
Scrum Made Zero Sense for My Young Startup. So I Designed an Alternative - loumal
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/scrum-startup-alternative
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throwaway-15520
Maybe I'm just unlucky, or it's a case of No True Scotsman, but I've yet to
experience a good working Scrum environment that doesn't devolve into
micromanagement, meeting hell and cargo-cult behaviors. I've seen it kill all
the initiative, enthusiasm and curiosity in a developer team. Pre-Scrum, a
developer might look at some code, think "hey, I'll spend a bit of time
optimizing that, looks like it needs some tuning", maybe have a quick chat
with their lead and/or teammates, and get on with it. Now it's "I'll have to
make a card, which will probably be a spike, put it in the backlog, wait for
it to be groomed, and maybe we'll get round to it in Sprint 12 this year".
That becomes too much effort, so they don't bother. This is classic
bureaucracy as a cudgel : make the form-filling and meetings exercise so
burdensome ordinary people just give up, and the bureaucrats win because they
thrive on the form-filling and meetings.

Scrum - as I've seen it practiced in the wild - seems to go against the entire
spirit of agile and developer empowerment, and even calling it "agile" is pure
gaslighting, but at the same time the arrival of Scrum is the signal that the
company you work for is no longer the fun, challenging little startup you
joined, but is now pulling on the big-boy enterprise pants. That may or may
not be a good thing for the company as a whole, but as a developer it's the
signal that you either should buckle up and prepare to be a more secure but
unhappier cog in the new beaucratic machine, or move on to greener pastures.
Because Scrum is just that: it's a tool for to corral your unruly startup
weirdos into a growing "serious" enterprise organization, and to push out the
ones who can't or won't comply. People just make the naive mistake of thinking
it's about increasing productivity and efficiency.

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replyifuagree
For most engineers scrum is a non-technical PMI trained PMP Scrum Master
asking the team if they are going to check-in their coding tasks by Friday.

Because traditional management techniques are primarily date driven, scrum
easily devolves into little satisfying deadlines where the primary goal is to
check something in by the date.

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replyifuagree
Amplified learning is critical for a startup because you are searching for
value in dark space. To find value you have to package up attempts and fire
them into the dark space to see if anything hits.

Fire the value attempt when it is ready, not when some artificial sprint
interval finishes!

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loumal
Love 'searching for value in dark place.' great point.

