Most companies I've seen recently, including a lot of startups, are operating in a waterfall that they then window-dress every 2 weeks in the form of SCRUM-ish rituals and ceremonies as if it's agile because it has iterations and story points or whatever.

Behind the scenes the PMs are making Gantt charts and deciding what's in and what's out and who is going to do it, without the team having any input or really getting to cost it out.

XP and agile generally was supposed to about shortening the communication and iteration gap between customer and maker. I almost never really see that.

Oh, I wasn't arguing that any companies actually do Agile (lower or upper case).

I meant in my experience, the methodology most companies I've worked in seems to follow is capital-C Chaotic. Requirements change at the whim of customers or leadership week to week, pivots are frequent and unpredictable, leadership gets fired/quits and the whole plan changes, lots of effort is wasted on stuff that then gets ignored, and customers are sold one thing but delivered another.

I don't believe organizations or companies follow either Agile (any brand of it) or Waterfall. I don't think what they do can be called a methodology at all.