But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members.
Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.
We do a pretty relaxed version of it; it's fun. It doesn't feel like micromanagement to me.
If I need to do something that doesn't have a task in the backlog, I just add one and then click "start" in Sprintly. No big deal. It's basically a shared to-do list, and I'm a to-do list kind of guy.
I like the daily stand up meetings. Specifically the emphasis on the fact that it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes in length.
You have my sympathies though. I can certainly see how some companies would implement Scrum in a way that is really anal-retentive and gets in the way.
Maybe that's how it works if you are doing it "right". But nobody ever seems to do Agile "right". If Agile is so hard to do right, and breaks down so badly when it's done wrong in a small way (like letting your manager in the scrum), then isn't that in itself a problem with Agile?
I don't see a problem in a manager participating. But what would the manager do if backlog is handled by the PO and work load by the dev team? I think any process would break down if a manager decides to fly solo and push extra work outside the framework, for example.
I did "Agile" for 1.5yrs and it was the least agile team I've been on so far. We never had a product owner (we were all expected to understand the user's needs enough to serve as "product owners"). We had devs and a manager, and a "scrum master"/team lead, who was one of the devs and reported directly to the manager. Our scrums were 30m+ long because the manager wanted to know every little detail, and there would be a lot of back-and-forth, most of which would be irrelevant to any given team member. Complexity poker involved guessing what number the manager wanted you to pick, and sprint reviews were two-day experiences in self-flagellation.
Not that all of this would have magically gone away if we weren't an "Agile" team but it did contribute to the problem. "Proper" Agile just doesn't fit well with the way most companies want to run their teams. So managers take Agile and make their own personal tweaks to it. Since their brand of Agile has 80% the same rules to what they read in the book, they expect to get 80-100% of the benefits of Agile. Any questioning of the actual results of this system is heresy, since Agile is a well-established management method used by many successful companies.
If that manager had picked up a management system that worked within the company's framework without making so many changes, or if there wasn't so much Agile-worship in the industry that an "Agile" setup was politically unquestionable, the situation would have been a lot easier to fix. As it is, it wasn't until our team completely collapsed that the company reassigned half of that manager's responsibilities to a new department, and the manager decided to retweak their personal brand of "Agile". Even that is probably too little too late; more and more projects are being moved from that dep't into others, to the point where I'm wondering what the devs there will actually have left to do.
So yeah. I'm very skeptical of anything calling itself "Agile", because it's such a nightmare when done wrong, and I'd bet dollars to donuts there are more places doing it wrong than right.
I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.
You're talking about standup, not Scrum. It's a common conflation to call a status meeting a "Scrum meeting".
Status reporting, if the overhead is around 3% (e.g. 15 minutes per day, or a one-hour weekly meeting) isn't so bad. I think it's actually good if it defuses the suspicions ("what does he do?") that, unchecked, can devolve into political behavior.
Scrum involves a lot more, like user stories and an explicit disallowance of working on things not in the backlog. By the book, you have to leave written records of what you did in insulting detail. It's horrible stuff. But I agree: 15 minutes per day for an all-team status meeting isn't that bad, and can be better than the alternative if that alternative is a culture of suspicion and resentment.
A culture of trust where engineers are treated as professionals and adults, not as children who have to justify weeks and days of their own working time. Open allocation as far as is possible within the confines of the needs of the business.
Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.