As a developer my highest level of productivity was on a 2 person team with a bi-weekly meeting with our manager. We would have impromptu meetings when needed, but for the most part I was free to work 6-15 hours in a row whenever I got in the zone, and if I slacked off other times noone noticed.

Once we got more people and switched to scrum my productivity plummeted. My anxiety went through the roof. Most days the standup left me feeling like I wanted to go back to bed. Most of the time when I was in the zone and feeling engaged I had to waste it on meetings that had no tangible benefits.

Busy work is draining, management knows this, they don't care.

Everytime I see that, I cringe. But sadly, you're not wrong.

Agile is anti-meeting, anti-heavy and definitely anti-meeting-heavy.

I really don't know what to call this weird thing that was created.

Just as an example: why are there standups? Because in XP, meetings are frowned upon. So the idea is not to have meetings whenever humanly possible (better to pair up, talk to individuals etc.).

And if there's a meeting you really really can't avoid or eliminate, let's at the very least incentivise everyone to keep it as short and meaningful as possible. By having everyone stand and thus be slightly uncomfortable.

How that fun, focused, no-nonsense, get-things-done approach got turned into ... whatever that "meeting-heavy" thing is ... is in some senses fascinating.

And terrifying.

> I'm currently in a no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment

AKA, an agile environment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Micromanagement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement

It's not a new concept, agile and project management tools around it decided to break things into small enough components that they essentially just streamlined and concretized micromanagement as a normal accepted daily business process. That's all "agile" is in practice in most case. If you see "agile" substitute "micromanagement" and everything that happens will make complete sense.

In practice, it's not unlike waterfall, because requirements and timetables are prescribed from above. But hey, the team has a sprint kickoff meeting every two weeks, so we call it agile.

It's almost like Manhattan projecting your own team, except theres no one who actually knows the full picture. Amounts to short term "wins" and constantly missing the actual target.

If a team practices Agile, they’re not likely to be agile.

[1] They weren't even concise with the acronym. Hey, lets throw a random e on the end!

TBH, I'd have a lot more respect for it if the framework were sold honestly, as something completely opposite of agile. There's merit to a non-agile approach, but the dishonesty is something that I find very distasteful.

And in fact ARE true.

The Agile Industrial Complex is a horror show, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to do agile well.

There absolutely is a way of doing agile well, I've been involved in a number of teams that did. And it worked extremely well. In fact, we did agile way before the agile manifesto came out, and before I was aware of there being a name for the things we were doing. We were just doing them because they make sense, they make us go fast and they let us have fun while doing it. Which is basically what the XP people said when they started writing things down. They never claimed to have invented a brand new way of creating software. No, they were observing that certain teams were very productive, and looked at what those teams were doing. If there was a pattern. Spoiler: there was.

Anyway, I also introduced agile "practices" in a large company. Well, in a small team in a large company. We didn't do a single one of the practices the Agile Industrial Complex proposes and often mandates. The much more important team next to us did. They did all the AIC practices. We did the technical. And interacted closely. Did TDD, worked on trunk, paired when necessary, did stuff alone when not. Did the simplest thing that could possible work. ("Where's your database?" "We'll put it in when we need it". <later> "Oh we're done. I guess we didn't need the database ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" ).

The more important team next to us that was doing Scrum with the standups and whathaveyounot failed. We delivered. Hmm.

And if you can point to the practices being promoted by the AIC as being in direct and obvious conflict with, for example, what's written the Agile Manifesto, and can in fact point to ways of doing it right that are in harmony with the AM and in conflict with the AIC, then it ain't a No True Scotsman fallacy. It's a simple case of the AIC doing it wrong.

That said, the modern communication culture is out of control. We spend way more time talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing something.

"Let's break the whole thing into 40 microservices" does not help. Unlike the neat theory of "everyone maintains their own set of microservices", every change and new feature needs to be over-analyzed for side effects. You are stuck in analysis paralysis. Not only do you not know what you should talk to other teams about, you may not even know who you should be talking to.

I've worked in an Agile team on a pre-launch product and after the 10min morning scrum (which served more to cement personal accountability and discover blockers than as the showboating and bikeshedding venue that some people here seem to have encountered) the rest of the day was more or less uninterrupted dev time with a few impromptu soccer games thrown in (for research purposes). It worked pretty well.

I'm currently in a 100% Agile-free environment, experiencing the delightful after-effects of good product-market fit, which means even if I have a clear schedule I never know if I'm going to spend half the day trying to help troubleshoot issues or helping end users integrate our product. I don't mind doing this, I want our customers to have the best experience possible and so far it seems to be working pretty well. It does, however, wreak havoc on my ability to 'get in the zone' because subconsciously I know I'll probably just be interrupted anyway.

Best env, but sadly a bit rare?

I used to select for shops like that, no wonder lay-offs are scary if you've been trapped in meetings instead of shipping.

Granted I am working a zillion hours right now, but I'm less stressed than when I was working 9-6 but in 5 hours/day of zoom.

Just feels like I am exercising my mastery vs fighting against inertia.

4 hours of bullshitting, meetings, an unclear vision, constantly being blocked, anxiety over a lack of productivity was swapped with 9 hours of clear aims, clear goals and hard work.

It was still not sustainable but it felt way better.

It's not like having 4 hours of BS job gives you 4-6 hours/day of free time to go to the movies, gym, spend time with family, cook for yourself etc.

Instead you are tied to a PC bored out of your mind.

The worst thing in life is a lack of purpose and feeling lack of control.

It was easier to put work out of my head in the latter job. Anxiety didn't overwhelm my evenings and weekends. Sunday evenings were restful instead of steeped in anxiety. It felt more like they belonged to me.

When I came home each evening I felt tired in a good way.

I scratch my head...

Why? Why are people still doing it? Who actually _wants_ that?

When you look at the agile frameworks that are commonly implemented (Scrum, XP, etc.) you see that however well-intentioned they are, they seldom live up to those ideals. Do we care about working software or hitting burn down numbers? Do we care about flexibility or about keeping our iteration plans nice and clean? Do we care about collaboration or about having a paper trail to cover ourselves? Do we care about people or tickets?

As agile has gone mainstream more and more experiences are bad, courtesy of Sturgeon's Law. Then you add in the fact that the bad experiences will always be amplified (after all, when things are working well they're "fine"; it's still work).

What don't you like about agile? What do you use that's better?