Re:Scrum Sucks
by Aurornis on Monday January 15, 2024 @12:32PM
(#39003554)
> Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup)
It was even worse than this: The Scrum operators wanted an engineer from every team they interacted with to also join their meetings.
So if a project made an API request to another project, they'd insist on pulling an engineer from that team into their weekly or daily meetings.
I had daily meetings with 10 people, half of whom might be engineers from other teams who didn't need to be there.
Meetings became so useless that everyone stopped listening until their name was called so they could work through meetings. Then every time someone's name was called, we had to spend 5 minutes recovering the last 5 minutes of the meeting to bring them up to speed.
The inefficiency was out of control, but the worst part was that some people thrived on this level of inefficiency: Lack of progress meant the empire builders could argue for more headcount, too many meetings meant the Program Management department could hire more program managers. It was like a case study in adverse incentives.
Re:Scrum Sucks
by dheera on Monday January 15, 2024 @12:43PM
(#39003697)
sounds like my (big co) meetings. also in the "scrums" everyone gets stuck on one topic and it turns into an hour long debate that could have been resolved by 30 mins of coding.
It was even worse than this: The Scrum operators wanted an engineer from every team they interacted with to also join their meetings.
So if a project made an API request to another project, they'd insist on pulling an engineer from that team into their weekly or daily meetings.
I had daily meetings with 10 people, half of whom might be engineers from other teams who didn't need to be there.
Meetings became so useless that everyone stopped listening until their name was called so they could work through meetings. Then every time someone's name was called, we had to spend 5 minutes recovering the last 5 minutes of the meeting to bring them up to speed.
The inefficiency was out of control, but the worst part was that some people thrived on this level of inefficiency: Lack of progress meant the empire builders could argue for more headcount, too many meetings meant the Program Management department could hire more program managers. It was like a case study in adverse incentives.