Sandro Mancuso on Software Craftmanship
Me went to a talk by Sandro Mancuso on Software Craftmanship. He is supposedly well known person in that field since he founded a SC movement years ago. As other evangelizing persons he does all those talks on conferences. But I'm lucky to work in the same organization with him and can get those talks for free after lunch.
What I agree with him is that it is easy for agile to produce shit in small increments. And the other thing is that one of the importaint things in Scrum is its ability to adapt and change to better fit the environment. Surprisingly this topic was just slightly touched when I went on Agile Experience training some time ago ("you have a spring retrospective at the end of each sprint" and that is literally all that I was told despite my questions.)
But then some questionable things start.
Be professional to be treated like professional vs being a resourse part. Do self education and continuous learning yourself and don't expect your employer to help you in that. I think that would definitely be a case for contractors, but when you sign up to be an employee then you agree to another game. You contribute to a company and company contributes to you. Why else do they bite that part of you money pie then if you compare that to contractors rate. So you have those internal/external trainings and conferences payed for you.
And the other bit is that you can always find yourself another job if you are a professional. Of course you can, but we are in banks to trade some of the freedom for more money. Just look on the job boards to see the difference. You go to a proper technology company to have more interesting tasks and better working climate.
Next topic is hiring people. I agree with a statement that searching by technologies is not the best criteria. People with genuine interest in what they do is much more important. Can you spot someone by looking one which writes a blog? I won't sign on to that. And how does this correlate to the fact that you don't promote people if they don't learn new technologies youself on your free time to increase their value. Now we suddenly start to value a bunch of technologies one knows.
Conclusion: that's just another typical agile blah-blah-blah. It is easy to be professional when you are surounded by professionals. But it is not usually the case in real world. And I saw no real evidence again.
What I agree with him is that it is easy for agile to produce shit in small increments. And the other thing is that one of the importaint things in Scrum is its ability to adapt and change to better fit the environment. Surprisingly this topic was just slightly touched when I went on Agile Experience training some time ago ("you have a spring retrospective at the end of each sprint" and that is literally all that I was told despite my questions.)
But then some questionable things start.
Be professional to be treated like professional vs being a resourse part. Do self education and continuous learning yourself and don't expect your employer to help you in that. I think that would definitely be a case for contractors, but when you sign up to be an employee then you agree to another game. You contribute to a company and company contributes to you. Why else do they bite that part of you money pie then if you compare that to contractors rate. So you have those internal/external trainings and conferences payed for you.
And the other bit is that you can always find yourself another job if you are a professional. Of course you can, but we are in banks to trade some of the freedom for more money. Just look on the job boards to see the difference. You go to a proper technology company to have more interesting tasks and better working climate.
Next topic is hiring people. I agree with a statement that searching by technologies is not the best criteria. People with genuine interest in what they do is much more important. Can you spot someone by looking one which writes a blog? I won't sign on to that. And how does this correlate to the fact that you don't promote people if they don't learn new technologies youself on your free time to increase their value. Now we suddenly start to value a bunch of technologies one knows.
Conclusion: that's just another typical agile blah-blah-blah. It is easy to be professional when you are surounded by professionals. But it is not usually the case in real world. And I saw no real evidence again.