Comment by temporallobe 15 days ago
This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the sprint.
Everyone's complaining about that as a developer, and rightly so. But that can't be easy for the PMs, either, trying to find a way to "add value" when they have no idea what's going on.
I'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
This is kind of cool as an alternative process to develop apps with. Literally product in a zoom window telling you what to build as you go along. No standups, no refinement, no retros etc. Just a PM that really knows what the customer needs and the developer just building those as you go along.
If you're creating nothing stories to justify work life balance and avoid burnout your organization has a problem. Look into Extreme Programming and Sustainable Pace.
And yet well over half of professional developers have productivity so low that if they get laid off the term gets the same amount done...
>> literally every hour is accounted for
I saw one company where early-career BA/PMs (often offshore) would sit alongside developers and "keep them company" almost all day via zoom.