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by jasonpeacock·4y ago·view on hn ↗
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

Alas, the fast hacker gets recognized for their hustle, despite them spending twice the effort to get to the same place, and others having to go back and fix/cleanup their mistakes.

1 comments
Was going to post this exact saying. (For the uninitiated, this advice is repeated on racetracks everywhere.)

It depends as always on the length of the race, though. The fast hacker gets to the first corner first. The 'slow' hacker finishes the first lap first. The engineer might miss the first season and then show up in a fighter jet.

This is why Scrum can be so pernicious for productivity: It turns every race into a race to the first corner.
Which is great! For a drag strip. Or a 4WD trek through unexplored jungle to a vaguely defined destination, like 'first to a nice swimming hole wins!' It's not so great if you're racing on a known track with lots of corners, or you have to meet up at planned waypoints.

Agile (are we calling it Scrum now or is Scrum something different these days?) is a good methodology for a very specific scenario: A small team working on a tight schedule towards an ill-defined goal for a client who doesn't know what they want. Unfortunately some people (especially those getting paid to preach it) took this new hammer and hammered every nail, screw, bolt and tube of epoxy they could find while trying to convince everyone they met that Hammering Is The Way.

Scrum is a horrible way to interact with somebody that doesn't know what they want. The process is entirely focused on breaking things on predictable sizes and focusing the interaction with the users into a single person and a few meetings. Also, in a tight schedule you do really not want to use a fixed timebox.

Honestly, I'm not sure Scrum is good for anything. (And well, we did not technically rename "Agile" into "Scrum", we just have a lot of lying propaganda saying that Scrum implements Agile and have the entire population of managers dismissing any other process. So Agile doesn't exist anymore, we successfully killed the idea.)