Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to the customer.<p>At Yahoo, I designed and built a large project. This took about six months to deliver. At the time, the company was doing quarterly reviews that I think Marissa had imported from Google. Anyway, my manager had rated me as "meets expectations" for a few quarters because this project and the one I had previously worked on weren't visible to "customers" till they were delivered, so he didn't have any evidence to justify a higher rating against other managers' team members.<p>Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated.<p>So I deliver the project and now it's visible and everyone loves it and I get an "exceeds expectations" rating and then a promotion and a raise.<p>From being warned I'd be terminated to a promotion in less than six months, with no change in my work, but simply it becoming visible. Whee big company fun.