public hell

Micro-manage much? Communicating information from life form to another is a super complicated process that just can’t be micromanaged. Riding around on your mentee’s back directing them to do this, then do that, with no consideration of the mentee’s motivations, desires, mental states makes for a pretty inefficient process, rife with frustration. The scene where Yoda is riding around on Luke’s back is a classic, and a classic bad example of bossing your student to death.

When former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones recently formed a new rock band, the music flowed easily. The struggle: inventing a name for the group. Between takes in a recording studio, Mr. Jones brainstormed about names with his new band mates, including former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, then checked them online. Their first choice, Caligula, turned up at least seven acts named after the decadent Roman emperor, including a defunct techno outfit from Australia. Eventually the rockers decided on Them Crooked Vultures. The words held no special meaning. “Every other name is taken,” Mr. Jones explains. “Think of a great band name and Google it, and you’ll find a French-Canadian jam band with a MySpace page.

Reads: Old: The Wall Street Journal
New: TechCrunch and GigaOM

I remember going through this realization myself. There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myself I could start a company by just writing code. But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you’d deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it’s on the path to something great.

Since we did continuous releases, our software didn’t actually have versions. But in those days the trade press expected versions, so we made them up. If we wanted to get lots of attention, we made the version number an integer. That “version 4.0” icon was generated by our own button generator, incidentally. The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though it wasn’t an online store, because we wanted to experience what our users did.

Nie oznacza to absolutnie, że przestałem wierzyć, iż zwinne praktyki i sama idea kryjąca się za Agile Manifesto są nietrafione. Wręcz przeciwnie, nadal uważam, że to jak dotąd najlepsze co wymyślono dla wytwarzania oprogramowania. Chodzi bardziej o to, że samo słowo agile przestało ostatnio nieść ze sobą jakąś konkretną idee. “Agile? Ale co konkretnie masz na myśli?” należałoby się dopytać w większości wypadków.
Chodzi też o to, że tak faktycznie nie ma znaczenia, czy Scrum jest lepszy od Kanban, czy Lean jest ogólniejsze od Agile i co jest podzbiorem czego. Czy jedyną prawdę i słuszny ratunek niesie ze sobą XP (Extreeme Programming), a wszystko co powstało potem to tylko nędzne przeróbki, czy też, który z manifestów jest bardziej wartościowy.