Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

Yet Another Obligatory Slam of Agile at WF

It hadn't occurred to me until now that concerns regarding WF's butchering of Agile Methodologies was too narrowly focused on the methods alone.

Agile has become way more than a method(s). Its original usefulness in software development has been converted by mgmt into a all-to-convenient verb promoting decision making without consequences. It is perfectly suited for the third party offshore workforce. US workforce not so much.

Ironically the effects of agile flow like a waterfall (ha!) from top to bottom. Tech teams are expected to always be ready to pivot to whatever the flavor of the day is. Managers of those tech teams are not motivated by anything other than taking orders and hoping for collective compliance. Make no mistake, this is fear based employment from a severely bi-polar employer.

If mgmt can't keep track of their wins and losses, what does that leave workers with?

What incentives can workers look forward to when the mission is so complex and so abstract? What skill can be gained here?

How can a worker accurately measure their worth? Simply counting the number of times one says "yes i'll do that" isn't going to cut it.

Agile has been we-ponized by mgmt to protect themselves and justified by the growing relationship with contracted work offshore.

It's brilliant and sad.

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Post ID: @OP+1qICyF8C

13 replies (most recent on top)

Why do we have AGILE = ASK SAUL

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Post ID: @4uot+1qICyF8C

When Agile was first being considered, I was a BA manager in mortgage. We spent days with an Agile consultant with them explaining the benefits. Toward the end, I explained the loan manufacturing process going thru multiple systems and what those systems did and offshoots and processes within those systems. Once I was done, the consultants advised that it made no sense to try to utilize agile in that complex environment. I then moved to Wholesale / Commercial. Processes and systems are is complex, if not more. Agile became a buzz word and focus was on trying to reduce employee numbers. It has never been a wining strategy with the complexity of process and systems.
Also…it’s not really agile. It’s been modified too much. We referred to it as Wagile. Wells form of agile. Messed up.

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Post ID: @1fuo+1qICyF8C

the departure of the guy who was the champion of agile should give you a clue as to how poorly we’ve done it. I was told we’re getting rid of all our contract scrum masters. lol. Ok good luck getting people to take on that role in addition to their actual job and doing it well.

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Post ID: @sdt+1qICyF8C

You can thank that burping mo--n who was against anything manual. Automation has its place but when the automation engineer doesn't understand the process and there is no one left who does, what do you expect?

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Post ID: @rvv+1qICyF8C

Only wells fargo can fuuuuckup something that 1000s of other companies got right.

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Post ID: @sgo+1qICyF8C

@qvl+1qICyF8C - Agile was never a good fit for WF. If Leadership had bothered to do a functional evaluation of the methodology with current and future practices/infrastructure it would have been clear that moving to Agile was a mistake.
That would have required experienced Leadership - no longer available at WF.

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Post ID: @ijk+1qICyF8C

Not only did WF lay off all their manual testers, they then didn't bother to confirm that the automation engineers were writing comprehensive (or even competent) tests. (I have seen some automated tests that literally validate nothing)
Even better, after getting rid of all the manual testers, no one made sure that every team had an automation engineer. I know of at least one team that hasn't written any automated tests in 2 years despite implementing new features in that time.
That same team has a tester who only does manual testing and refuses to learn how to automate anything, despite having been given numerous lessons on how to do so.
It is a mess.

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Post ID: @jvl+1qICyF8C

@jzp said, " hopefully teams have learnt their lesson."

They haven't.

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Post ID: @vne+1qICyF8C

Blaming testing is wrong, upper management decided to lay off all QA in September 2022. Every single one was canned, they knew the application and the business and left it all up to automation engineers to do the real testing and mainly offsite sources that don’t even know how a mortgage account works or the difference between a checking or savings accounts. Make no mistake testing failed because there were no testers!

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Post ID: @lks+1qICyF8C

Agile with Waterfall deadlines. We're just ba----dizing everything, including Agile.

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Post ID: @qvl+1qICyF8C

Tech hasn’t figured out testing and delivering without errors. Everything came to a halt in Oct and tech execs at the highest levels put the freeze for three months to
Review changes as most teams were not deploying after appropriate testing and valuations hopefully teams have learnt their lesson.

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Post ID: @jzp+1qICyF8C

OP-thanks for posting. I agree with you. WF doesn’t know wtf they’re doing or what direction they’re going with Agile. They just wanted to “do” Agile. Tech teams are cycling thru multiple kanban/scrum leaders-it’s been a sh*t show.

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Post ID: @jys+1qICyF8C

We'll QA it in prod.

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Post ID: @ohv+1qICyF8C

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