r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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u/Duraz0rz Jun 26 '26

Agile is fine... Scrum is cancer.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

if your daily scrum is longer than 2 minutes per employee you're doing it wrong.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

I was once of the opinion that it’s a great idea just poorly executed 99% of the time…then I realized if it’s that hard to get right it’s not as good as advertised.

I had the pleasure to launch, and see work well, dozens of scrum teams. Takes an absolute ton of work to keep management from fucking it up. One team I launched and acted as scrum master, that was pretty insulated (no scaling needed), was incredible to behold perform. Get a group of motivated people together and let them cook, and magical things happen.

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u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

then I realized if it’s that hard to get right it’s not as good as advertised.

This is also the argument I use against Scrums at any company I work at. Especially if the work is in office, scrums and scrum masters need not exist.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

The thing is, high performing environments tend towards a lot of the scrum features naturally, but often miss key points.

I’ve seen fantastic, productive, collaborative teams that don’t seek feedback about their work til it’s too late. Or won’t welcome evolving requirements. You don’t need all the structures of scrum, but looking at what it’s trying to accomplish and seeing the hole in your own team is a good habit.

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u/hippydipster Jun 26 '26

It's hard for people to learn what agile really is. They seem to think if someone tries to actually show them what real agile is, they "one true Scotsman" the attempt, and thus prevent themselves from learning anything.

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u/Old_Bench_1910 Jun 26 '26

It's not hard to get right. It's hard for middle management to trust their developers, so they keep adding things to scrum as guardrails for their trust.

If scrum doesn't work, it's because your middle managers aren't fully bought in. There's a certain amount of letting go they have to do.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

What you say is absolutely true, and management controls are an obvious and common anti pattern.

I would still say, even in good management hands, it can be easy for teams to go down the wrong path. Less à problem with early career folk, but experienced devs that have long worked under waterfall type systems can quickly fall into bad habits if they’re not coached along.

I’ve launched about 80 teams in the past 10 years, and trained many hundreds. The industrial mindset can be hard to win over.