I've worked at large corporations where the structure doesn't lend itself to being very productive which causes a lot of headaches. One of the best examples was where the "business" side of a project I was working on was using waterfall and we (the dev team) were using Agile. Let that sink in for a minute. Neither team changed their methods and it was 8 months of madness until I finally quit. This was a company that was also famous for having "meetings about meetings" which wasted a lot of time during your day. I'm surprised I even lasted 8 months.
The only other really frustrating place I worked at was a medium sized company where Jr. inherited the company from his dad and my boss (marketing manager) was best friends with the boss. We were in the midst of redesign and development of their current site. We butted heads all the time about the design. I have close to ten years of development and design experience and he had none. He was trying to make the site into a 1990's version of Yahoo's homepage. After a lot of back and forth, he finally emailed me and basically said, "I out rank you, we're doing it my way." and after that, I just didn't give a fuck. Whatever he wanted, I gave it to him. About three months later, I finally left after being there for almost two years. The hilarious thing is after I left, I saw they released what was an half completed design since they hired a .Net guy to replace me (the only guy with design experience) and he had no idea what to do with Photoshop files or any basic frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation. After seeing the site, I finally felt vindicated.
If I have to manage a project myself, I would have: 1. bug tracking with timesheet (timesheet not for figuring how much you worked but to give a cost idea of future project). 2. source control 3. meetings as needed but needs to be scheduled and has a subject and time. So screw standup. Standups I've being part of previously was about glorifying what you did yesterday and what you will be doing today. A kind of, I don't trust you, give me some bullshit. 4. management needs to stay away, they need to go move furniture if they don't have anything to do. I know some people might be offended by this.
Not really. I work in mid-size company driven by marketing and sales. Besides daily stand-ups which could be considered bullshit there is not much meetings. Lead developer needs to attend few more to scope projects coming from marketing but its not that bad. Most time we can focus just on coding. The worst part is probably UAT process, but when you deal with mature projects it always will be a pain.
David Graeber wrote "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ , where "bullshit jobs" are defined as those "that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."
