Is this now the norm?
Posted by MpappaN@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 60 comments
The company I'm at since about a year ago is undergoing massive internal changes to "AI first" and it sucks.
They think going nuts on the Agile will make it smoother.
it is a midsize company
everyone is expected to vibe code. they have even made an internal dashboard and advertised it to all , where you are encouraged to type in the name of anyone and see how much they are using AI.
the dashboard even tells you to 'nudge them" if their usage is too low.
this company has also hired agile Coaches and now have heavily prescribed high protocol scrum where we now need to 'never have the ticket in progress for more than two days' and 'never carry a ticket from Sprint to sprint ', and plenty other rules like that I won't bore you about it. Suffice to say now we write tickets in specific ways to make sure they can be completed in 2 days.
The Bed of Procrustes for real
now I feel like I want to try and find employment elsewhere.
but is this now the norm?
bdanmo@reddit
Fuck. This.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Ya man
If this was the case a year ago I would not have joined. It soured..
My luck I guess
bdanmo@reddit
Yeah where I am at seems to be headed down the shitter right now too. Seems to be the trend.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Yeah we had a good run (well some of us at least) and now it's done
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
That is the ideal programing situation that I know many companies are trying to aim for.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Holy moly. Ideal for whom really?
pydry@reddit
It'll go out of fashion eventually but for now we're stuck with this idiocy.
I would lean in and burn those tokens like you're trying to bring mad max to life.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
I so wish you are right about going out of fashion But my fear is, it's here to stay
kevin_1994@reddit
One thing I don't understand and bothers me every day is the fact that developers have spend 40 years building best practices, software engineering principles, coding methodologies, etc. and we always collectively agreed this was a Very Good Thing™.
It's good because the code quality is better, its more maintainable, allows developers to reason more about the code, yada yada. 5 years ago, when we reviewed a PR, we didn't have to justify why basic principles like DRY are useful. It was just self-evident.
The biggest issue I have with the vibecoding push is that suddenly now we're expected not to care about any of that. If the code is shit, but it seems to work, stamp "LGTM" and move on.
But we already figured out 40 years ago this is a catastrophic approach. Code quality actually does matter. SOTA LLMs can produce accpetable code in short bursts, but anything major will inevitably be shit with leaky abstractions, shit copied everywhere... A youtuber once described LLM code as "always increasing code entropy" which I think is super accurate.
Just seems we are headed for disaster. Hope I'm wrong
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Or at one point bots become so good that humans are completely out of the loop f
At that point higher level languages (Java, JS, Rust whatever) are not needed at all. They will just ship binaries.
I hope that day never comes though (or not in the next 15-20 years at least)
Fenix42@reddit
We are. I look at it as job security.
Quick_Role_8775@reddit
agile and ai mix like oil and water
ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit
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nsxwolf@reddit
The agile thing sounds pretty normal to me. I’ve been subjected to that environment for over 10 years. Crushing 2 week deadlines, ticket “rollover” is a huge failure that must be answered for.
The AI thing is just something we have to all go through, it won’t change until it starts costing too much or biting companies in the ass hard. Right now the bender has just begun and the stripper really really likes you.
ZolaThaGod@reddit
I’ve been a Kanban-style engineer for the last few years, and I’ve generally been happy.
I was made a team lead recently and were now Fosbury the full agile process, and I feel like I’ve burnt all the way out in under 2 months.
Fuck agile.
chmod777@reddit
Best part is telling people waterfall or kanban works better, getting shot down, just to end up doing waterfall anyway.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
I've never done kanban would be cool to try
Naive_Freedom_9808@reddit
The team I'm on used to do kanban, and it was very nice and smooth. However, as the team has grown and the client wants more control over when and how things get done, we're now doing agile. And, I swear, at least half the drama and obstacles we face now are due to the agile process. Bug tickets get indefinitely delayed since "we can't bloat our current sprint deliverables". Team infighting is spurred due to disagreement with prioritization. Story points are annoying and arbitrary. It's messy compared to the simplicity of kanban.
mikkolukas@reddit
Then you have not been doing agile
black_tamborine@reddit
Isn’t the ‘fuck agile’ philosophy not dissimilar to the ‘fuck democracy’ idea? No shade, but what else do we have as a framework that our corporates buy into…
Current world climate is an obvious point.
