The central premise of the article seems to me to be a likely misunderstanding of the problem. I would bet that a Scrum Product Owner who uses a "command and control" leadership style and doesn't know how to properly delegate authority would be doing the same under any other development framework, too.
In general I'm a big fan of the "single wringable neck" principle. I've seen it put to great effect in the hands of a skilled leader, in both Scrum and non-Scrum teams. Better yet, when the leader isn't managing things well, it also leaves no question that they're the one who needs to figure out how to set things straight. Same goes for their delegates.
And for the ICs it makes collaboration easier - and therefore, ironically, enables them to work more autonomously. When everyone unambiguously knows what they're in charge of and what the team's big-picture objectives are, they have everything they need to independently figure out how best to make it happen. And it's also a lot easier to figure out who to talk to when they need to call attention to a problem.
I've seen a lot less luck with shared authority and informal delegation. On the best of days, it turns decisionmaking into an unnecessarily political process. More likely, the team will settle into an informal consensus process that typically operates as "rule by the obdurate" in practice. And when things get tough, the leaders will tend to slide into unproductive bickering that all but precludes actually fixing the problem.
Favorite readings that touch on this kind of thing: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman, and Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet.
> For a computer scientist, a biologist’s methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback.
I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.
I noticed this as well. No matter how dedicated the team is to not doing waterfall, waterfall nearly always creeps its way back when anything that even smells like a deadline rears its head.
Waterfall planning tends to get ramped up for four really common reasons:
* Managers who simply cannot conceieve of non waterfall planning.
* As a response to failure (ironic coz it tends to increase failure rate)
* Because it's basically the job of most middle management to do waterfall planning.
* Because if your managers manager wants deadlines, tough shit it's deadlines all the way down.
* Because ultimately, upper mamagement tends to prioritize control over profit even if that control is somewhat illusory.
Waterfall planning is kind of infectious, too - if the team does it in one area it spreads to others.
I would say that 90% of teams experience this kind of "waterfall whiplash".
I worked on a couple of teams where upper management didnt set deadlines or create roadmaps or anything. These rare occasions were the only time when I was entitely free of waterfall and we were wayway more productive because of it. Like night and day.
However, 90% of companies can't even envision this, let alone do it. Most people dont even believe its possible - developers included.
I suspect this is one component of the secret sauce of high performing startups that defeat wealthier, more established incumbents.
There are even companies selling scrumfall consultancy known as SAFE.
In my experience, there are few problems with agile.
- scrumfall that is mostly cause by stakeholders wanting to have yearly roadmaps and KPI tied to delivery of increment. Plenty of organizations have separate engineering and product orgs that create this disconnect.
- groomorgy when teams spend more time on analysis than actual work. Driven by middle managers thinking that doing less is better than not finishing the sprint in time. Middle managers that do not understand tech or business but can track progress of tasks.
- cost-amnesia When feature is build over many increments is hard to estimate total cost and long term maintenance cost. You might have teams re-inventing a wheel and having a massive amount of slowly rotting code.
- conway-architecture. Because people think that agile is all about small independent teams, it naturally leads to service oriented architecture. In many places, SOA is a bad fit problem or organization. Small company with limited resources doing micro-somethings will create death trap.
- teflon-promotions You will have teams and projects doing terribly over a longer period of time, but in initially phase they delivered value. You will see people promoted in the organization based on early wins, even if they left behind dead bodies. It often encourages tech dept over long term maintenance.
I still feel that agile is great. Most of these problems are people problems, not agile itself.
I worked at Amazon. While my boss was on vacation I took over for him in the "Launch readiness" meeting for our team's component of our project. Basically, you go to this meeting with the big decision makers and business people once a week and tell them what your status is on deliverables. You are supposed to sum up your status as "Green/Yellow/Red" and then write (or update last week's document) to explain your status.
My boss had not given me any special directions here so I assumed I was supposed to do this honestly. I set our status as "Red" and then listed out what were, I felt, quite compelling reasons to think we were Red. The gist of it was that our velocity was negative. More work items were getting created and assigned to us than we closed, and we still had high priority items open from previous dates. There was zero chance, in my estimation, that we would meet our deadlines, so I called us Red.
This did not go over well. Everyone at the Launch Readiness meeting got mad at me for declaring Red. Our VP scolded me in front of the entire meeting and lectured me about how I could not unilaterally declare our team red. Her logic was, if our team was Red, that meant the entire project was Red, and I was in no position to make that call. Other managers at the meeting got mad at me too because they felt my call made them look bad. For the rest of my manager's absence I had to first check in with a different manager and show him my Launch Readiness status and get him to approve my update before I was allowed to show it to the rest of the group.
