Yep, that&#x27;s a pretty apt description. The sad thing is almost all these fires were avoidable if they had let forward thinking engineers work on problems we all knew were upcoming, but weren&#x27;t the emergency of the week. Unfortunately, the dedication to &quot;agile&quot; seemed to mean that anything outside the scope of the next two weeks pretty much didn&#x27;t exist, and if you tried to do anything that wasn&#x27;t in the &quot;backlog&quot; you were some sort of rogue cowboy. (Even if the backlog was empty!)<p>Fundamentally, the problem was trust -- the management didn&#x27;t trust the engineers, so they micromanaged them poorly while invoking &quot;agile&quot; to make heavy management somehow seem like a populist movement for the &quot;team&quot;. And because the team was micromanaged and not trusted, motivation was low and the output was poor, which just made the problems worse.<p>(Not surprisingly: the company recently just laid off the entire staff)