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> It is very rare that we actually work on something truly novel

I'm working on something truly novel to me every day. The fact that it's novel to me is enough to make any wishful planning arbitrary.



Unless you are really bleading edge, say mRNA vaccines, there should be someone with experience in what you are doing. Even for the bleading edge stuff, people have relevant experience to build upon.


Sure, there are people who are experienced in the areas that are novel to me. But, engaging them to the project may not turn out to be a better alternative (in terms of all kinds of variables: time, money, communication and coordination overhead, etc.) than my learning the subject.


Teams that subscribe to the agile methodology have a tendency to churn out ad hoc systems because there is not time for due diligence. The end result is ad hoc things built on ad hoc things. There is no limit to the learning curve. The knowledge doesn't transfer in the smoothest way because (a) there is no time for an engineer to perform due diligence, and (b) engineers are interchangeable cogs that flip high tech burgers based on orders from the Jira board.

The amount of brain waste caused by agile is immense. So many minds toiling away, trying to pick apart some long lost engineer's cleverisms and build something mundane on top of them.




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