>that is why agile principles were declared - to help developers deal with this challenge.
I've noticed that in practice everyone benefits from agile except the devs... The managers have new and extremely elaborate play acting to perform, dominance to new authority to vigorously enforce, and extensive new paperwork and reports and whiteboards to shuffle. The snake oil salesmen obviously love selling snake oil. The marketing and HR folk have a new feature nobody can deny they use because nobody knows what it is, its like being "customer focused" or "empowered", it means nothing and sounds nice therefore everyone does it. Customer svc has a great excuse, well, sure you have a bug, but now we have agile so surely there will never be any bugs in the future. The customers are told things will get better because of Agile and when things invariably get better for whatever reason, it was because of the wise application of agile and their wisdom in selecting an agile supplier. But what do the actual devs get out of it? Nothing, really.
Everything that happens around a plastic christmas tree is really cool and fuzzy and happy and the best thing to ever happen and the nicest time of the year and watch us drinking cups of eggnog while you stand there as a plastic christmas tree. And that's nice ... for everyone around the christmas tree. But with some empathy for the point of view of the plastic christmas tree itself, all the foolishness related to christmas, is kinda irrelevant to itself in it's tree-i-ness. The plastic christmas tree is having a lot of things done to it and around it but it is not affected in any way.
Right off the bat, I can see you've worked at some toxic work environments because you see managers as impediments to work because what their MO is to play act, exert authority, and get off on paperwork.
On a good team, a manager is worth their weight in goal, and will work tirelessly to remove road blocks from devs.
The agile manifesto was written by developers for developers. But these developers were builders who liked building and solving customer problems. Not people like you who seem to think everyone in the company is useless and just gets in the way of devs who do the only real work. If that is really the only experience you know, I urge you to work hard to find a better job.
Any philosophy or process is only as good as the people attempting to practice it.
I've noticed that in practice everyone benefits from agile except the devs... The managers have new and extremely elaborate play acting to perform, dominance to new authority to vigorously enforce, and extensive new paperwork and reports and whiteboards to shuffle. The snake oil salesmen obviously love selling snake oil. The marketing and HR folk have a new feature nobody can deny they use because nobody knows what it is, its like being "customer focused" or "empowered", it means nothing and sounds nice therefore everyone does it. Customer svc has a great excuse, well, sure you have a bug, but now we have agile so surely there will never be any bugs in the future. The customers are told things will get better because of Agile and when things invariably get better for whatever reason, it was because of the wise application of agile and their wisdom in selecting an agile supplier. But what do the actual devs get out of it? Nothing, really.
Everything that happens around a plastic christmas tree is really cool and fuzzy and happy and the best thing to ever happen and the nicest time of the year and watch us drinking cups of eggnog while you stand there as a plastic christmas tree. And that's nice ... for everyone around the christmas tree. But with some empathy for the point of view of the plastic christmas tree itself, all the foolishness related to christmas, is kinda irrelevant to itself in it's tree-i-ness. The plastic christmas tree is having a lot of things done to it and around it but it is not affected in any way.