Here’s Why Agile Technique and Scrum Destroys Any Company.

Agility and Scrum simply does not work in any company that implements it. And it definitely will not allow for aspiring programmers to advance in their field in any way. Why? It simply does not work. First let me explain to you exactly what Agile means and why it should not be permanently conducted as a regular development strategy, and point at that Scrum is just another unnecessary micromanagement operation that provokes anxiety and stress.

What is Agile and Scrum?

Agile is a trend that came out of web consulting that deals with particular and picky clientele with no real direction, choosing from limited options. It’s a two-week process where the team has to rush to get things done. During these two stressful two-week cram, the team either directs a client towards set expectations or deals with the misconduct and manages workflow around their needs. Neither of these options is appealing to programmers since they usually do not react well to social demands.

Companies usually divide two types of work to consultants, which is the high-end work that may not be given to prepared employees or the low-end dirty work that is assigned to employees who are temporarily retain for a year or two. Scrum is for the ones that have been promoted to the mediocre management class, that expect for programmers to deal with uneasy and difficult clientele and that will work on incoherent projects and assignments that no one wants to do.

Programmers are not taken seriously as they should be in this agile community and are expected to work on nonsense into valuable time just to appear productive along side with their actual work duties. It’s humiliating and a complete waste of time, instead of working on meaningful long-term projects that are interesting for programmers they are regulated to work on short-term projects in crunch time and are often turned away to work on developments that cannot relate with urgent business needs. Agile terminates ownership and uses programmers as mindless robots that are only useful to get the job done.

Scrum creates stress and anxiety in the productivity of individuals. This makes work sloppier can lead to mistakes since programmers usually perform at their best when involved in long-term interesting work instead of being pushed for a close deadline in an invasive matter. It simply does not work.

Destructive Placement

Agile reflects a dysfunctional organization with no well-defined hierarchy. Even with the team environment there is still an obvious ranking level system from highest to lowest, Product owners, Scrum and team members. Scrum puts engineering at a low level well below the ones that actually have full authority that decides which work is to be done. This causes problems because it means that they are likely to get pushed around or even penalized if work is falling behind and is taking longer than the deadline should be.

These decisions made by the higher level react emotionally instead of with deeper insight to the solution and defeat tougher and technical challenges of the development. So it is not wise for the company to be driven by engineers but when engineers have a sense of priority and ownership there is a happier and better quality of engineering in the workplace.

How is Agile causing destruction in the workplace?

Agile is created for companies that have no real credibility that would facilitate them to bargain with clients in an equal level, it is designed by consulting firms that are marginal that deal with short deadlines and puts clients at risk. It means to undergo the headaches and risks without any real positive feedback. It sets an emergency atmosphere when clients present reputational problems that need to be fixed quickly. You work more hours that take over evenings and weekends to get the job done, a lot time is wasted trying to focus on a mythical single cause and causes tension between team members that end up blaming each other for mistakes and errors. It is aggressive project management and should not be a permanent way of executing projects, it just doesn’t make sense and is not made for highly skillful programmers that deserve a better and enjoyable options.

Another real problem that agile creates is the invisible debt that piles up for every project. It is not brought to attention because higher leveled employees that direct the projects are blind to the problem and overlooked until it is too late and too expensive to fix. Individuals working on these projects are either rewarded or punished based on the completion of the project with no regard to looking ahead towards the two-week deadline. Agile corrupts the minds of these programmers to be mindless and near-sighted with no actual progress and improvement whatsoever. What’s even worse for programmers is that there is no career coherency for them to advance in there area of interest.

Say no to Scrum

Scrum creates underperformers that place them in an observation state that demands for individual engineers to provide a transparent work flow to rate and judge their own productivity. It is basically a position for slackers that do not get the job done but demand for others to do it instead. The fact that these individuals are being observed 100% of the time is a state of anxiety that is impossible to get away from.

Scrum and Agile is not meant for the best performers because they immediately do not react well to this environment once they understand that there is no room for advancement or any real interesting work that would pay off, instead it is meant for the status insensitive workers that have not been faced with any real challenges and just want to have some sort of high level credibility.

Essentially, Scrum and Agile play a part in status profit so many scrum material people judge their advancements or failures based on status differential achieved. This usually describes a younger person that thinks they are higher than what they really are and will gladly take to a scrum level position. Scrum is falsely sold under the impression that it works well in every environment and as a permanent way of workflow.

How Scrum can be useful.

Before the permanent implementation of Scrum and Agile in the workplace was put in place, it was best used as a tool during code red or in an emergency state. It was when a team needed to act quickly when an unexpected challenge arose and has no clear manager but a leader that chooses to provide direction to a possible solution to the problem. Since the emergency is short term then it is no problem to place the real and interesting work on a brief hold since they would be allowed to go back to it once the emergency is over. However, it should not be frequent for a company to spend time in these emergency states more than 6 weeks per year because in that case the emergency state is not rare when it should be causing less focus into the real work that needs to be done. Another problem is if consultancy is having trouble to establish itself and has bad communication with the client and is jeopardizing the reputation of the company then that also means that there is a permanent state of emergency.

More on Scrum issues.

Scrum and agile acknowledges that the state of emergency must be handed to a leaders that like to take charge and will do whatever it is to get the job done and advance in social status. It develops the problem of getting the job immediately and discussion later. So those motivated by the emergency state feel comfortable in it and conclude to terrible management. Agile and Scrum praises emergencies and that is the real problem, it is aggressive focus on individual performance with hardly any concern for individual engineers career advancement and have them only work on the priority. It becomes toxic.

With all this being said, there is no room for advancement and Agile and Scrum cannot be used to improve productivity at all. It is a dishonest representation of getting the job done right and instead glorifies the emergency state as its permanent way of completing projects. There is no real and interesting work that will benefit the programmer’s career journey and instead has them go in circles doing the same stressful workload for every challenge.

What’s next?

Hopefully this Agile and Scrum concept will soon disappear, it is not helpful for this booming generation of software engineers. There is much advancement in the technical world that will better benefit the individual programmer to enjoy meaningful work and improve on their skills. It is important that programmers and software engineers grow in their field for the sake of much better technical improvements because we need to improve our own people first before that can ever happen.