Why "Agile" and especially Scrum are terrible

What is Agile?

• started in web consulting, where one deals with finicky clients, and must decide either to manage the client, or else adapt to clients' chaos
• Scrum seems to be tailored toward the body shops, where client relationships are so mismanaged that the engineers have to be watched on a daily basis, because they’ve become a dumping ground for career-incoherent work that no one wants to do (and that probably isn’t very important, hence the low rate and respect).

Violent transparency

• Open-plan offices […]. They aren’t productive. It’s hard to concentrate in them. They’re anti-intellectual, insofar as people become afraid to be caught reading books (or just thinking) on the job. When you force people to play a side game of appearing productive, in addition to their job duties, they become less productive.
• Programmers often have to work in an environment of one-sided transparency. These Agile systems, so often misapplied, demand that they provide humiliating visibility into their time and work, despite a lack of reciprocity. Instead of working on actual, long-term projects that a person could get excited about, they’re relegated to working on atomized, feature-level “user stories” and often disallowed to work on improvements that can’t be related to short-term, immediate business needs (often delivered from on-high).

Specific flaws of “Agile” and Scrum

1. Business-driven engineering

• Waterfall is legitimately terrible […]. Projects are defined by executives, design is done by architects, personal deadlines are set by middle managers, implementation is performed by the top-tier grunts (programmers) and then operations and testing are handed off to the lower tiers of grunts.
• I have mixed opinions about job titles like “Senior” and “Principal” and the like. They matter, […] but I hate that they matter. If you look at Scrum, it’s designed to disentitle the senior, most capable engineers who have to adhere to processes (work only on backlog items, spend 5-10 hours per week in status meetings) designed for people who just started writing code last month.
• Agile, as often implemented, increases the feedback frequency while giving engineers no real power. That’s a losing bargain, because it means that they’re more likely to be jerked around or punished when things take longer than they “seem” they should take.
• Good engineers want to work in engineer-driven firms where they will be calling shots regarding what gets worked on, without having to justify themselves to “scrum masters” and “product owners” and layers of non-technical management.
• Ultimately, Agile (as practiced) and Waterfall both are forms of business-driven engineering, and that’s why neither is any good at producing quality software or happy employees.

2. Terminal juniority

• The problem with Agile’s two-week iterations (or “sprints”) and user stories is that there is no exit strategy. There’s no “We won’t have to do this once we achieve ” clause. It’s designed to be there forever: the business-driven engineering and status meetings will never go away.
• As a result, the sorts of projects that programmers want to take on, once they master the basics of the craft, are often ignored, because it’s annoying to justify them in terms of short-term business value. Technical excellence matters, but it’s painful to try to sell people on this fact if they want, badly, not to be convinced of it.
• The worst thing about estimates is that they push a company in the direction of doing work that’s estimable. This causes programmers to favor the low-yield, easy stuff that the business doesn’t actually need (even if bumbling middle managers think otherwise) but that is “safe”. Anything that’s actually worth doing has a non-zero chance of failure and too many unknown unknowns for estimates to be useful. Agile’s focus on short-term business value ends up pushing people away from the kinds of work that the company actually needs, in favor of each programmer’s real-time reputation management.

3. It’s stupidly, dangerously short-term

• Agile is designed for and by consulting firms that are marginal.
• When each client project represents existential or severe reputational risk, Agile might be the way to go, because a focus on short-term iterations is useful when the company is under threat and there might not be a long term. Aggressive project management makes sense in an emergency. It doesn’t make sense as a permanent arrangement; at least, not for high-talent programmers who have less stressful and more enjoyable options.
• Under Agile, technical debt piles up and is not addressed because the business people calling the shots will not see a problem until it’s far too late or, at least, too expensive to fix it. Moreover, individual engineers are rewarded or punished solely based on the optics of the current two-week “sprint”, meaning that no one looks out five “sprints” ahead.

4. It has no regard for career coherency

• By age 30, you’re expected to be able to show that you can work at the whole-project level, and that you’re at least ready to go beyond such a level into infrastructure, architecture, research, or leadership.
• In an emergency, whether it’s a consultancy striving to appease an important client or a corporate “war room”, career coherency can wait.
• Saying, “I was on a Scrum team” says, “Kick me”. It’s one thing to do grunt work because the CEO recognized that an unpleasant task would add millions of dollars of value (and that he’d reward it accordingly) but doing grunt work just because you were assigned “user stories” and Jira tickets shows that you were seen as a loser.

