Flow Manifest(o)

https://flowmanifest.org/

by alexzeitler • 3 years ago

76 33 3 years ago

flowmanifest.org

matonias• 3 years ago

Ponzi?

mahopa2• 3 years ago

Parody

hedora2• 3 years ago

You laugh, but there is a certification very similar to this, except it isn’t a parody, and requires you to make sure all your suppliers have the certification.

One give away that a company is certified is that it forces them to block merging of all unreviewed pull requests (including ones that were revised after last review).

mahopa2• 3 years ago

Definitely not laughing, the Agile Industrial Complex kills souls.

lkrubner• 3 years ago

I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way to actually achieve simplicity and commonsense?

hedora2• 3 years ago

I am a fan of making sure each process is necessary to solve a specific problem encountered by this organization, and then periodically revisiting each process to see if the organization still has the problem it addresses.

ilumanty• 3 years ago

It's capitalization that turns a pure idea into a bureaucratic nightmare. Other than making someone pay for courses and certificates, how would they prove that they have achieved wisdom? /s

1attice• 3 years ago

The problem with 'commonsense' is that it's neither a sense, nor terribly common. It is, rather, that sweet spot where intuitions are useful.

Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones.

There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country.

An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions.

Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best.

There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D

beefman• 3 years ago

Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary... and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by credentials and ridiculous interviews...

Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated

https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952

lmm2• 3 years ago

Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated

Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.

kerkeslager• 3 years ago

The agile movement is alive and well, and has not become a bureaucratic nightmare.

The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name.

Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.

namuol• 3 years ago

It doesn’t really offer solutions you’re after, but I keep coming back to this: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bu...

joaonmatos• 3 years ago

I love that this website is just Wordpress with the default 2020 theme. Even I did more CSS tweaking when I was building out a business site for my father.

e12e• 3 years ago

They might want to enable caching?

http://web.archive.org/web/20230212185150/https://flowmanife...

nickpeterson2• 3 years ago

Every company I’ve ever worked at talked about how new hires should be familiar with agile and scrum, and then proceeded to completely ignore either. Then hire coaches to try and make it happen and it didn’t.

It not a knowledge problem, it’s a culture problem.

beders• 3 years ago

Culture eats processes for lunch.

It is incredibly frustrating to join a new team, point out the very obvious misalignment between agile and what they are doing...

and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of that same culture.

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of that same culture.

haha this is so true. It basically always happens unless you walk away

sidpatil• 3 years ago

Culture eats processes for lunch.

Damn, that's a good way of putting it.

Sophistifunk• 3 years ago

Unless you've been hired specifically to address a culture problem and been given the resources and powers with which to do so, don't be that guy. All the people who are in your immediate vicinity already know about the problems and they don't have the power to change it either.

mavu• 3 years ago

without adding true agility, and far too often without having an idea about why software development is so complex, or so enjoyable.

This almost made me cry.

zac23or• 3 years ago

A good companion for the flow manifest is eXtreme Go Horse: https://medium.com/@dekaah/22-axioms-of-the-extreme-go-horse...

Axiom 8 is the most important.

dinvlad• 3 years ago

jeez, too real. Also the horrors about Tesla

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

The solution is that sprints just need to be faster

rukuu001• 3 years ago

Great site, but unfortunate to have mixed satire and non-satire (https://flowmanifest.org/we-believe/) in the same site

Btw HNers - any here disagree with the 'We believe' page?

Daub• 3 years ago

I think that most manifestos are rhetorical devices, used mainly for opening up discourse.

neilv• 3 years ago

For anyone new to the term "flow" as they seem to use it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Flow Manifest(o)

Related Stories