder, then maybe you're right. Successful as in productive or good for the organization or society, probably not. They are responsible for many of the biggest organizational failures.

Don't think there's any evidence for that.

It's not about low performers, but workers who complain about mistreatment. There is usually nothing preventing unionized companies for offering higher pay for high performers, but sometimes they use the union agreements (which ask for wage adjustments well below inflation the inflation rate at the moment) as an excuse not to offer higher wages.

A game company might not like unions because it would harder to retaliate against workers protesting against illegal "crunch" time. Just an example.

Surprised any FAANG uses teams. I think the only headshot you might need is for your badge, can't imagine any serious company mandates LinkedIn (that would be your boss deciding that and not HR).

I thought it would be the opposite. People heavy on the soft skills and light on tech are more easily replaceable by a large language model. They seem the most promising for slide decks or fill in Excel sheets, or generate a meeting protocol for a pointless meeting.

Yeah outside of the US they do constructive dismissal instead, and you'll be paid pennies even if you win the suit (and fail future "background checks").

Mostly agree but HR would have no clue about that.

Have to tune (hard-code) answers to some of those "gotchas" published on Twitter. Very core to give an impression of intelligence.

It's not less research mathematics than bathroom remodeling, that's for sure. I never tweaked any CSS, did you?

I think it's about balance, and a lot of software engineering projects would do better by steering more toward the academic research group model than the current fad of two week "sprint", plenty of non-technical pseudo-managers and endless micro-estimations.

In my experience just working by priority works better than endlessly estimating tiny chunks of a project, that doesn't actually give any real predictability. Workplaces that go heavy on estimation and "agile" methodology produce bad software and not very reliably.

If a computer scientist is doing completely routine tasks, they should be automating them, not estimating them every two weeks.

We're doing applied mathematics, not bathroom remodeling. Try telling a mathematician to "story point" the conjectures they're working on.

Because of non-technical micromanagers.

Probably similar to you but without "sprints" or "stand-ups" or reporting to "product owners", "agile coaches" or "business analysts". You would work on "epics", or projects as you would call them more dignifiedly.

Those 10 minute meetings are 5 hours of lost time for deep work each week. Daily status reports are excessive. "Sprints" in general don't work in my experience, they are unnecessary overhead. You want to work in something more towards half-year projects, not two week "sprints".

But the agile salesmen can't do code reviews.