I've read the Netflix document many times. To be fair, I don't have any special knowledge about working at Netflix to suggest that Netflix doesn't actually empower specialists. I am curious if Netflix avoids Agile/Scrum or offers real private working conditions though, and if not, why not? Answers focused on "collaboration" would count as evidence that, contrary to the slide deck, you aren't actually "hiring smart people and getting out of their way."
Generally we have cubes (as far as working space goes). It's up to the teams if they want Agile/Scrum (most don't, a few find it useful, folks are encouraged to experiment).
Collaboration, in contrast to many other valley companies, isn't a big priority. Since we only hire senior (Finder) devs, each is capable of taking on one or more projects almost solo. So where you'd have an ~8 person team at Google, Netflix has a single developer. There are pros & cons to this approach, I might talk about them in a future article. The practical upshot is that everyone does what they think is best for their particular project (others are encouraged to provide feedback but the ultimate decision is left up to the project owner [who is not a manager]).
> Collaboration, in contrast to many other valley companies, isn't a big priority. Since we only hire senior (Finder) devs, each is capable of taking on one or more projects almost solo. So where you'd have an ~8 person team at Google, Netflix has a single developer. There are pros & cons to this approach, I might talk about them in a future article. The practical upshot is that everyone does what they think is best for their particular project (others are encouraged to provide feedback but the ultimate decision is left up to the project owner [who is not a manager]).
The emphasis on individuals is refreshing. Saying "the team decides" isn't a huge help when "teams" get thrown together with little regard to preferred working styles.
If you can guarantee that non-Agile teams never have deliverables required for Agile teams (and it sounds like such a guarantee is something you strive for), then this seems reasonable. But it seems very fragile if you can't guarantee that condition.
"Do what you feel is best" is the right attitude, so at least it suggests you treat employees as grown-ups. But I would worry how that "do what you feel is best" property could possibly trickle down to subordinates within Agile teams.
Subordinate is just anybody who has to take direct instruction from someone else. Doesn't have to be codified via job title. If you have a "team" that does Agile, you thereby have subordinates (the members of that team, subordinate to whomever is reviewing e.g. burndown) even if no one calls them subordinates or explicitly thinks of them that way.
FWIW, Agile/Scrum is not, by itself, something that smart people would avoid. It's good for certain situations and bad for others, like every other management technique. I use (a lightweight form of) it to manage my own projects when they reach the "mopping up, fix all the little details that the customer will be annoyed by" phase, and I am both CEO, manager, and sole developer, so it's clearly not a power thing. :-)
The question you should be asking is when would you want to use Agile or Scrum. An answer of "All the time! It's the greatest thing ever" indicates either stupidity or limited experience. But an answer of "We never use that bullshit" also indicates either stupidity or limited experience. Good managers and good cultures deal in shades of grey, and are able to drill into the details of the situation to identify when a technique is appropriate.
There's a distinction between 'agile' (the manifesto) and Capital-A Agile. I believe your parent comment is referring to the latter, where Agile has just become yet another way for managers to control their underlings.
...I mean seriously, "Agile process" is an oxymoron and terribad managers go around saying it without a hint of irony. Seriously?!?
There's a distinction between 'agile' (the manifesto) and Capital-A Agile.
Yeah, that's kinda my point. People throw the word "agile" around as though it has one precise meaning, when it clearly doesn't. And IMO, the kind of "Agile" that people are railing against is so far removed that it doesn't deserve any association whatsoever with the expression "agile". And then there's the thing where people act like "Scrum" == "Agile" when Scrum is just one of many processes that claim some degree of affiliation with the "agile" world-view.
All of that said, I get the vibe that some people either don't agree that there is a distinction, or don't care, and have a blanket "agile is bad" mindset. It's frustrating to me, as I've experienced a shop with a well run Scrum process (when I was at Lulu.com) and I know from experience that, done right, it's a pleasurable and effective way to work.
Yeah, that's kinda my point. People throw the word "agile" around as though
it has one precise meaning, when it clearly doesn't. And IMO, the kind of
"Agile" that people are railing against is so far removed that it doesn't
deserve any association whatsoever with the expression "agile".
I agree with you, but I'm also realistic about the fact that the term "agile" has been thoroughly and completely tainted by its association with bad implementations. One may as well complain about people referring to "Linux" rather than "GNU/Linux", or using "hacker" to mean people who break security rather than programmers who come up with novel solutions to interesting problems.
Words are defined by usage, and every manager I've encountered has used "agile" to mean a system of project management in which work is broken up into things called "user stories", and is then bucketed into fixed-length "sprints", with planning sessions to actually put the work into the buckets. Now you may say that this is one mere implementation of agile, and you'd be right. But it is by far the most dominant implementation. It's like saying that GNU/Linux is one mere implementation of a GNU system. You're right. But realistically, no one you know will be familiar with any others. It's the same way with agile software development. Scrum is one mere implementation of agile. But it's the only one most developers and managers encounter, so it's understandable that they'll conflate the two.
So few implementations of Agile have the slightest connection to the quality-focused spirit of the Agile principles that there is no such thing to talk about "Agile" apart from the ubiquitous failure mode.
You say,
>the kind of "Agile" that people are railing against is so far removed that it doesn't deserve any association whatsoever with the expression "agile"
but I say that the idealized notion of "agile" you're talking about simply does not exist in reality, and no company using Agile even comes remotely close to it. The fact that Agile is so easily subverted is an indication of how poor a tool it is, and in the end when everyone is misusing a certain tool (the way that everyone misuses Agile) you have to stop doing mental gymnastics to defend the tool and acknowledge the widespread failure is the tool's fault.
but I say that the idealized notion of "agile" you're talking about simply does not exist in reality, and no company using Agile even comes remotely close to it.
Based on how ubiquitous it is to hear about agile failure modes, this suggests to me your experience isn't widely applicable.
I'm glad you found some of those one-in-a-million workplaces that "do agile right" -- but they are so rare that we can't go around basing our overall opinion about agile, or our expectations about the next marginal adoption of agile, upon these kinds of freak occurrences.
Based on how ubiquitous it is to hear about agile failure modes, this suggests to me your experience isn't widely applicable.
Counterpoint: Maybe you're just hearing from a "Vocal Minority". And maybe the people quietly doing agile and enjoying it, don't feel the need to go around trumpeting it to the world?
No, the grievances against Agile are just too voluminous and wide-spread, consider even Dave Thomas's presentation about how Agile is dead due to the ease with which it is subverted for political manipulation [0].
If someone as key to software productivity as Dave Thomas is saying this, it's clearly not just because of a vocal minority.
Your suggestion that we should check whether it's just a vocal minority is a good one. We should check that.
Unfortunately, it's extremely obvious that it's not the case, and the dysfunction / failure mode of Agile is extremely common, by far the majority of Agile implementations.
Your comment represents a No True Scotsman fallacy -- the idea that whatever "agile" is, it must be equivalent to the ideals espoused by people who are affiliated with it.
I've written much more about the in principle failure of Agile [0] so I'll leave it to that.
As others have said, the agile manifesto itself is far less objectionable than most implementations of capital-A Agile Processes. However, I think we should be careful about giving it a free pass -- in particular, it's sometimes used as a counter-argument against remote work.
