The insidious part is that every effort to work around bad management of this type is captured by management, and twisted, corrupted, and festered until it becomes yet another torture inflicted by management.
Agile would be just fine, if it was the bottom-up, developer-focused scheme that the manifesto writers and True Scotsmen claim it to be.
Unfortunately, it's been co-opted, and we end up with interminable daily standups that are driven by line managers, or by yet another useless person who bought a Scrum Master certification, and exist solely for developers to justify themselves and kowtow in self-abasement. Likewise with the whole cavalcade of infantilizing sprint planning meetings and planning poker and retrospectives and meeting after meeting after meeting imposed as part of a holy Process, that the company spent tens of thousands of dollars having consultants implement.
Agile would be just fine, if it was the bottom-up, developer-focused scheme that the manifesto writers and True Scotsmen claim it to be.
Unfortunately, it's been co-opted, and we end up with interminable daily standups that are driven by line managers, or by yet another useless person who bought a Scrum Master certification, and exist solely for developers to justify themselves and kowtow in self-abasement. Likewise with the whole cavalcade of infantilizing sprint planning meetings and planning poker and retrospectives and meeting after meeting after meeting imposed as part of a holy Process, that the company spent tens of thousands of dollars having consultants implement.