Thread regarding IBM layoffs

OMG.... I do remember that forced march to "agile." All of those pointless comparisons of us to Spotify. The premise of "agile" was the team (that creates and builds the product) was meant to make the best decisions for the team (and the product that they build.) That autonomy... that ability to "do the right thing" lasts approximately until a 2nd line (or, much worse, a 3rd line) has a "really good idea." It turns out that this company never, ever stopped being "top down" no matter how "agile" we became. Since those two concepts are in complete opposition, we decided that we would go with the tried and true "top down" approach. But we still had to perform all the rites of "agile" in perpetuity just to show our commitment. This whole thing was both insane and a nightmare. I have to stop typing now because I am off to my 1200th "Retrospective" where I can explain what I could have done so much better in the last week.

@klx: "With coding, if a module needs coding, any dev can do it."

Rubbish.

On the ~200 dev product I was product manager for, there were very distinct specializations, some requiring domain knowledge, some requiring specific technical skills, and some requiring deep knowledge of an old, large, and extremely complex codebase.

Maybe this is true of the baby projects in the web world, but not when you are responsible for the integrity of somebody's data.

The marketing agile was comedy in action. The former CMO of shoes…oops I mean CMO of IBM was clueless. She did wear some great shoes though. I recall being in a super important meeting with MeShell presenting a critical agile program update and of course she’s shoe shopping on her lap top….

wait.... ibm still develops s/w? i thought we just other peoples' s/w and h/w.

Yes. IBM shoving agile to everyone's face was absolutely a disaster. It needed to be targeted to the right teams who could benefit from this method, and not all were applicable. But unless you truly experience what it really means to be agile, IBMers will never understand it especially being a bygone tech business.

They started doing some tasks via "semi-Agile" around 2017. They tried to force agile into places where waterfall would be the more productive method. When you have a team doing wildly different tasks, not just anyone can go to the board and pick a task. With coding, if a module needs coding, any dev can do it. Agile works great for software dev, not making marketing comms.