Note #5

There is often a strong disconnect between what management believes their developers are working on and reality. Doubly so in “agile with a capital A” type environments. Leadership is often ignorant (sometimes deliberately) about developers’ genuine concerns and frustrations with the type of work environment they have to work in.

The contrast became hard to ignore when I calculated the time and effort spent in my current job on everything but designing software the customers wanted.

Entire teams of developers are being prevented from doing what they were hired to do: solve problems with software engineering. Instead, incredible amounts of money is spent on what can only be described as “Agile Theatre” as it has come to be known.

Based on my experiences, observations, and notes, a somewhat disturbing story is told.

There’s just so much bullshit.

  1. Fixing technical debt20%
  2. Bad internal tooling20%
  3. Bad DevOps process20%
  4. Meetings to discuss meetings20%
  5. Refactoring poor/fake tests10%
  6. Vague/contradictory requirements10%
  7. Debugging other team's code5%
  8. Writing new features5%

Read the rest of my notes

© Lloyd Atkinson 2026