I see older devs being active in the trade well into their 60s but even as I much younger person I don't see how agile development is sustainable for a ~50-year career.
Pretty much everything that's been layered on top though has either nothing to do with the manifesto, or actively breaks it. i.e. there's a burning issue, I'll get to that after my sprint commitment, which was sold to let me finish work, but now only exists to stress me out to squeeze more widgets per unit of time, where the widgets pretty much never actually map back to anything actually tangible.
...and that /is/ topic of discussion every time this discussion happens
Every agile criticism conversation goes like this
A: agile as practiced is bad
B: but the manifesto is solid
It's predictable as the sun rising
Scrum is like Spaghetti Carbonara in America. The ingredients are simple and there's a tiny bit of technique involved that anybody can figure out after a few tries. For some reason though almost everybody that makes it decides that they know better than the people that invented it and so adulterates it with peas and onions and garlic and cream and cream cheese and Italian seasoning and parsley and chives until it ends up being Olive Garden Alfredo. If they wanted Carbonara then they would have cooked the Carbonara, not the waterfall with a bunch of JIRA workflows and four-hour meetings layered on top. They just did what they would have done anyway while attempting to sound fancy via obfuscation.
DevOps is a culture. It can also be the specific subset of highly skilled individuals who were part of or an outcome of said cultures cross pollination. Today DevOps most often means fairly unskilled person hitting pipelines with hammer.
In the end, the same old people with the same old commercial interests adopted the term in a way that benefited them but changed the meaning of the term because change was not actually something anyone wanted.
C: Therefore you’re doing it wrong.
And once an “agile guru” enters the conversation:
D: You need my book / seminar / services.
Inasmuch as Agile was adopted at companies, it's because it was sold to them as a way to provide greater transparency, accountability, and control into a chaotic software development process. The vice president behind the company's "Agile Transformation" probably can't even name point one of the manifesto; "we're doing Scrum with JIRA, therefore we're agile" is the extent of his concern.
SAFe is just an attempt to mush something that like looks like agile to delivery teams together with something that fits into more traditional program management, governance, and strategic direction lifecycle models.
There's no particular magic to it, and it's probably better to think of it in terms of being an "enterprise variant of agile" rather than a "humane variant of agile".
The reality is that in some domains there just aren't many developers who are highly motivated, self directed, and thoroughly understand customer needs. Those people just aren't widely available in the labor market regardless of wages or working conditions. So if management doesn't impose a fairly strict methodology then then the program will collapse.
If the tool is used wrong most of the time, it's at least partially to blame.
Only if there were other tools that didn't fall victim to the same business incentives, but they all do.
I've had PMs that find a balance with the business incentives and make it work. If you’re human and make the wrong choices, then most people, including me, will likely call you bad in that context. If they can't stand up to find balance with the business incentives, then they're a bad PM. That doesn't make them a bad person.
To be clear I am not claiming that SAFe is necessarily the best possible methodology. There is certainly room for improvement. But empirically it can work in real life.
Are you talking about Agile, Waterfall, or project management in general?
I've seen Agile work just fine. I've also seen it fail miserably. I've seen both of these at the same company with the main difference being how aggressive/delusional the leadership is. The easy test is if your leadership is legitimately ok with your team going home early if you complete your sprint commitment early, and it actually happens on occasion.
It’s not like my great grandparents had a passion for farming in South Dakota and that’s why they did it until they dropped dead. It’s all they knew and what they did to survive.
If you gave them the option to tap on a keyboard in an air-conditioned room for 10 or 20 of those years they would’ve taken it.
A lot of young guys like that D-Day style work, then goof off for a while, but not me. Continuous sustainable work is much preferred.