For the rest of the time that I went to Launch Readiness I was forbidden from declaring Red regardless of what our metrics said. Our team was Yellow or Green, period.
Naturally, we wound up being over a year late on the deadlines, because, despite what they compelled us to say in those meetings, we weren't actually getting the needed work done. Constant "schedule slips" and adjustments. Endless wasted time in meetings trying to rework schedules that would instantly get blown up again. Hugely frustrating. Still slightly bitter about it.
Anyway, I guess all this is to say that it doesn't surprise me that Amazon is bad about declaring Red, Yellow, or Green in other places too. Probably there is a guy in charge of updating those dashboards who is forbidden from changing them unless they get approval from some high level person and that person will categorically refuse regardless of the evidence because they want the indicators to be Green.
Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
For real about unnecessary dismissive hate, I'm a female Engineer and loved her stuff, and for the people on here incredulous about the investment scale for this clothing store, you are seriously underestimating the proportion of ones paycheck or overall wealth a female with a decent salary like me (26yr old female working in tech) but also girls who don't make very much like coffee baristas or artists, spend on clothing, and being fashionable, however they define that for themselves.
Whether you agree its rational spending or not, the spending happens, and this is not an example of sexism, just an example of sometimes how clueless men can be about the time money and effort women put into their looks. I say that accepting as usual that me as a female am a minority in the HN community, so I try to provide gender perspective when its relevant.
That aside, even if fashion and makeup is of no interest, being a female costs more than being a male when it comes to basic clothing and hygeine. That is pretty undisputed.
For the men on this thread who may not have been there for the cult fashion launch that liberal awesome women really identified with and particularly nerdy female engineers I knew, as we were always the ones on the internet and finding new launched stuff that was not yet mainstream, in my opinion there were two major things, and both of those were fueled by VC firms funding it making decisions on Sophia's behalf that in my opinion were subpar, and also I'm saying this because I've read dispositions of her first female employees and have their perspective as well.
The big downfall was she Sophia was supposedly aggressive with her own female employees. That is all a matter of perspective from her employees and who knows the real story but one thing goes undisputed, the integrity of her teams spirit and unification went down the drain years back. Thats never a good sign for anyone, regardless of whose fault it was.
Secondly, The second the Male VC firms put the Macy's old Fashion Director in charge of revamping the clothing choices, I could immediately tell, and did not like it, and neither did Sophias best weapon in her company, her tight knit core of awesome scene girls who vigorously curated the clothing line into something awesome and unique.
Sophia had a magical ability to be at the racy edge of fashion while maintaining a classic California Vintage Style and pulled it off as a badass look that never came across as cheap or slutty. Her pieces did not look like something you bought online. They looked like you really did find that one amazing once in a lifetime impulse buy that was a buried treasure in a vintage fashion store in Oakland. Her pieces were original but echoed some classic badass and also classy shapes and ideas.
Fashion like this has its beauty in the FACT that it walks a very very very fine line without crossing it, and all that went down the drain when the business plan was modeled to cater to the masses and not the cult following.
Even early on female employees who did not like Sophia agreed that the input from the previous Macys Director was crap, and they should have never put her wannabe 80's common girl attempting to be badass and failing miserably and looking cheap and slutty input into the line, because it was obvious in the output of the clothing curation.
Sophia's magic was her own style, and finding other girls my age who genuinely emulated that style, and letting them do the curation. Bringing on a multimillion dollar chain store for 5th Ave Fashionistas was the worst idea ever.
Nastygal was like shopping with Scene girls in Oakland helping you pick out your clothes. Now It's like some lady 3x my age in stilettos prototyping my "stereotype" and picking out economy scale pieces and being dressed by my mom. Not only did the Macy's employees brought on just "not get it" in the first place, they really bypassed the input of the girls doing the original curation, and those girls spoke out about it alot.
If none of this makes sense about fashion sense, what should make sense to you is that the product components were mistaken as the input from a bigger better company when it really should have been the financial components of Macys as a target using good financial models they have made around clothing, and not trying to actually use the same type of curation.
It's very simple at the end of the day. They stopped listening to their customers, and the main curator was imported from a Brand that could not be further from the personality of her dedicated customers.
For men, I can only relate to you this concept as what it was like (I'm 26 so got FB two years before college when you had to be invited by a college student with a college email ID) to go from the awesome FB phase to the point when your parents and grandparents were allowed on facebook and suddenly started commenting on everything you like and posting pyramid schemes for tupperware sales. The party loses its edge quick. (Maybe some of you cannot relate, but for me, I have been off of FB for over three years).
Once you lose your cult following, your brand and the critical brand honement and feedback spirals out of control.