Rhetorical question - Do you have a better idea?
B-Rock001@reddit
Define your terms. You're probably talking about two different things with the same name. "Agile" as in a set of best practices to quickly find issues and change direction (vs waterfall).... totally fine. "Agile" as in capital A agile I'm going to sell you my books on how you're doing software wrong... yeah, fuck that.
Kanban is a form of agile development depending on your definition.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Google doesn't do it. Meta doesn't do it though
Accomplished-Tip7106@reddit
solve the ticket, ship a bug or two with AI Slop and let them create a new one. Problem solved.
dsm4ck@reddit
Small tickets sound nice, but "never carry a ticket from Sprint to sprint" is insane. They won't care if you don't like it.
3rdPoliceman@reddit
Maybe as an aspirational goal but in practice it's absurd. Always find it funny when people use absolutes within the agile framework as if flexibility isn't one of the primary benefits.
bonkosaurusluke@reddit
I push for not carrying tickets from sprint to sprint and encourage the engineering team to use the "idle" time to either upskill or document technical debt.
Unfortunately, agile metrics tend to be used to measure that the team is busy, not to detect events that are disruptive to the team which impact productivity.
3rdPoliceman@reddit
Agile as a general principal is great. Agile as a "let me justify my existence" is a scourge.
Regal_Kiwi@reddit
It makes sense not to carry over stories if you don't want to extract every drop of productivity out of your team. Productive here means "if you don't write code 100% of the time like a maniac, then you are deemed not productive".
The alternative of always carrying over 40%+ of the work from sprint to sprint makes them a liability.
rwilcox@reddit
Them: “don’t care over tickets from sprint to sprint”
Devs: “ok, I’ll officially sit on my hands for half a day or a day….”
Regal_Kiwi@reddit
Well if devs think of themselves as junior code monkeys then that's their problem.
Again I'm not saying the sprint thing is good, I am quite opposed to agile in general, but if you're going to use the sprint process, then might as well do it in a sustainable way that makes a little bit of sense.
rwilcox@reddit
Not totally sure what your point is. My point is, when it comes down to that last day of the sprint, when you just finished a ticket, do you pick up that “maybe 2-3 days” sized ticket - officially putting it In Progress when you know you’ll be dinged for rollover?
Or do you officially not pick it up - no blame then for the rollover - and throw smoke for a day to cover you not officially doing anything, until Sprint Kickoff?
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
My manager even removed them from the sprint it such situation.
I think his brownie points are on the line if we carry a ticket forward!
polypolip@reddit
That's kind of the point, though less sit on hands and more do the other stuff you have to do or some small code maintenance tasks.
Bricktop72@reddit
Do more testing!
Connect_Detail98@reddit
This type of stupid shit is what makes developers quit. Some tickets definetely take more than 2 days.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
Yeah we are now dancing around it and writing them in such a way to have them closed in two days.
Basically more jirra work ....
ButWhatIfPotato@reddit
Protip: the stakeholders that are mainlining "AI will replace those pesky expensive developers says AI company director" articles directly into their veins are now mainlining "GenZ so scared they are sabotaging AI", so when AI inevitably does something catastrophic, guess who is going to get blamed for it?
Historical_Cook_1664@reddit
Let it burn and keep us informed!
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
I think I have to I've only been here for 1 year... previously it was laid off after 10 months. It will start looking dodgy
At least one more year?
Careful_Lab_3411@reddit
yeah noticed that too
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
Yes, it is for the AI usage. We are not there yet but pretty close. There is a survey every month that inquires AI usage. Better adapt than what not, because your next company is likely to become the same.
