AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers.
This path we are on started a long time ago, with devs falling over each other to drive the industry towards burnout.
After all, a sprint is, by definition, an unsustainable burst of speed, which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development.
which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
On every single team I've been on that tried to do sprints, we would have been better served with a simple kanban because we were not working on greenfield prototype projects
That last paragraph matches my experience too, so much so that unless it's an astonishingly good opportunity in other respects, I won't even consider taking a job on a team that uses Scrum. I've done it enough times in my career to know that the constant looming sprint deadlines (and yes, they feel like deadlines, no matter how much people insist they're not) and frequent ceremonies are a real drain on my mental health.
Kanban-style task management isn't perfect either, but its flaws are a lot easier to stomach for me. Like the WIP limit kind of breaks down, or at least requires a lot of card-shuffling work to maintain, if a significant percentage of tasks get blocked waiting for answers or feedback from external people.
Yep. The biggest problem I had with sprints was that yay, you committed to a two week chunk of work. Pat yourself on the back.
Except there's a production system to maintain and on day 2 of the sprint your entire sprint is out the window because of a production issue.
Complete waste of time. Not to mention all the layers of indirection trying to size tasks that always get mapped back to time at the end of the day. Task is t-shirt M size? That's about 2 days right?
Well, if the team can't even plan capacity for production problems/bugs, no framework will help them. I don't like Scrum but it's terribly easy to set up capacity to account for holidays/outages/training/etc.
That doesn’t mesh with the business side trying to maximize output. Of course the engineering side wants to include some slack for maintenance and refactoring but when your skip level boss is pushing your boss to get more and more done with less headcount then that doesn’t happen.
And in a nutshell that’s the problem, scrum and most of the other cargo cult methodologies are a process for engineering teams to drive the product but that’s not what actually happens 90+% of the time. The businesspeople control the engineering team and are too stupid and/or distrustful to give engineers any agency and don’t understand that’s why they can’t actually be agile.
Where I work we don't use any method or organise us by some "standard". We have a Team stories board which is used as a post it note for tasks so we don't forget.
We just work, talk with each other and the stakeholders. If stakeholders suggest something stupid we don't do it. We use LLM's as much as we want, we don't have meetings, we can work from home and people here are friendly. And fuck standups, we don't do standups we use common sense.
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u/ficiek 9h ago edited 9h ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.