Why “Agile” and Especially Scrum Are Terrible

Discussion from two months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9672370" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9672370</a>

Why is this on the front page?<p>This is an individual&#x27;s ranting as he generalizes his own agile experiences to everyone&#x27;s, -even while he recognizes that the generalizations people make about waterfall are straw men-. What an amazing lack of self-awareness.<p>Worse still, even if I granted him his points as broadly as he seems to want to make them, and agreed that all agile&#x2F;scrum experiences are like this (or at least, those in consulting), he fails to give any suggestion as to how to improve things. He dismisses both agile and waterfall. Okay then; how would you do things differently? &#x27;It’s time for most of “Agile” and especially Scrum to die&#x27; - fine, to be replaced with -what-? I&#x27;m not interested in generalizations that you whine over; whether or not you&#x27;re correct becomes immaterial if you -legitimately offer me something better-. But this offers me nothing.

This guy has a serious axe to grind against some previous employer.

The story of this article, is that this man is talking about why he is angry, which is because agile is just not good enough for him.

Another article about &quot;How I didn&#x27;t understand how to use fire and burn my house and myself to death&quot;. And I guess he doesn&#x27;t know agile history to talk about it: - &quot;The “Agile” fad grew up in web consulting&quot; - It grew up in huge enterprises in the beginning of 1990; - &quot;dealing with finicky clients who don’t know what they want&quot; - just haha, I guess no one don&#x27;t know what he or she wants in terms of development; - &quot;second is appealing to a decision-maker who’s recently been promoted to management&quot; - looks like someone got not a best relationship with a managet in a past.<p>Didn&#x27;t even read after 1 paragraph.

This starts with a false statement--&quot;The “Agile” fad grew up in web consulting&quot;--and just continues downhill.<p>I&#x27;m going to try and not make this criticism a No True Scotsman, but this post describes a vaguely Scrum-flavored approach that explicitly violates many of its stated intents.<p>If the purpose of this post was to decry cargo-cult agile where the trappings and software of Scrum or Kanban are adopted without paying heed to the intent, I&#x27;d be wholeheartedly agreeing. But it seems the author has conflated the two.<p>If information is flowing only one way, from product owners to engineers, whose only upstream delivery is their reporting, you&#x27;re not looking at agile but at some weird sprint-chunked waterfall process.

I assumed I know what a scrum is, given that I&#x27;m in one every day, and I can&#x27;t recognize what the author is talking about.<p>You&#x27;re only able to give short-term updates? It takes 5-10 hours per week? What even is this?<p>That just sounds like a sinkhole of terrible management, where some micro-manager is scheduling a full-blown meeting every day and euphemistically calling it a &quot;scrum&quot;.

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The rate this post is getting upvotes suggests that agile (and particularly scrum) are indeed misunderstood. Eesh :&#x2F;

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

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