> this company has also hired agile Coaches and now have heavily prescribed high protocol scrum where we now need to 'never have the ticket in progress for more than two days' and 'never carry a ticket from Sprint to sprint '
You can game the system by creating extremely small tickets. Don't quit before finding a new job. Better, let them lay you off the moment you have an offer.
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
We are gaming it.
Instead ofa ticket "develop feature XYZ".
We have one for "write code for XYZ" Another for "write test for XYZ"
Another for "deploy XYZ"
But it's so pointless and demoralizing
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
Yeah I'm doing that, too. We don't really care too much for this kind of things, but sometimes I still want to break down bigger tickets into smaller ones. Much easier to control!
CodelinesNL@reddit
Before I pass judgement (which is tempting), how are they approaching this? AI costs money, using it correctly takes learning. What do they have in place?
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
How are they doing it?
So they are setting up meetings in our calendars for training but without a trainer.
They want us to share tips and best practices about how to get most of AI.
Funny enough there are actually people who do use cursor a lot, and they complain that they run it off tokens too quickly.
So it's AI first. But within budget
BusinessWatercrees58@reddit
Sounds like the next meeting should be sharing tips and ideas to reduce token usage. Maybe go over what other people have tried. Discuss grievances.
Keep in mind everything is within a budget at a company. That's not really a valid gripe. No company has unlimited funds.
CodelinesNL@reddit
And what tooling (aside from cursor) and models do you have access to?
NewFuturist@reddit
Document every time a PR would cause down time or security issues. Put a dollar number to it. "Our sales page could be down for 6 hours before we worked out how to fix it, so that's 0.3% of our annual revenue gone in a single sprint."
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
Agile who knows, but yeah ai is not going away
MpappaN@reddit (OP)
But it's the combination that is killing me!
I use AI at my own project, it can help.
But AI plus this insane agile crap is just :(
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
I think what you hate is the micromanagement more than agile.
Agile is a vague term that can mean a lot of things. I've been on while teams that were free to basically self direct their processes.
Anytime I hear the words Agile Coach, I clench my butt in fear and prepare for micromanagement
No_Day655@reddit
Unfortunately it is. But you can play the game, just play along with your AI usage to keep your numbers up. For the stories, you can game the system by just creating new stories for next sprint due to “scope creep” or “breaking it down” or some other BS reason, they’re not gonna know the difference and everyone will be happy that you’re not carrying over any stories
etxipcli@reddit
Yeah it is the norm. These idiot managers focus on process because they are technically incompetent. Hopefully AI will move these fools to more appropriate careers.
gibdimkoofchji@reddit
The pressure comes from executives. Doesn’t matter how bad of an idea or a failure this is, the repercussions will be felt by the devs and front line managers.
The execs will just double down the pressure. Not enough AI. That’s why everything breaks all the time.
No one meaningful is going to get pushed out over this. It doesn’t matter how bad it gets
shiny0metal0ass@reddit
Agile coaches and AI mandates do go well together.
Like a fart and a shit.
CodelinesNL@reddit
I know a few (literally two) good agile coaches. They were concerned with actually improving teams and by that very nature, made themselves redundant after a while.
All the rest of them were mostly concerned with staying in place, and when process people have process as their job, all they do is create more process.
Many of them also used it as a stepping stone into management positions. Most of them are shit at it. At my previous engagement one agile coach got himself into the "AI lead" position, while having zero experience with AI, or development in general. Guy was a complete sociopath too.
bdanmo@reddit
With your pants still on
Jmc_da_boss@reddit
Honestly, LLMs suck in almost every way. Except this one situation they are a golden ticket to compliance land.
All you have to do is hook up Claude to the jira cli with a skill. Put the agile rules ticket rules in it and let Claude go update everything/keep it in sync.
The tickets will of course be somewhat shitty but they will follow the arbitrary stupid rules. Seriously give it a try, I don't even blink at jira requirements anymore I just update the Claude skill and forget about it.
tonjohn@reddit
Run.
bonniewhytho@reddit
Nah. Stick to your comforable amount of AI usage and make them go through the process of pip or whatever repercussions they’re going to do to enforce this asinine way of working. Then run. Hahah