Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

I have no evidence, not even an argument, that software on the whole has gotten better, or worse, over the last 10 to 20 years.

I can argue that software developers have become less efficient, because Agile enforces bureaucratic constraints. Also, Agile tends to produce "feature factories" that ignore best development practices such as refactoring.

But from the viewpoint of the decision-makers, none of this matters. For the people who decide to use Agile, these issues are not nearly as important as having control.

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Scrum gives managers and sales more control.
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Yet, has software on the whole gotten better over the last 10 to 20 years?

There’s certainly a couple of orders of magnitude more of it, although most of the supporting infrastructure is often “hidden in the cloud” and a mystery to most users and indeed many programmers.

That accurate critique was posted ten years ago. Kanban was in use twenty years ago. We've known better ways to build software for a long time. So why don't we use them?

Because Scrum gives managers and sales more control.

They won't give up that control until a new methodology comes along that is clearly much better. Until then, we're stuck with this.

Full text from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384

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tomelders on March 20, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps

I can't take this Agile cr-p any longer. It's lunacy. It has all the hall marks of a religion. A lot of literature, a lot of disciples, hoards of money grabbing snake oil selling evangelists, and no evidence at all that it works. In fact, as far as I can see, there's more evidence that it doesn't work.
And the next person that says to me "derp derp derp, well it's better than waterfall herp derp" can go fly a kite. If you think we live in a world where there's only two ways to manage/build software, then you're a fool and have no business being in this business. Either start applying critical thinking or go sell crazy some place else.
Maybe there is a perfect project out there, somewhere, and they're doing Agile right, and it makes the product better, and everyone on the team is happier and more productive. But I've never seen a project like that. In five Agile projects I've had the misfortune of working on or alongside, All I've seen is stakeholders making implementation decisions in ivory towers, developers being told to not implement that "delete" function because it's out of scope (it's out of scope because the designer and UX people forgot to put it in, but fu-k it, we'll pretend you're right and it's meant to be like that), and teams pretending stuff works and everything is ok when in actual fact, it doesn't, and it isn't and if people could just stop looking a Jira and start looking at the code then maybe we could start to fix this hunking pile of cr-p and actually start being proud of our work.
And before anyone weighs in with "Well those project clearly weren't doing Agile right", please, save your breath. Every project has been infested with people who have stacks of books on the subject. They love it, they su-k it all up, they obsess over the minutiae of how to implement scrum, retrospectives, and sprints. They can talk of nothing else at work, at home, or in the pub. If they can't do it right, who can?
And herein lies the point, there is no way to do agile right. What there is, is good project managers and bad project managers. There are good devs and bad devs. Good designers, bad designers. The good people will make good things in spite of having Agile forced upon them. Then the agile non-thinkers will jump on the bandwagon and lap up the good peoples success as if it were their own. Then someone will write a blogpost about how Agile made it all possible and it will all be lies piled on top of lies.
Do I sound angry? Good, because I am. Agile is a con. People like agile because it absolves them of the responsibility to think and do their job. It makes my job a misery and it su-ks money out of a clients pockets and to my mind is no better than theft.
If you think I'm wrong, prove it. And I mean PROVE AGILE WORKS, WITH EVIDENCE or shut up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I didn't come into your life and tell you how to su-k eggs, but if you're going to come into mine and do that, you'd better have data to back you up.
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SAS is far from the only place this occurs.

The OP is getting to the heart of the competing philosophies within Agile, the fact that diehard Agile acolytes often discharge their duties with a religious fervor (while possessing approaching zero understanding of the actual software engineering they are attempting to micromanage) and that Agile is just plain not a good fit for every kind of software engineering.

This bloke had it right over a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384

It's hard to move forward with skills based on lies.

Indeed seen this way many times Insurance is the worst