Yes, but not at big companies. SCRUM and Sprints are useful when you're a consultant and the client doesn't actually know what they want to build. When you're working at a software company, it's a red flag if product can't map out what they want.
I've worked at Verizon and Google, and they were much more interested in having quarter or bi-yearly shipping goals and really didn't give a fuck how the teams hit that goal.
Managers may or may not run daily or weekly 'check-ins' (I've never been on a team that did daily ones), there were no points assigned, there were very rough guesse of how long projects would take, but management just assumed people didn't need babysitting and people would work hard when necessary to unblock other folks.
The largest company I worked for was in the energy industry, and we didn't even have quarterly shipping goals. I pretty much was handed some apps and told, "Handle these." I did well with that and ended up being handled a collection of tech platforms, then left alone to handle them. I then was thrown a team to help out, and my manager would walk by once every couple weeks, let me know what larger goals needed to be hit. That was the entire extent of our "process".
It wasn't that I had some big title and leadership role. That was just how little the process mattered to leadership. Every engineer on the team had their own little empire to run. I, and everyone else on that team, got good reviews not because of any metrics we hit, but because we could handle being thrown a system and just run with it, so the leadership never had to get into the weeds.
We did have formal change control processes - a tedious weekly meeting where we'd all go over what changes were going in to be sure we didn't step on each other. So it was a mix of utter freedom with one painful touchpoint each week. Not a bad price to pay, honestly.
All that being said, I disagree that Scrum or other Agile processes don't exist in large companies. They do. Some people like them. I personally don't mind Kanban, but detest Scrum. But when you are allowed to control your own process, there is no telling what people will choose to do.
Comments
Yes, but not at big companies. SCRUM and Sprints are useful when you're a consultant and the client doesn't actually know what they want to build. When you're working at a software company, it's a red flag if product can't map out what they want.
I've never worked at a place that doesn't do some variation of scrum. It is terrible. How do things work at bigger firms?
I've worked at Verizon and Google, and they were much more interested in having quarter or bi-yearly shipping goals and really didn't give a fuck how the teams hit that goal.
Managers may or may not run daily or weekly 'check-ins' (I've never been on a team that did daily ones), there were no points assigned, there were very rough guesse of how long projects would take, but management just assumed people didn't need babysitting and people would work hard when necessary to unblock other folks.
The largest company I worked for was in the energy industry, and we didn't even have quarterly shipping goals. I pretty much was handed some apps and told, "Handle these." I did well with that and ended up being handled a collection of tech platforms, then left alone to handle them. I then was thrown a team to help out, and my manager would walk by once every couple weeks, let me know what larger goals needed to be hit. That was the entire extent of our "process".
It wasn't that I had some big title and leadership role. That was just how little the process mattered to leadership. Every engineer on the team had their own little empire to run. I, and everyone else on that team, got good reviews not because of any metrics we hit, but because we could handle being thrown a system and just run with it, so the leadership never had to get into the weeds.
We did have formal change control processes - a tedious weekly meeting where we'd all go over what changes were going in to be sure we didn't step on each other. So it was a mix of utter freedom with one painful touchpoint each week. Not a bad price to pay, honestly.
All that being said, I disagree that Scrum or other Agile processes don't exist in large companies. They do. Some people like them. I personally don't mind Kanban, but detest Scrum. But when you are allowed to control your own process, there is no telling what people will choose to do.