<story><title>Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipaddr</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a junior approach thinking you know more than your pm and have no respect if they didn&amp;#x27;t come from your ranks.&lt;p&gt;In the end if you are difficult you become easy to replace.</text></item><item><author>emptysongglass</author><text>&amp;gt; And that&amp;#x27;s why things like &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;DevOps&amp;quot;, etc will fail.&lt;p&gt;I completely disagree. Most team leads and technical managers where I&amp;#x27;ve worked get promoted up from within a highly technical position. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have any respect for my team lead or my PM if they didn&amp;#x27;t know what they were talking about.&lt;p&gt;If my PM is going to try to tell me that I should work on this feature over this other feature or I should implement it in this way over this other way do you really think I&amp;#x27;m going to listen to them if it&amp;#x27;s clear they have no idea what the implementation details are let alone the tools? Of course not.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m making DevOps happen and I do that by knowing the tools and practices. I&amp;#x27;m being given the power I need to make it happen. I earn the respect every day I come in and write the code or identify the weaknesses we need to shore up to move faster.</text></item><item><author>throwaway290232</author><text>Agile is a generic umbrella term that involves a vast array of complex, subtle knowledge and skills. It&amp;#x27;s like saying &amp;quot;Engineer&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Chef&amp;quot;. Each has a shared skillset, to be sure. But each category&amp;#x27;s members can&amp;#x27;t just work the same way at all jobs, and there&amp;#x27;s no book on how to be an Engineer or Chef everywhere.&lt;p&gt;The Agile Manifesto is a failure at trying to make Agile happen because it can&amp;#x27;t tell you how to make it happen, because it varies wildly. No manager can read a book on how to &amp;quot;Agile-ify&amp;quot; their org, they have to apply their brains and figure out how their specific version of &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot; will work. But the skill-set required to do this is not a Managerial skill, it is a lower-level-worker skill. But it&amp;#x27;s also a very &lt;i&gt;advanced&lt;/i&gt; lower-level-worker skill.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s why things like &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;DevOps&amp;quot;, etc will fail. People at the higher end have no clue how to make it happen, and people at the lower end who have an idea how to make it happen don&amp;#x27;t have the power to make the organizational changes to do so. You need a way for the lower-end people to tell the higher-end people what to do, and have the higher-end people listen to them, and make the changes happen. This is very hard in a traditional organizational hierarchy, because higher-end people have big egos and bigger concerns over things like politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperman1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll give 2 examples.&lt;p&gt;One was a CEO who hadn&amp;#x27;t any technical background, but he knew what ICT could and could not do for his company.&lt;p&gt;One day we rewired all of our network, a massive weekend job.  He was there, even if the only thing he could do was pulling network cables out of bags and straightening them.  He saw who and what worked or not, he saw where we struggled even if he didn&amp;#x27;t understand a word of our technical mumbo jumbo.&lt;p&gt;I found out he was always there on the ground for every major operation in his company, not only ICT.  The result was he knew the company inside out.  Nobody ever tried bullshitting him.  I still have massive respect for him, years later.&lt;p&gt;Then there is exhibit B, a manager from the &amp;#x27;you dont have to understand ICT to manage it&amp;#x27; school.   Everybody under him spends 3&amp;#x2F;4 of the time in meetings or filing useless forms. Nobody dares touching important things, so hard decisions get pushed in the future.  It happens urgent  work needs doing and the only person capable of doing it sits twiddling thumbs as the spreadsheet says maximum team capacity has already been reached.  He redefined the words &amp;#x27;major incident&amp;#x27; as there were to many under the old definition.  His teams keep losing important members, everybody hates each other, work that should take 10 minutes takes months.  But he always has a spreadsheet demonstrating it is not his fault.&lt;p&gt;I know who gets the respect.</text></comment>
<story><title>Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipaddr</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a junior approach thinking you know more than your pm and have no respect if they didn&amp;#x27;t come from your ranks.&lt;p&gt;In the end if you are difficult you become easy to replace.</text></item><item><author>emptysongglass</author><text>&amp;gt; And that&amp;#x27;s why things like &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;DevOps&amp;quot;, etc will fail.&lt;p&gt;I completely disagree. Most team leads and technical managers where I&amp;#x27;ve worked get promoted up from within a highly technical position. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have any respect for my team lead or my PM if they didn&amp;#x27;t know what they were talking about.&lt;p&gt;If my PM is going to try to tell me that I should work on this feature over this other feature or I should implement it in this way over this other way do you really think I&amp;#x27;m going to listen to them if it&amp;#x27;s clear they have no idea what the implementation details are let alone the tools? Of course not.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m making DevOps happen and I do that by knowing the tools and practices. I&amp;#x27;m being given the power I need to make it happen. I earn the respect every day I come in and write the code or identify the weaknesses we need to shore up to move faster.</text></item><item><author>throwaway290232</author><text>Agile is a generic umbrella term that involves a vast array of complex, subtle knowledge and skills. It&amp;#x27;s like saying &amp;quot;Engineer&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Chef&amp;quot;. Each has a shared skillset, to be sure. But each category&amp;#x27;s members can&amp;#x27;t just work the same way at all jobs, and there&amp;#x27;s no book on how to be an Engineer or Chef everywhere.&lt;p&gt;The Agile Manifesto is a failure at trying to make Agile happen because it can&amp;#x27;t tell you how to make it happen, because it varies wildly. No manager can read a book on how to &amp;quot;Agile-ify&amp;quot; their org, they have to apply their brains and figure out how their specific version of &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot; will work. But the skill-set required to do this is not a Managerial skill, it is a lower-level-worker skill. But it&amp;#x27;s also a very &lt;i&gt;advanced&lt;/i&gt; lower-level-worker skill.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s why things like &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;DevOps&amp;quot;, etc will fail. People at the higher end have no clue how to make it happen, and people at the lower end who have an idea how to make it happen don&amp;#x27;t have the power to make the organizational changes to do so. You need a way for the lower-end people to tell the higher-end people what to do, and have the higher-end people listen to them, and make the changes happen. This is very hard in a traditional organizational hierarchy, because higher-end people have big egos and bigger concerns over things like politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emptysongglass</author><text>My PM does know more than me. And he&amp;#x27;s good at directing where the team should invest it&amp;#x27;s efforts. That&amp;#x27;s why he&amp;#x27;s my PM.&lt;p&gt;You seem to have completely missed my point, which is that technical leads and PMs should have domain knowledge and that this is why DevOps is not in danger of failing at competent companies.</text></comment>