Agile Practices and Micromanagement

[GoalSeeker]

My current job agile design practices is the norm and I find it hard to separate it from micromanagement. I think it kills creativity and wastes a lot of time just going over the progress 4 times a day. Anybody else who would want to share some stories about micromanaging bosses and how to deal with them? Also, is it the agile design practices the real killer? At my previous job, the timeline used to be in months to come up with some working model, and now it is a different story all together.

 

[euroazn]

My current job agile design practices is the norm and I find it hard to separate it from micromanagement. I think it kills creativity and wastes a lot of time just going over the progress 4 times a day. Anybody else who would want to share some stories about micromanaging bosses and how to deal with them? Also, is it the agile design practices the real killer? At my previous job, the timeline used to be in months to come up with some working model, and now it is a different story all together.

I feel your pain

 

[GoalSeeker]

haha thank u

 

[Andy D.]

Micromanaging really is a pain in the ass. I find absolutely nothing worst as a programmer, than having somebody interupt me with emails, phone calls and pointless meetings numerous times a day.
90% of it is trivial crap. 5% of it could have been worked out by the person in question if they paused and thought for a moment. 5% is actually very useful and productive.

I totally get why meetings are important - especially with programmers - but when they hamper productivity, because your manager just can not let go enough of the project to let people get on with it - it's a killer.

 

[GoalSeeker]

dude, worst is when the manager wants to go over each persons code everyday to make sure thry all look the same n no one can say this was written by X vs Y.. same number of blank spaces, newline characters between lines of code let alone the variable declarations.. hoe can it ever get worse than this.. lol.. i feel for the manager.. taking undue stress

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Tell me you are not working on Wall Street, right?

 

[GoalSeeker]

working as a mid-level quantitative analyst.. for a fairly large bank

 

[Andy Nguyen]

That must be some ridiculously stressful job right there.

By the way, you need to remove those 2 extra blank lines on line 587-588 and should have extra indentation on the next line.

 

[didje]

I'm working in a insurance company in France and we are using a "modified" agile design practice : we have meetings with people from other services and managers but only once a week, precisely in order to not disturb programmers/developers too much in their work. I think that the willing behind agile design practices is not that bad (everyone is aware of the current progression of the project, at least in a functional way). But the thing @GoalSeeker is talking about is just torture. People need to have time to work their work properly.

 

[GoalSeeker]

@andy u r a funny guy.. liked the pun

@didje: agreed agile like every methodology has a positive intention behind it; just like socialism/communism.. lol ..and management style matters a lot.. but i prefer the evolving prototype model, a cousin of agile better.. atleast there meetings are held after something is done n then to steer the project accordingly