My views on Agile and Project Management
I think I am working with a very good team now, somehow there seems to be no politics as far as I know, or looks like politics is hidden from me for reason unknown. It’s very difficult for honest person and thinkers who are honest to survive in politics, and somehow I found a company where I could survive, it looks like an impossibility for me to come across such a good fate. At least my tech team is lead by a guy who knows to code, so maybe he knows what difficulties we face. Possibly that’s why he created an environment without politics, else if it were created by a management guy, we would have been roasted and many of us would have flown off.
We have a great project manager too, and we use Agile, we use jira which is only worth bringing misery to people, its just designed to nag us log this and that and take our attention away from coding. For some reason across the I.T industry non coders like marketing people and the managers who know little of code seem to prefer giving us a lifestyle that lets us create a scene and show off that we are busy, rather than let us alone in deep thought and make something innovative. That’s how the world works, even in the best team I have found so far. I truly wish hell for the creators of Jira.
Okay, let’s come to the project management and my views about project management in the I.T industry as of now. I feel project management is still the same. Maybe it’s the same across almost all I.T companies (may be 37 signals is an exception). Let’s say that you can create a dosai in 2 minutes, a project managed way of creating a dosai is a manager standing near you with his eyes closed, and asking every five seconds if a new dosai is ready. You have to answer that you are lifting the ladle, you have poured the batter on to the (tawa)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tava], now the dosai is getting cooked, now you will turn it around and so on. If you don’t say it, in today’s project management, you are a person with attitude, a person incapable of creating a dosai. Somehow for this attitude gravity will fail you, the batter won’t fall on tawa, and even it did the heat would not make it crisp. That’s how I still view project management.
Maybe it will not change in my lifetime. Maybe someone will have brains enough to bring in A-players for project management and create a company with great value, thus nullyfying companies which have no clue about project management.
Coding standards in India has improved, developer’s pay is improving, but it’s still got lot to improve. The dumb boss earns more than coders with brain, this is a system that will fail when faced with real competition. But project management is still in its dark ages, and doesn’t even have a clue that sun also rises.