Nastygal was one of my favorite places to get a statement piece here and there when I wanted to be fun, but as a nerdy girl I'm not daring enough to pull it off without botching it, and Nastygal was always there to help me make a classy but original and slightly daring jump.
I havnt bought clothing from there in years. There are a million online female clothing stores that mimic nastygals brand now, and because theyve lost their uniqueness, there is not much to differentiate them from the rest.
Turning down a lot of candidates is not the same as finding good candidates. If you are turning down that many applicants, all it means is that your applicant pool is almost entirely bad candidates. That merely implies you are failing where it matters most, getting awesome candidates interested and excited about working for you.
I bet you could drive the P down even more. You could write worse job descriptions that get even more of the wrong people to apply. You could post the job listing on job boards like Monster or Dice, where there is a huge pool of un-hirable candidates who will apply to 20-30 jobs per day. I bet you could make it so bad you will have to hire someone to be the initial filter of candidates. Congratulations! You now have an HR department. They will arbitrarily filter candidates before the people actually competent to filter candidates get to see them, based entirely on buzzword bingo and 'number of years of experience'.
The book Billionaire's Vinegar is a eye opener too.
What I found funny is William Koch spent millions because he got his ego bruised.
The book also describes what might happen to some if you become a wine snob, and worse; what you might evolve into if you make a lot of money in life.
The book is very well written. I'm not a big reader, and I finished it in a few hours.
In college, I worked in a big wine store. The owner really didn't care about the business. He would come in sometimes under a bottle, or two, and after witnessing our horrid sales skills technique, should tell at us, "Open a bottle, and taste it. Then sell the crap!". I still remember that Shark's tooth, framed in gold, that would bounce off his chest while he was yelling.
The sliding door would close, I would watch him leave, and I could go back to my minimum wage clerk mentality. Meaning I would try to get my studies done. Besides dusting, there wasen't much work to do. This was in the ninties, and grocery stores, drug stores, etc. were taking away his business. He really didn't care, he owned a few apartment complexes that he made a fortune off of. He just wanted to ride out the lease.
One night, after the Manager, gave us the same speech about getting to know the wine, and sell it--a meek accountant from the back walked out and told us, "Boys--get ready!"
He then walked around the store picking bottles off the shelf, even the wine in the glass cases. He picked at least 50 bottles--all over $30. He was really miffed about someting.
We had a taste test that night. I couldn't tell the difference between the $70 bottles, and the $30 bottles. I was not a wine drinker though. The Accountant called us Beer Boys. He was right. I then asked him to do a blind taste test. He said, Go ahead--try to stump me!"
I set up twenty red cups with the price written on the bottom of the cup.
He ended up liking the less expensive wines. When I told him, he said, 'I've had a bad day---I can usually tell the difference', or something like that.
He then realized he just opened at least 2 grand worth of wine. He had a look of constipation on his face. He then asked us to pour all the wine down the drain in the bathroom. He said, "Quick--the Security guys might pop in?"
We poured all that expensive wine down the drain. To this day; I feel weird about the waste.
This is exactly why the founders of SO, reddit, even HN itself implemented a solution with certain mathematical brilliance and you've just recreated the problem again. The absolute bottom line is that no question is too stupid -- they're only too stupid for you and your inured in-group of community insiders. If you don't want to see these questions, have the algorithms hide them from you; have people who have been programming for two months deal with the questions from people programming for one month.
All you are doing here is injecting your own over-weighted bias into the algorithms and creating yet another tyranny of moderation for everyone that culminates with every single online community monotonically decreasing off peak from the point of its inception. Moderators should be more -- if not entirely -- concerned with tweaking algorithms rather than tweaking members and activity directly.
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
1. The universe is vast, mostly empty, and runs on fundamental laws that we barely understand but exploit well.
2. Life is a self-replicating, entropy-defying phenomenon that emerged through chemistry, evolved through selection, and adapts through intelligence.
3. Humans are social primates who dominate the planet through cooperation, tool-making, storytelling, and an insatiable drive for meaning.
4. Societies form through shared beliefs, laws, and trade, but oscillate between progress and collapse due to power, greed, and ignorance.
5. Technology is humanity’s amplifier, accelerating knowledge, comfort, and destruction in equal measure, with unintended consequences at every turn.
6. Economies are trust-based systems of resource distribution, prone to cycles of boom, bust, innovation, and inequality.
7. Morality is a human construct, evolving with culture, often conflicting between collective well-being and individual freedom.
8. Knowledge is a fractal—deeper the dive, more there is to know—yet most wisdom is rediscovery of old truths in new contexts.
9. The future is uncertain but shaped by the tension between human ingenuity and our own worst tendencies.
10. The meaning of life? Whatever gets you up in the morning and lets you sleep at night.