Yeah, Agile is not the OP's problem. Some director made some comments about a direction, and zoom! Off all the middle managers went, trying to kiss up to him, and implement what he said in the most dramatic way, in order to get that next promotion, or at least more headcount. And now it's, "Just the way we do things around here. Like it or leave."
His problem, as with all these types of things, is management. Of all people, we here on this forum ought to be able to call a spade a spade. But even we fall victim to blaming the process or the tool. Over and over again, the problem is management, and we should call it out.
The biggest problem with large corporations is managers who sacrifice long-term company success for short-term personal success. Smaller corporations can often get rid of such managers, but past a certain size -- and that's not really very large -- bad managers can become entrenched as they hire and/or promote sycophants to prop up their power plays. I have 27 years in the blue-chip Fortune 250 world, and I've seen it over and over and over again.
We're going to have to change large parts of the tax code in order to fix this problem, so that companies do NOT get a tax break by giving stock options as compensation. Until that is no longer the case, you will have people -- and rightfully so -- deliberately and predictably responding to huge financial incentives to do LONG TERM damage to the company with SHORT TERM thinking. The C-levels should stop this nonsense, despite the tax incentives, but, of course, the problem is only worse at that level.
Agile might not be my problem, but even so what the comment you're replying to kind of sums up the situation:
> I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
We had a big round of layoffs a few years back. I don't know if technical writers were affected more than others, but we did have a team whose main job was to run training sessions; how to write better code, how to be a more effective technical organization, that sort of thing. That whole team was laid off.
Management may be the problem. It's hard to point the finger at any one person in particular when everyone is just trying to do what they need to do to ship product, and the underlying problem seems to be a sort of emergent behavior that you end up with if you get a bunch of generally smart, helpful, friendly people together and apply all the wrong incentives.
Stock incentives might be part of the problem, but I expect that's more of an issue for the upper layers of management. Lower-level manager can't individually do much to affect the stock value one way or the other. I think maybe a mandatory long vesting term could help. Like, if you're a CEO your stock doesn't vest for ten years. (Maybe "vest" is the wrong word, since that implies you lose it all if you move jobs before it vests. I'm thinking of a system where if you leave you still get the stock eventually.)
His problem, as with all these types of things, is management. Of all people, we here on this forum ought to be able to call a spade a spade. But even we fall victim to blaming the process or the tool. Over and over again, the problem is management, and we should call it out.
The biggest problem with large corporations is managers who sacrifice long-term company success for short-term personal success. Smaller corporations can often get rid of such managers, but past a certain size -- and that's not really very large -- bad managers can become entrenched as they hire and/or promote sycophants to prop up their power plays. I have 27 years in the blue-chip Fortune 250 world, and I've seen it over and over and over again.
We're going to have to change large parts of the tax code in order to fix this problem, so that companies do NOT get a tax break by giving stock options as compensation. Until that is no longer the case, you will have people -- and rightfully so -- deliberately and predictably responding to huge financial incentives to do LONG TERM damage to the company with SHORT TERM thinking. The C-levels should stop this nonsense, despite the tax incentives, but, of course, the problem is only worse at that level.