Sometimes you need to make a cry for help and the only lever you have is saying this.
It doesn't mean that what was said was the actual reason, which happens to often. Not enough follow-up happens, and the original trigger for the call-for-help goes unaddressed.
I'm glad that I was able to get appropriate treatment (15 years later) but how I was treated as a teenager in a mental health facility was atrocious. Misdiagnosis, over medication, and only keeping patients as long as their insurance held out was par for the course.
The Culture Series by Iain Banks. Love his style, love the setting, and love the stories. Really fascinating look at a post-scarcity galaxy spanning anarchist society facilitated by extra dimensional artificial intelligences.
I wonder if this also explains some of the benefits of meditation. While focusing on one part of our higher functions, more areas of the brain cam slip into this low power state, without fully entering sleep. Which is why people feel refreshed and relaxed after a session.
I feel the exact same way. And I've had the same exact experience: only one place in my decade long career has done agile well.
The Project Manager was completely on point with gathering information from stakeholders and direction from executives. The scrum master was a perfect neutral voice who really did an amazing job mediating. Our team was full of smart, capable, focused multidisciplinary engineers. It was absolutely beautiful.
I've also never ever seen it again. I've been trying to figure out what was different about that org than everywhere else. Because I've always worked with smart, social SWEs.
I think the problems arising from cargo cult agile are more fundamental than the methodology. In order for agile to work well for SWEs, the organization's infrastructure and expectations must be a fit. There are key things that I saw at the place where it worked and were missing everywhere else.
* Strong product ownership. The PM is the captain of the ship. They must interface with the execs, with the customers, with the technologists, with the customer service. They must synthesize the stories and effectively outline clear exit criteria for them. And they must accept input from engineering to prioritize tasks that must be done but do not necessarily directly provide customer value. But the buck stops with them. Engineering should not be subject to department infighting for prioritization of pet features. The direction must be clear, or you're foundering.
* A neutral voice in the planning meetings to keep things on track and ensure everyone who has a question / input is heard.
* Demo days. It's so important for the morale of everyone - on the team and off - for the exposition of the completed work for a given sprint.
* Respectful retrospection.
* Trust and verification. Micro management is toxic. The only time other than sprint planning that the PM should be involved with the daily work of engineers is when a story requirement needs clarification.
And modifying the scope of an in progress sprint should be relegated _only_ to emergencies. This cannot happen if there are _always_ emergencies, though. Which is why it's important for a PM to understand and allocate time for maintenance / infrastructure improvement.
One of the big themes in the series is how people find meaning in their lives given that they basically want for nothing. When you can have any material possession created for you on demand, what do you do with yourself?
For example, in The Player of Games, Gurgeh devotes his life to games of strategy, and Yay to orbital architecture. Neither character needs to work for a living, so why bother working at all?
IMO, there are much better novels about this subject not involving any techno-magic. Lem's Return from the Stars is an excellent work that explores this very question, and unlike Culture novels, it's down-to-earth and fully self-aware. Hard to explain what that means. Lem realized that the very notion of "meaning" will change in the future.
Many works by Strugackiy brothers also deal with this question.
I realize these writers belong to preceding generations of SF, but their works are still very much relevant and (IMO) far more plausible than futures of Vinge and Banks.
To answer the last question: to define themselves as more than average by joining a community of practice. It is a society where what you do is considerably more distinctive than what you have and where you come from, which is likely to seem strange to us.
Vernor Vinge's two Deep books (I haven't read the third) were right up there for me. Albeit simultaneously terrible from a "Jesus, this is %&#$ed up, but also plausible" perspective.
So can dental fillings, breast implants, and artificial sweeteners.
Like female birth control though, most people agree that the risk for developing cancer associated with the activity is well worth the benefits. Saying "boo fucking hoo" about someone who can never reproduce again is pretty cold-hearted, in my opinion.
I did a quick Google and it appeared to me that most of the adverse events were measured at rates in the 10's per 10,000 ... Though that is absolutely from a very high level.
This study was presenting at around 20% (IIRC, I was reading the outrage version of this stuff a few days ago)
It is also important to note that this is by no means the end of the drug. The people involved consider this to be a very promising study and are going to continue working on it.
It wasn't stopped early "as a failure" to be shelved and never looked at again. It was stopped early because they knew enough about the upside and didn't have to continue on the down.
The next rounds of trials will likely try to alleviate the side effects while preserving the MOA (mechanism of action)
It doesn't mean that what was said was the actual reason, which happens to often. Not enough follow-up happens, and the original trigger for the call-for-help goes unaddressed.