There's a bias there, I think there are a lot of small shops where agile works great and you mostly hear about big shops that use it where it will never work great because you probably don't care that much about SmallTechCo.

Versus communism where people (e.g. Benjamin Tucker) were predicting its primary failure mode decades before it ever was instantiated at any scale.

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Excellent points.

Process is not the problem.

People are the problem.

What I mostly see it is people doing it to themselves. Someone thinks he has to be guardian of the process and refuses to let the experiment run.

I worked at a big company which did a full agile transformation, including full-time, agile coaches. I imagine everyone hired afterwords hated agile for the very real swirl the process caused, but those of us who’d been there before know it was FAR better than that chaos.

I also worked at a funded start up that implemented agile from the beginning, worked pretty great.

I've seen agile working well at a fairly big company.

I don't understand this recent pushback against agile development.

Do you really want to go back to the waterfall and V model style of development? Those are basically guaranteed failures in a fast moving industry like software development. If anything your comparison should be applied to the waterfall/V model because it is essentially central planning.

If you are doing things like building MVPs, iterated/incremental development with frequent changes and deployments to production then you are doing agile development.

Maybe it is not hyper formalized like Scrum but it is agile nevertheless.