Thoughts on Kanban, Scrum, etc - Jonathan Blow

Snip taken from "Jonathan Blow: Consciousness, Game Design, & Free Will"
Original video: • Jonathan Blow: Conscio...
#gamedev #gamedevelopment #jonathanblow

[@InconspicuousChap]

Amazing. When I first became a team lead, I inherited a team and pretty soon I've figured out how well balanced it was. One guy was mediocre at algorithms, but excellent at information search, e.g. finding some cool frameworks on the web, another guy was a math academic, another guy could restructure the application changing half of the code without breaking anything, another one had deep knowledge of the business (we didn't have analysts then), etc. My ex-boss had hired them. This turned out to be a very efficient way to assemble a team on a limited budget: 10 "universal soldiers" would cost much higher than 10 people good at their particular skill. I could only imagine how much damage would it cause to run it using some dumbass methodology with impersonal averaged drones picking indistinguishable tasks from a queue (yes I mean Scrum).

[@zyriab5797]

From a SWE perspective, I think these processes (Kanban, Scrum, Agile, ...) are only interesting if we take them as principles and adapt/reject them based on the team and its needs, it often end up being a leash from management and really hinders the overall productivity/creativity of the individuals, imo. Control freaks love their sprint planning, retro and daily/bi-daily meetings... imo, if you hire the right persons for a job, you should be able to trust them to organically sync-up and organize with very minimal management and compulsory "standups"

[@MoonOvIce]

This has been happening all throughout the corporate world, not just in tech. It's a disaster and management and their bosses don't give a shit. It's all money and results.

[@tierdropp7544]

@@MoonOvIceyep, they dont give a shit because it doesn’t effect them or their pay

[@___Hermitage]

I have a lot of respect for this man

[@seinfan9]

My experience with this shit is that it's a system in place for management to track progress without tasking themselves to understand the complexities of the development work. Gaslighting also occurs telling the engineers that it's to help plan stuff and that the metrics are supposed to tell higher ups of a bandwidth issue. What winds up happening is that the engineers are bullied for not completing everything and the product owner and scrum master weasel word their way to mark crap as completed. So it's a stupid time wasting game put on top of the actual work that needs to happen and anything that is wrong with the process never gets addressed.

[@smallbluemachine]

“We don’t do any of these programming methodologies like Agile or Scrum because they’re umm.. ..” What are they, say dumb, tell me they are dumb. Say it’s just waterfall with meetings every two weeks!

[@zyriab5797]

People talk about agility but they are everything but agile, they follow these principles without giving a thought about why they were invented in the first place, in which context and by what kind of team.

[@foxdie8106]

I think that scrum is for an sport team, they need to improve their skills and they could survive even if they would not win a cup, but in software development you have to launch a product.

[@kzco-iq5cw]

i dont really see your point, since scrum is about making a working product as often as possible

[@foxdie8106]

@@kzco-iq5cw Scrum is for team skills improvements, they don't need to launch nothing. IT world has taken the metodology and It cannot be implemented well because It's not for a product, for example planning and tasks estimations are a common problem in IT.

[@kzco-iq5cw]

@@foxdie8106 scrum is about delivering working software regularly as its primary goal. Idk what you are talking about but i suggest you read the scrum guide to get an idea of what it actually is. It also doesnt mention „team skills improvements“ anywhere.

[@alexxx4434]

All this methods are just attempts to make a conveyor belt poduction line out of software development.

[@lordadamson]

anyone who had to manage a team will know the value of scrum, leaving people just doing their own thing is as good as it is also bad. On one hand you get all the benefits of someone who has been experimenting with something or coming up with a good solution for something. On the other hand people when unguided naturally tend to just focus on the most absurd unproductive things. So having a method to continuously make sure we're focused on what we need to do is really good. That said, I really wish there was a way to make space for creativity and freedom in those systems, because these systems seem to kill those unfortunately.

[@alexs591]

I think we should Mentor people up until they can work autonomously. If they can’t focus on their work, it’s almost certainly boring, and probably not high value. Very high value work tends to be engaging for the right person. People going all over the place is lack of management/team focus, but babysitting is usually not the best bandaid

[@foxbasedelta338]

Couldn't agree more.

[@aarondcmedia9585]

As far as I could tell, kanban was not mentioned, and is not a software process per se.

[@bombrman1994]

its helpful for those that are new exactly the words from my mouth. A framework of productivity tracker is always good for fresh people. when you become a "pro" lets say. You can freestyle and be always ahead of everyone else in just 2 hours of productive hours per day compared to a less experienced person that will take day and half to barely do equivalent amount of work.

[@tiko-]

based

[@XDBjoernXD]

I don't think agile processes are bad. It is working really nicely to guide yourself to a acceptable solution and helps during the process. In small teams it is very good.

[@emoneytrain]

You know. Right? Um. Here's the thing.

[@streampunksheep]

I only have a shallow idea of both subjects, but I feel like process is good, and I don't think it can get in the way of creativity.

[@lordadamson]

unfortunately it could :(

[@niks660097]

It does, cause someone with 100+ closed tickets/scrums with 100% completion is supposedly better than someone who worked on single ticket and scrum with most crucial component or did it in a most creative way, its all about chasing big numbers without soul.

[@cyronixed]

don't think a daily meeting lasting 15 min to half an hour has that much impact, because there are still 7,5 hours left to do work ... but whatever

[@mikaellindberg93]

I think I actually disagree quite a bit on this. I'm not gonna make an argument on it, but let's just take the average of those two numbers, 15 min and 30 min - 22.5 minutes, and multiply it by the amount of people joining a daily meeting. Very quickly it becomes a good handful of hours, and that's without counting the meeting potentially disturbing deep focus. :)

[@zyriab5797]

I work as a SWE and we have standups every 2 days, we're a 6 people team but the standups always end up being 1h minimum, I don't find them very useful and the "scrum master" often ends up transforming it in some sort of sprint planning (which I also find useless in the way it's done where I work). I hate meetings, especially if they can be replaced by an email exchange or a 5 minutes written sync up on Slack (which we did once and it was perfect). Also, when I'm working on a task and I'm 100% focused, I hate having to stop to talk about stuff I don't really care at that moment... just post the info somewhere and I'll get it when I'll be available.

[@williamanthony915]

I'm always at my most productive when I don't have meetings. Even if it was only 15min (It always ends up being 50min), that's still 60 hours a year per person. Would you really want to pay people to waste 60 hours? If they're getting $50 an hour, that's $3000 a year you're losing on each person.

[@cyronixed]

@@zyriab5797 your problem is it takes one hour, with a team of 6 people it should very well be possible to cut it down to 30 minutes and only ocassionally have longer meetings for specfic reasons, discussions about certain topics should have their own meetings

[@alexmckee4683]

Standups are a waste of time if they're allowed to be a waste of time. If you work in a team on a feature or a product surely you have ideas through the day, questions arise, concerns. That's what the standup is for but if it becomes chit chat or procedural (yesterday I did work on the ticket I am assigned to, today I will do work on the same ticket) then sure it's a complete waste of time. Things are what you make them.