So we don’t really “do Agile” at my job. There are no well-defined sprints, no retrospectives, no story points, no Kanban, no burndown chart, no project managers even. Just a bunch of programmers in loosely-organized teams, coordinating with a designer.
By many accounts, we’re doing Agile right! Bare minimum processes that work! Individuals interacting together & with customers to deliver what people actually want! The perversion that is Scrum has no place here.
So why am I still so angry?
The Never-Ending Treadmill
Let’s say you’re launching a new feature. Let’s say the backend stuff has mostly been solved at this point in time. Let’s say you’re one of the two frontend engineers in the company who can manipulate Flexbox without resorting to an LLM, and the other is busy with a different project.
In such a scenario, you’d be primarily responsible for making sure the frontend is spick-n-span. Ideally, the designer would present you with a design, and enumerate the ways in which the code differs from the design, and you could rectify this within a set amount of time, and all would be well.
In actuality, your company is dogfooding the beta version of the feature in order to uncover any pain-points, re-designing parts on-the-fly in a poorly-organized Figma where some screens still reflect the old design. And the designer isn’t quite happy with how a standard component looks, so now you have to change it for the entire app & make sure that doesn’t introduce any new bugs. And oh by the way there’s new bugs in all these areas you touched previously.
The pile of work just keeps growing and growing, faster than you can keep up. The attention to detail you’re so proud of slows you down & makes you invaluable at the same time. The designer keeps adding to your list every time you interact with them so you start to dread those interactions. You have no idea what to prioritize since everything keeps coming in so fast so you just work on whatever the CEO seems most interested in at the time & let everything else fester until it becomes too big a problem to ignore.
Why yes, I am speaking from experience! Not just recently (tho that’s what’s pushing me over the edge), but every single project at this company has worked this way.
Why Am I So Mad?
I’m mad because it feels like I’m not respected, treated like an errand dog, constantly tasked instead of having real agency in what I work on. I’m mad because it feels like all tasks are considered equal, across all 4 quadrants of {easy, hard} x {important, unimportant}, and no-one listens when I think something is hard & unimportant. I’m mad because I see my coworkers in the same predicament, burning the candle at both ends to ship new features, and for what? Delivering “working” code just a little bit earlier, instead of being able to take the time to deliver absolutely bug-free software, no matter the time cost.
I’m mad because tests and documentation are nonexistent. I’m mad that the new engineer we just onboarded had to go thru that grueling learning curve process even tho I swore to change things after going thru it myself. I’m mad that I’m the only one who seems to give a darn about these kinds of things. I’m mad I don’t have the time to fix them. I’m mad that the startup culture “grow or die” mentality/reality makes things this way.
Here’s the kicker: I’m mad because the designer asked me to put a “remove all” button after a series of “remove” buttons.
It sounds silly writing it down now; it’s actually a very reasonable request! But it really was a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situation. Compounding stresses from a misalignment of the things I care about deeply and the tenets of Agile/startup culture.
What Will I Do About It?
First, I’ll channel this anger into writing this piece instead of saying something I’ll regret in workplace-monitored chat. And I’ll also “take a breather” (procrastinate out of spite) for a bit.
Then, I’m going to temporarily ignore the designer. I’m going to work on the things I think are important to regain a sense of agency. I’m going to talk to coworkers more, to see them as people instead of task-giving machines. I’m going to dust off my résumé just in case things get worse.
But most importantly, I’ll do my best to rediscover the joy in what I do (programming is fun after all!), despite everything above. Can’t stay mad forever.