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0 pointsJensson3y ago0 comments

Do your developers have to work in 2 week sprints and forced to work on tasks split into sub 1-day part so they never have any real autonomy? Then you aren't giving your developers more freedom than Google. And if you aren't working like that then you aren't doing Scrum.

Google gives even junior developers multi month projects to own, manage and complete. No Scrum shop gives developers that level of autonomy, not even to senior developers.

So to me the time I've spent working on Scrum projects feels like a sweatshop compared to how I could plan and structure development at Google. At Google I am free to collaborate with stakeholders, build prototypes and get feedback etc, as I see fit to complete the project. Or not do it when I don't feel it is needed, the important part isn't how I run the project but that I run it well. If you don't give your developers that level of autonomy then I'm not sure why you'd care much about developer competence at all. (I quit Google a few years ago though due to how the company was changing, but I'll never join a Scrum development team again)

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amitport3y ago

"And if you aren't working like that then you aren't doing Scrum"

I kindly disagree. You seem to have worked at a very stressfull place. In my experience that has nothing to do with it being "true scrum TM" or not. In any case, happy for you that you got out.

JenssonOP3y ago

Always this "if you have any complaints about Scrum then you aren't doing it correctly" with no explanation how you'd fix the problems I talked about.

Also the leetcode interview is cargo-culted from big tech companies like Google and Scrum is cargo-culted from big tech consultants. They don't fit well together, having both means your company just picked the most popular/simple way to do each part without considering why Google uses that interview or tech consultants uses Scrum. If you want your engineers to work on problems similar to at Google then you wouldn't use Scrum, and if you want your engineers to work on similar problems as big tech consultants then you wouldn't use the leetcode interview.

amitport3y ago

Scrum does not mean "no freedom" or "no autonomy" it just says lets think about what we're going to do and try to follow a plan for the next week or two. Of course the individual software developer should be the one responsible to forming, adapting, and updating this plan (and it definitely should contain " collaborate with stakeholders, build prototypes and get feedback etc,") (of course, there is some level of 'commitment'. As in other project management systems, you should try and do what you said you'll do).

If as you say, you had no autonomy/freedom, this has nothing to with scrum, that's just regular bad management.

2 more replies

NickChasanis3y ago

Scrum is like communism, it doesn't work, stop obsessing over it.

nicoburns3y ago

If a company is really following scrum, then the developers are creating and managing their own tickets

JenssonOP3y ago

Yes, nobody else could write tickets that reliably takes less than a day other than the team. The problem is that your day to day structure gets decided by a brainstorming session held every other week, that might make sense in some contexts but mandating that every developer has to work that way is exactly what I mean that you aren't allowed to have any responsibility.

To me it seems like Scrum was designed to make developers have as little individual ownership/responsibility as possible while still being able to produce relevant code. I see the merit in that, you don't have to tell me why minimizing individual ownership/responsibility could be a good thing. But I strongly believe that individual ownership is necessary to properly capitalize on the creativity of individual talent, otherwise its mostly wasted.

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0 pointsJensson3y ago0 comments

Google gives even junior developers multi month projects to own, manage and complete. No Scrum shop gives developers that level of autonomy, not even to senior developers.

0 comments

amitport3y ago

"And if you aren't working like that then you aren't doing Scrum"

I kindly disagree. You seem to have worked at a very stressfull place. In my experience that has nothing to do with it being "true scrum TM" or not. In any case, happy for you that you got out.

JenssonOP3y ago

Always this "if you have any complaints about Scrum then you aren't doing it correctly" with no explanation how you'd fix the problems I talked about.

amitport3y ago

If as you say, you had no autonomy/freedom, this has nothing to with scrum, that's just regular bad management.

2 more replies

NickChasanis3y ago

Scrum is like communism, it doesn't work, stop obsessing over it.

nicoburns3y ago

If a company is really following scrum, then the developers are creating and managing their own tickets

JenssonOP3y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse