I’m going to say it. Kids today…
When I began working in IT, men wore ties to work. This wasn’t back in the Don Draper Days…this was only a couple of decades ago. The corporate culture was professional, dignified, and respectful. Not that I’m a fan of neckties—far from it—but they were an indicator of how we treated one another, and how we thought about ourselves. We were professionals, and we were adults.
Seattle, home of grunge rock, was one of the first places to install Casual Friday in our corporate culture (I think we tied with Silicon Valley). The rank-and-file pushed for it, and we loved it, but I knew some executives who, even though they wore denim jeans on Friday, those jeans had been ironed.
Soon, dress codes were relaxed further. No neckties at all, then jeans acceptable everyday if you didn’t deal directly with customers, etc., etc. But still, we maintained an “adult” atmosphere. Running an IT shop was serious business. The systems we built and enhanced were very expensive and absolutely critical to our business. We weren’t screwing around here. We were highly skilled professionals, hard to find, and rather expensive, so casual dress or no, we maintained a professional attitude.
The last decade has seen massive changes in IT: offshoring, Y2K, and the burst IT bubble, which resulted in a diaspora of young hot shots who didn’t know a test environment from a deck chair. These Spicoli-clones flooded the market, commanding exorbitant salaries for their super-cool, shiny website-building skills, and knocked the corporate culture on its ass.
Since then, IT has been increasingly infantilized. Agile and other scrum-like methodologies, geared toward the quick-fix and the “What have you done for me lately?” attitude, have replaced more thoughtful, quality-obsessed approaches. Instead of workload planning sessions, we now have “story time.” Rather than project managers, we now have Scrum-masters. Instead of a determination to deliver a product that works right the first time, we now have “patches.” End-users no longer expect quality from IT; they literally expect us to screw up. And we fulfill that expectation, frequently.
So, yesterday, in our end-of-sprint demo, when suddenly our scrum-master announced that now we would go around the table so everyone can say who they appreciated this last sprint, I nearly blew my head gasket. What followed were ten minutes of the most uncomfortable, infantile, totally unprofessional drivel I’ve ever experienced on the job. “Everyone gets a trophy.”
Kids today… They go on and on about “disrespect.” You want to know disrespect? Treat a 53-year old man like a 12-year old at the Thanksgiving table. That’s disrespect, boyo.
k
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 
[…] staff to their rosters to deal with extracts, reports, and such. The idea of escaping “Agile World” and the onerous duties of being on-call for one third of my life is intensely attractive, so […]
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Couldn’t agree more been blogging about these topics for years. Feel free to browse and add your commentary; I go over many (though not all!) of the issues raise here..
Let’s move beyond scrum etc
PA
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And it’s only become worse, in recent months, as management cherry-picks the aspects of Agile it likes and tosses those that make it hard for them. They’ve pushed more and more of the actual work down on the Agile teams, until We are now managing our managers. They swap us around, breaking up teams, and last month they laid off 20% of my team, including critical knowledge bearers. This is not even Agile anymore.
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got a “sprint review” today… scrum is totally infantile. Incredibly wasteful infantile drivel. Can someone remind me how we got from professional data processing organizations to this iterate for no reason and then sit in a circle and hold hands and touch knees and confession crapola? I don’t feel like a 12-year old, I feel like a friken barbie doll.
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I feel your pain, friend; I do.
I have a few theories as to how we got from structured approaches to project life-cycles to this Agile methodology. Some of them include language that isn’t safe for the workplace, so I’ll leave those aside. The one I currently have as my “main suspect” in the whole thing is this:
As the Peter Principle pushes mediocrity higher and higher into corporate echelons, we get management that no longer knows how to manage. The task of management is pushed down the food chain, but it’s all spun into “empowering” terms like “Self-Actualized Teams” and so on. And now we have a bunch of worker bees running the show, with no hierarchy or leadership. We’re all equal, we’re a complete democracy, now, and we all want to feel GOOD about what we’re doing, and isn’t it all just so much fun? It’s like we’re at camp. Come on and sit by the fire. We’ll make smores and sing Kumbaya.
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Friend if that’s the case, then why is mgmt using coercion as usual to impose scrum on the workers… even in the training there was an air of coercion and condescension about the whole thing, from the scrum trainer. I also came up with a theory, google Elaine Scarry, Body of Pain. Essential scrum is contained in chapter one. Management is wielding power through scrum and they continue to double-down and do it because they can’t stop themselves, it’s compulsive. Once you start torturing, you can’t stop. A friend of mine, independent of my opinions, says standups and the rest are performed to make the worker more compliant. Perhaps you mean we have become like the Beat Generation, and we are compulsively torturing ourselves and we can’t stop, perhaps that’s the case. To make ourselves more compliant… I find what mgmt wants is always what they want: status reports and progress reports, nothing changes, they still want that. Most people don’t know the difference any more.
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I don’t think our positions are mutually exclusive. Management will impose this methodology on the workers so management doesn’t have to manage, no? It’s also the new shiny thing, which attracts the magpie-attention of modern management.
I’ve been in IT for 25 years, and have seen the rise and fall of several methodologies–some good, some not so good. But this one has come on strong, and I think it’s partially because it appeals to the “edgy” penchant of younger IT folks. I mean, it’s got a “manifesto,” for crying out loud.
And of course, a whole industry has sprung up around touting this new shiny object. Condescending? Yup. Coersive? Double-yup. And of course, management still wants their status reports and still throw work at us outside of sprints and our own “self-actualized” planning.
Naturally, there are different flavors and strengths of Agile; sounds like you got a real bad strain in your neck of the woods. My sympathies.
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