I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning.
A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.
Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster.
From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.
If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work.
The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time.
No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team.
I miss those days.
Sort of worst of both worlds. Everyone develops learned helplessness, checks out or leaves.
If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre.
Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
Lots of that, going 'round, these days. Companies are firing (or driving off) all the people that can do it right.
You also have to consider that developers are not sales people. They are a cost center.
… devs don’t hire the teams… management does…
Most devs I worked with prefer smaller teams.
Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for.
It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
Yea, duh.
The more your decisions affect the company, the more you’re compensated.
It’s why C-suite commands the biggest salaries.
It’s another reason why orgs are so low trust.
People are not equations.
Let’s define risk in this discussion.
Risk is the relative impact your decisions have on the org at large. If you make the wrong choice as the CEO, you can tank the company.
If someone’s job involves risk, and you pay them peanuts, they’ll either go to a job that doesn’t involve that much risk or make decisions that are always maximally safe, regardless of potential upside, usually at the cost of company growth.
You want your staff to feel comfortable taking risks so that the company can grow, because a stagnant company will die. So you pay your positions more when they have more risk.
They've just removed a huge amount of manager discretion and initiative through multiple top-down dictates that are pretty much killing any low level desire to really innovate and try risky initiatives.
IBM, but with same level product market fit as IBM had for its mainframes, but in this case for markets 100x more important for the global economy.
It's just sad.
It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement.
It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything.
Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything.
The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll.
It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive.
And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs)
Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.