Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?
Continuous integration is a good thing.  Back in the bad old days you&#x27;d have three people working on parts of the system for 6 months and plan to snap them together in 2 weeks and it would take more like another 6 months.<p>Agile methods are also useful.  If you can&#x27;t plan 2 weeks of work you can probably not plan 6 months.<p>When agile methods harden into branded processes and where there is no consensus on the ground rules by the team it gets painful.  The underlying problem is often a lack of trust and respect.  In an agile situation people will stick to rigid rules (never extend the sprint, we do all our planning in 4 hours, etc.) because they feel they&#x27;ll lose what little control they have otherwise.  In a non-agile situation people can often avoid each other for months and have the situation go south suddenly.  In agile you wind up with lots of painful meetings instead.<p>Also I think it is rare for one language to really be &quot;best for a job&quot;.  If you want to write the back end of a run of the mill webapp, you can do a great job of that in any mainstream language you are comfortable in.