100%. A lot of problems at organisations come managers having far too much job security. This gets really acute the larger an organisation gets, where the goals of managers can become completely divorced from that of the company. For example a managers goals might be to increase their budget and team size in order to justify higher pay and promotions due to experience “delivering” “larger” projects. Whereas more team members (especially those easy to hire project managers or engineering padding like architects) end up decreasing productivity. A really good example in the article was Skype, which went Scrum with dozens of staff (if not hundreds) and was beaten by a team of three engineers with no “formal” process at WhatsApp.
Scrum needs to seen for what it is: a way for management consultants to bill lots of hours and a way for organisations to manage projects where engineers have no agency. In a consultancy, for example, where scrum is almost always used, the real money comes from all of the management consulting fees and design iterations and etc etc, and a build is only done when all of that has been signed off and paid for by the client. Then the engineering team is told to go build it. This is VERY similar to the waterfall methodology that Scrum was supposed to replace. And seen in that context, it’s no wonder that successful tech companies have zero time for it.
Scrum needs to seen for what it is: a way for management consultants to bill lots of hours and a way for organisations to manage projects where engineers have no agency. In a consultancy, for example, where scrum is almost always used, the real money comes from all of the management consulting fees and design iterations and etc etc, and a build is only done when all of that has been signed off and paid for by the client. Then the engineering team is told to go build it. This is VERY similar to the waterfall methodology that Scrum was supposed to replace. And seen in that context, it’s no wonder that successful tech companies have zero time for it.