I’ve seen a few, but it’s still kind of controversial. That being said, there is a time and a place for agile where it works, but also there is a team composition and a style of agile which works and that style tends to piss off micromanaging middle managers, so it rarely is allowed.

I had an article saved in my work slack before I left that company (for health reasons), but a currently popular one seems to be this one: https://johnfarrier.com/agile-failure-what-drives-268-higher-failure-rates/

My take is based on years of interaction with companies and friends in other companies. The biggest problem isn’t necessarily Agile, but instead that agile is not intended for long term projects. Agile is fantastic in short turnaround interactions such as web dev, and because these short turnaround places have such easily visible results, managers take them to be gospel. Thus comes Corporate Agile: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524230754/https://bits.danielrothmann.com/corporate-agile Link is from the Internet archive because I can’t find his new site if he moved.

Long story short, corporate agile is the agile the bosses want, as it allows them to be constantly involved with more and more “agile” meetings. You know. Meetings. The antithesis of Agile. The place productivity goes to die. I had to remind our bosses that Agile dictated that stand ups included the developers and the scrum master ONLY multiple times and pointed them to the agile training they gave me. Didn’t matter. They’re the boss. This is a pretty common breakdown in Agile. So, that turned daily standup into daily meeting, since the quick status updates now had to be broken down for the boss. Every. Single. Day.

Agile at its most basic is intended to reduce meetings to once a week so the rest of the time can be spent developing. Every company I know starts including devs in at least 300% more meetings (even junior devs) after switching to Agile for at least 6 months. And on average, it takes half an hour for a programmer to return to the level of productivity they hit before any interruption. This is generally due to the limitations of working memory. (Many research papers on this if you want.)

But to get back to the original point. Because agile concentrates on short immediately tangible and verifiable benefits, any progress that takes longer than a sprint isn’t allowed. (It actually is, with proper implementation, as Agile is supposed to be edited on a team by team basis to make things work, but companies want everyone on exactly the same page.) Guess what doesn’t have immediately tangible and verifiable benefits? That’s right, research. Guess what it’s still in a research phase? Aside from basically anything that isn’t in market yet, self driving technology is very much research driven. Lots of trial, error, and long development cycles. Longer than a sprint for sure. And anyone who says self driving is in market should try an exercise if finding one level 5 self driving car that hasn’t been recalled due to false marketing or safety concerns. The technology isn’t there yet. It could be getting there, but profits are getting in the way of progress.

In my (in the industry) experience: Agile killed safe development by pushing superficial internal deadlines that look good instead of are good. Safety requirements therefore are never met, but people keep looking like they’re approaching at least one, but end up sacrificing other things that no one is concentrating on, causing more set backs than improvements. Self driving will not be legally commercialized until either someone lobbies bad development onto the roads, or capitalism realizes that quarter profit isn’t as important as ten year profit and Agile finally burns in a god damn fire.

After you hit full time student, the rest of the classes are free, so I filled my schedule way too full. All my favorite teachers were in the math department too. No regrets. That and I ended up using my math skills when I switched to machine learning engineering.

That must have been cathartic as hell.

As someone with a degree in math and a degree in engineering… One of those degrees got me a job.

That being said, that’s the way engineers look at managers, as generally they want to build something that works and is safe, but all managers care about is getting it done quickly and under budget, which means any micromanaging gets pushed down to the technician to have to deal with… And trying to argue gets you fired.

There are times where intersex babies need surgery to prevent complications. For anything else, let them wait until they can decide. Agreed 100%.

In America, it appears to have started being in vogue during WWII as a way for single moms whose husband is overseas to have less to take care of. After a bit of coercion, my parents admitted the hospital did it without even their consent. That does sound a lot like [insert birth state here] in the [insert birth decade here] so I didn’t question it.

Still pretty cheap, but yeah. I’ve had little from the Kroger line that I’d buy again, so that’s fair enough.

Interesting. Outside of chips, I’ve had a lot of luck with Private Selection (Kroger’s no name brand). I’ve had quality issues with Food Lion and Walmart’s perishables, but not as often with Kroger. Kroger’s non perishables don’t seem to be much different than Walmart’s though.

Fabulous Crusty. I don’t hate his work or his decisions, as he wanted to do what he liked, and he found a new audience with it. Absolutely good for him.

I miss his old content he probably decided was cringe, or perhaps YouTube deemed controversial like his playthrough of Rinse and Repeat. Rinse and Repeat isn’t controversial as far as I know(?) and had censor blurs. As someone in the LGBTA, I didn’t find his reactions to be inappropriate, and I liked his exploration of the jank of that game. Although I’m not sure why he played it, other than “this game is weird, it’ll get clicks.”

He’s deleted or delisted a lot of my favorite videos from back in the day (or I can’t find his old channel, not sure). I hope he’s doing well, I just miss the really random weird stuff he was playing. I did enjoy the Shadow of War stuff though.

Mine only do these things for attention. We try to encourage positive behaviors for getting our attention, but there are times we can’t pay attention to them and they hate that. I love those spoiled brats, but they can get frustrating. Especially if the game you’re playing can’t be paused or you have your hands full at work (from home).

I mean, the average newborn is smarter than the average politician, so maybe it’s not as bad as we think.