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+#+title: My Experience with Scrum
+#+description:
+#+keywords: blog static
+#+author: Yann Esposito
+#+email: yann@esposito.host
+#+date: [2021-08-30 Mon]
+#+lang: en
+#+options: auto-id:t
+#+startup: showeverything
+
+#+begin_notes
+My experience with Scrum in a small startup.
+Mostly negative, but there are good lessons to learn.
+#+end_notes
+
+I was a new recruit in a small startup.
+I started just about 6 month ago, and we did have a CTO, and 4 CEOs.
+Part of the team were remote, (the CTO and another member).
+
+The amount of work was huge and at the same time, I was really motivated
+coming from a big corp full of mega-boring technology and lacking of
+talent.
+
+Here I will regain a lot of freedom regarding my developer environment.
+A real computer to work with, use the latest techno using the latest trend.
+But, having 4 CEOs many clients, a lot of concurrency regardings tasks to manage.
+It was quite stressful and difficult to plan.
+
+They told us about hiring someone whose responsibility would be to plan the
+work, because it is a full-time work in itself.
+They guy looked cool, it told us about how he envisioned the work.
+It was "mostly" SCRUM, not full scrum. Mainly he will always be the scrum
+master, he will be responsible of planning, priotirizing and organizing tasks.
+This was indeed a lot of work.
+We welcomed him as we our hope was to be able to work on longer tasks than
+just quick 1-day tasks.
+
+Now the reality:
+
+- Every Monday morning was last for planning.
+- Every Friday afternoon was lost for retrospective
+- Every half morning was lost in daily standup (instead of 10min it latest
+  generally about 30min to 1h30)
+- Every week, the 4h work on planning was changed entirely due to new
+  market priorities, so every week we often made an exceptional new task
+  planning for about 2 to 4h.
+
+To that you needed to add a few meetings, discussion about priorities, team
+spirit, etc...
+
+So looking at this you could imagine that I have a totally negative
+impression on SCRUM faced to the reality of people.
+Which is mostly true.
+But scum-like tasks organisation can be great for a few things.
+
+
+If you really have a clear plan with everyone involved and most
+difficulties have been though about in advance. This is a killer way to
+go from "planned" to "reality".
+
+What is wrong with scrum;
+
+1. Daily standups suck, this is mostly lost time
+2. Planning every week/2-week is terrible for medium to long term tasks
+   (see a reference between important vs urgent).
+
+The main reason full SCRUM is terrible  is because it narrow your mind to a
+sprint-long time to do any tasks. It mixes urgency with importance.
+And generally, really important tasks to make are left behind, most of the
+time being put on urgent tasks.
+Which for most product is terrible.
+
+Quite often it is better to eat the cake, keep a lot of fixes, urgent
+tasks on the side to take the time to work on the important stuff.
+The one that is hard to build, the one that will make the real difference
+in the market.
+
+Manager scrum/any kind of process common misunderstandings:
+
+1. Do your agile stuff (like work your ass off even on the week-end)
+2. Yes agile to have more control about you slackers
+3. Ah you have given a random number about the difficulty of the task, this
+   mean I can translate it in number of days, and this is a contract ;)
+
+And all this kind of bullshit.
+It is normal to understand that managers need to have some vision about the
+time a task might take.
+It is normal to understand that managers need to see who is performing well
+or not, and how this could be enhanced.
+etc...
+
+But, Scrum looks like a magical solution. It is not.
+If fact, any kind of *process* could be and will be tricked and played off by
+the players.
+The only thing that matter is:
+
+- make a distinction between important vs urgent tasks
+- make every player want to play in the same game as the managers, people
+  need to want to do something.