5. Its purpose is to identify low performers, but it has an unacceptably high false positive rate

• Scrum is sold as a process for “removing impediments”, which is a nice way of saying “spotting slackers”.
• There’s a fallacy in civil liberties debates: the “nothing to hide” argument. […] For one thing, laws change. Ask anyone who was Jewish in Central Europe in the 1930s. Even for respectable people, a surveillance state is an anxiety state.
• the most status-sensitive people [older people, women, racial minorities, people with disabilities] (even if they’re the best workers) are the first ones to decline when surveillance ramps up. If they feel like they aren’t trusted (and what else is communicated by a culture that expects every item of work to be justified?) then they lose motivation quickly.
• Agile and especially Scrum exploit the nothing-to-hide fallacy. Unless you’re a “low performer” […] you shouldn’t mind a daily status meeting, right?
• Often, it’s the best employees who fall the hardest when Agile/Scrum is introduced, because R&D is effectively eliminated, and the obsession with short-term “iterations” or sprints means that there’s no room to try something that might actually fail.
• The truth about underperformers is that you don’t need “Agile” to find out who they are. People know who they are. The reason some teams get loaded down with disengaged, incompetent, or toxic people is that no one does anything about them. That’s a people-level management problem, not a workflow-level process problem.

6. The Whisky Goggles Effect

• There seems to be some evidence that aggressive management can nudge the marginally incompetent into being marginally employable. I call this the Whisky Goggles Effect: it turns the 3s and 4s into 5s, but it makes you so sloppy that the 7s and 9s want nothing to do with you. Unable to get their creative juices flowing under a system where everything has to be justified in terms of short-term business value, the best programmers leave.
• Scrum and Agile play into what I call the Status Profit Bias. Essentially, many people in business judge their success or failure not in objective terms, but based on the status differential achieved.
• Let’s say that the market value of a “3” level programmer is $50,000 per year and, for a “5” programmer, it’s $80,000.
• The people who are least informed about what social status they “should” have are the young. You’ll find a 22-year-old 6 who thinks that he’s a 3 and who will submit to Scrum, but the 50-year-old 9 is likely to know that she’s a 9 and might begrudgingly take 8.5-level conditions but she’s not about to drop to a 3, or even a 6. Seeking status profits is, of course, useless. These points don’t mean anything. You win in business by bringing in more money than you pay out in costs, not by exerting margins in meaningless status points. There may be a whole industry in bringing in 5-level engineers and treating (and paying) them like 4’s, but under current market conditions, it’s far more profitable to hire an 8 and treat him like an 8.

7. It’s dishonestly sold

• Something like Scrum has its place: a very limited, temporary one. The dishonest salesmanship is in the indication that it works everywhere, and as a permanent arrangement.

What Scrum is good for

• Before the Agile fad made it a permanent process, “Scrum” was a term sometimes used for what corporations might also call a “Code Red” or a “War Room emergency”.
• This team would have no clear manager, so you’d elect a leader (like a “Scrum Master”) and give him authority. You’d want him not to be an official “people manager” (since he needs to be as impartial as possible). Since the crisis is short-term, individuals’ career goals can be put on hold. It’s considered a “sprint” because people are expected to work as fast as they can to solve the problem, and because they’ll be allowed to go back to their regular work once it’s over. Also, in this kind of emergency, you need to make it clear that no one is being evaluated individually. The focus is on the mission and the mission only.
• When you impose process and demand one-sided transparency of all the workers, people feel watched. They get the sense that they’re being stalked and will be labelled “low performers” as soon as their week-by-week, individual fluctuations go the wrong way. So they become resentful. That’s dysfunctional. On the other hand, when you call together a group of known high-performers to handle a specific and time-limited crisis, they don’t mind giving frequent status updates so long as they know that it’s the exigency of the situation, rather than their own low social status, that is the reason behind it.

Two issues

• Scrum, in this way, acknowledges the idea that emergency powers must sometimes be given to “take-charge” leaders who’ll do whatever they consider necessary to get a job done, leaving debate to happen later. That’s fine. It’s how things should be, sometimes.
• A time-honored problem with emergency powers is that they often don’t go away. In many circumstances, those empowered by an emergency see fit to prolong it. This is, most certainly, a problem with management. Dysfunction and emergency require more managerial effort than a well-run company in peace time. The result is that there are many managers, especially in technology, who seek out opportunities for emergencies and emergency powers.
• “Agile” and Scrum glorify emergency. That’s the first problem with them. They’re a reinvention of what the video game industry calls “crunch time”. It’s not sustainable to work that way. An aggressive focus on individual performance, a lack of concern for people’s career objectives in work allocation, and a mandate that people work only on the stated top priority, all of these provide a lot of value in a short-term emergency, but become toxic and demoralizing in the long run. People will tolerate short-term losses of autonomy, but only if there’s a clear point ahead when they’ll get their autonomy back.
• The second issue is that these practices are sold dishonestly. [I]f Scrum were sold for what it is– a set of emergency measures that can’t be used to permanently improve productivity– then there would be far fewer buyers for it, and the “Agile” consulting industry wouldn’t exist. Only through a dishonest representation of these techniques (glorified “crunch time”, packaged as permanent fixes) are they made salable to the corporate world (“the enterprise”) at large.

Looking forward

• These aren’t just bad ideas. They’re more dangerous than that, because there’s a generation of software engineers who are absorbing them without knowing any better. There are far too many young programmers being doomed to mediocrity by the idea that business-driven engineering and “user stories” are how things have always been done.