Readit News...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
How do people trust the output of LLMs? In the fields I know about, sometimes the answers are impressive, sometimes totally wrong (hallucinations). When the answer is correct, I always feel like I could have simply googled the issue and some variation of the answer lies deep in some pages of some forum or stack exchange or reddit.
However, in the fields I'm not familiar with, I'm clueless how much I can trust the answer.
The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.
When grandmasters battle it out for hours in classic chess, thinking ahead of so many branches of moves that I would find unfathomable, they do burn through a lot of energy.
For what is quite a sedentary career choice, I rarely see overweight grandmasters. Though that is probably more correlation of other facts than causation...
More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups. If you have standups daily, you should be able to give an update on what your status is in a minute tops, given it's business as usual. If there's any followup discussions to be had or questions to be resolved, the startup is not the right place to do that, everyone who is interested or affected can continue the discussion after the standup. This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask.
Having spent some time living in Sweden, the situation described in the article is not too surprising to me. Swedes are incredibly nonconfrontational and even the thought of politely cutting someone off because they're talking too much in a standup would be faux pas for some.
Consistently the most durable roles seem to be those which require theoretical understanding of the fundamentals —- UI/UX, systems, algorithms, etc. It’s unfortunate that not everyone gets a chance to learn these things.
Yes the expectations are probably still higher, but these companies don’t expect everyone to grow past “mostly self-sufficient engineer” as the parent comment suggests, and for people that do want to do that there’s a full non-management path to director-equivalent IC levels. My impression is that small companies are more likely to treat management as a promotion rather than as a lateral move to a different track (whenever I hear “promoted to manager” I kinda shudder)