I cannot agree more with the assessment that agile works well with front end and poorly with backend.
Agile with the backend/infrastructure actively encourages taking on technical debt just to get something, anything up and running as quickly as possible. Which is great for PMs' careers but terrible for the developers who have to maintain those systems, and ultimately the organization as a whole. Maybe it's even great for job security or to get an IPO/acquisition as quickly as possible, but it really does result in much more work in the long term.
The issue is that the people who push for these terribly designed backends that suck up unnecessary human-years worth of work to maintain, patch, and fix are never held accountable. And if you're stucking as a developer working on these systems, you're screwed (and it can even be bad for your career since you're not shipping anything new). I can't tell you how much of a relief it is to just walk away from that kind of mess... which really, makes the situation even worse, since everytime that happens organizational knowledge gets lost and some poor soul gets to start working on something terrible with much less context
I think it depends. It does protect from overcomplicated designs that never come to fruition in accordance with Gall’s Law (See Googles Omega). And nobody will care how much extra debt you saved down the line if company seizes to exist because it was outpaced by competition so there’s definitely some trade offs to be made.
The last part is more of a problem with hard maintenance work being unappreciated compared to launching new shiny shit which is entirely different can of worms.
Agile with the backend/infrastructure actively encourages taking on technical debt just to get something, anything up and running as quickly as possible. Which is great for PMs' careers but terrible for the developers who have to maintain those systems, and ultimately the organization as a whole. Maybe it's even great for job security or to get an IPO/acquisition as quickly as possible, but it really does result in much more work in the long term.
The issue is that the people who push for these terribly designed backends that suck up unnecessary human-years worth of work to maintain, patch, and fix are never held accountable. And if you're stucking as a developer working on these systems, you're screwed (and it can even be bad for your career since you're not shipping anything new). I can't tell you how much of a relief it is to just walk away from that kind of mess... which really, makes the situation even worse, since everytime that happens organizational knowledge gets lost and some poor soul gets to start working on something terrible with much less context