The Longflow Manifesto
I know this was intended with a good heart, but it seems very naive to me. At times I have hated agile & scrum. I have hated interruptions, I have hated meetings, and I have hated deadlines. I've tried to explain to management that they were shooting themselves in the foot by adding overhead with meetings and status reports. With hindsight, I now believe I was wrong.<p>As an engineer, this sounds like bliss. Sit quietly by myself without interruptions and solve the problems of my choosing in whatever way I consider the highest quality. It sounds like grad school.<p>As a manager & business owner this sounds like a nightmare. Engineers who refuse to make & meet deadlines, refuse to communicate & report status regularly, and work on problems of their own choosing, it adds up to people I can't make very good use of, and work getting done that doesn't contribute meaningfully to the bottom line.<p>There's a reason you need regular communication: because people walk out of planning meetings with different ideas in their head, even when everyone thinks they agree. If you don't follow up often, nobody will get what they expect. Realizing that as a programmer, even if it's painful, that I need regular checkins in order to be more useful to the organization, that is something that didn't happen early enough in my career.