This is just commentary on blindly following a process and taking it to the extreme. Plenty of people use scrum successfully. Plenty of people also do what this person did and follow process for process sake. That’s the issue. Agile and scrum are simply a set of tools that you can use to iterate. If you cannot intelligently look across the tools in the Agile tool box and pick the ones that you really need, you ARE doing it wrong.

I mean for goodness sake, he’s complaining about planning poker and story points. I used to play planning poker with my team every other Friday for an hour. The team would talk design or whatever they needed to on Friday afternoon and we’d estimate 3-5 things in our backlog. It was a great time to teach junior devs. They would independently think about what needed to be done and then that would be validated through planning poker. It also allowed less familiar devs to learn enough to pick up new tasks in the upcoming sprint.

It’s possible to over index on this and take it way too far. That sounds like what this guy’s team is doing. Blindly following Agile processes without questioning how they best apply to your business and team is absolutely doing it wrong.

I didn’t know anything about this particular author/journalist. Wow was his wikipedia full of reasons never to trust this guy. For this book alone, criticism:

Scientists Stuart Ritchie and Dean Burnett both criticised the book for failing to cite strong evidence for the claim of shrinking attention spans, as well as presenting mainstream psychological concepts as niche ideas that Hari had discovered.[67] Writer/broadcaster Matthew Sweet investigated some of the claims in the book and found that Hari had failed to cite the primary sources for some studies, and misrepresented the results of studies that suggested multitasking could have benefits in certain conditions.

I question their judgement based on this picture alone. If you’re a serious news journalist, why would you take a picture where it looks like you are standing around, in, or sitting on a dumpster? I think these 4 really just like posing for CD cover pics and getting attention. Seriously, just google 404 media and all you’ll see are references to the 4 of them at this point. Everything is questionable with this group.

Beyond that, early articles I’ve read make me question their quality.

I just don’t agree with this in principle. It supports the idea that every individual is special, but we’re not. Sure it’s nice to know about our ancestors, but everyone writing publicly just introduces so much nonsense and noise into a public conversation when it isn’t necessary. The public doesn’t need to know what Sally had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. History doesn’t give a fuck. I also don’t care what my great grandfather ate for lunch, but I do care about accomplishments that might be summarized thoughtfully.

If every fleeting thought gets written down, there’s no indication of what is important. Yes that means some useless moments in history are lost, but not all moments are meant to become history. Social media gives people a very false sense of importance and it is actively hurting our society. Let’s not make it worse with this BS.