If there was a fund to help remove sprints, scrum, Jira and standups I would donate to it.

It's like a factory but the people are the machines.

Probably many of the people who hate writing code for a PM at work, love working on their own open source project.

And the difference is freedom.

Hear, hear.

I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.

I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).

I wonder how much of this is company- or team-dependent. I don't mind sprints, but I also choose what to put on them myself with very rare (like twice-yearly, tops) requests from my manager.

I don't have a PM.

This, it is costly, certain personal walks away. Proper roles seem to emerge anyway.

The cost of control and the costly overhead has everything to do with atomizing the work load. Just like in a distributed system. The synchronization mechanisms get more complicate.

The more layers, the less trustable the organization, since every manager under their manger, is a potentially corruptable.

This makes the communication lines unclear and makes people over promise. Also distributing the workload has diminishing returns.

I am not a fan of scrum or other systems.

Why would you expect freedom at work? Employment is by definition working for someone else, so you are going to be working on their goals, not yours.

I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).

My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.

Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.

The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:

- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.

- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)

- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)

The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.

Common themes:

- Communication is 2 way

- Both teams are friendly and competent

- Customer care about results and leave programming to us

- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.

Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!

Some examples:

- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates

- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall

- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid

- "release" after "release" but no actual customer

- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages