Maybe that's what he wants to change? Take Dell back to the day where people actually wanted their systems because they actually stood for quality once?
Presumably because they think it'll stop the haemorrhaging of users to Chrome.
Ironically though it'll do the opposite, if Firefox looks like Chrome then I might as well just start using Chrome as that's the last thing stopping me switching to Chrome.
This is the thing that always baffles me about the US. Here in the UK we're fighting the snooper's charter and so forth but in America it seems it doesn't even need the government to get involved. The FBI, NSA, CIA etc. just seem to have free reign to do whatever they want, sometimes at least doing the courtesy of getting a supportive job to sign it off.
But how can these agencies even get away with this without legislation in the first place? Is there really no oversight by elected representatives of what the limits on these agencies abilities are or what judges can order?
"Is there some reason he thinks government employees waste any more time dicking around with computers than private sector computers do?"
I can't talk for every department across the UK of course, but I worked full time in public sector in local government for 6 years, and have done a few contracts in other areas of government and I can say that without question that's absolutely the case. Part of the problem is as much that they're given more money to dick around with computers in the first place than private sector and not given any reason not to spend the money.
All too often rather than have the head of IT write up a budget in public sector and get it approved by some board or the CEO, possibly with some negotiation on reducing it by cutting some things off the list they're just given a massive wad of money without question for the department that's way more than they actually need and they're outright told to spend it all because otherwise next year they'll be given less so it's easier to just waste it and get the same amount/more next year than it is to have some left over and have to be a bit more sensible with spending next year because you're given a little less.
"and most people do something else rather than stare at a booting PC."
We're talking about UK government office staff here, no they don't. They just sit drooling whilst mindlessly waiting for either Facebook or Solitaire to show up on their screen.
By taking into account the bad DNS configuration that drastically increases the login time on Windows PCs and that is rife throughout the networks supported by many incompetent public sector IT departments I would guess.
I guess it does depend on what is classed as maintaining as you say and I'm not sure what sections of government they're referring too.
I can however speak for local government, specifically my local council and whilst it differs council by council I can quite imagine it for mine.
At my local council around 2009 they were paying £28k for bottom of the rung helpdesk/front line support monkeys, and they upped their wages to £32k around 2009 - 2010 right at the height of the recession when they were axing outright other departments and services. For reference the equivalent member of staff in private sector with an equivalent degree of competence and responsibilities would be paid around the £18k - £20k mark in this region so they were paying £12k - £14k a year premium for each member of support staff alone and there was a decent number of them. If support costs are factored into this figure then I can full well imagine grossly over-inflated wages in at least some IT departments across the spectrum of government departments across the UK is a big factor.
Further to this, in 2011 the council decided, again, whilst making cuts to real actual useful services to blow a few million on upgrading everyone from Office 2007 to Office 2010, because of course that was totally worth it, I mean Office 2010 was so fundamentally different that despite being at the height of an austerity drive and despite having to cut useful services and despite cutting funding for real actual problems like 1 foot deep potholes and so forth it was essential that all staff got bumped from 2007 to 2010. Oh, and of course they hired a bunch of people on £32k a year to install it, because of course you need people paid a 23% premium over the national average wage in a relatively cheap part of the country to stick a CD in and click next next next a few times rather than just get your existing well paid support team to just install it remotely using the city-wide fibre network you'd built to every single satellite office a few years beforehand. It's all this sort of wastage that causes that figure.
Put simply, if my local council is representative of government in general then I'd say the £6k is probably about right because for some reason they have a hard-on for IT and all common sense and fiscal responsibility just goes right out the window. Government has enforced public sector pay rise increase limitations of 0% for a few years and 1% some years after so the wages issue at least will begin to be dealt with via inflation if they keep that up, though the problem is it's a blanket thing so unfairly harms government roles that were underpaid but this is typical of our current government's cuts - rather than grappling the fundamental issues of wastage and overpayment in some areas they just demand blanket cuts and let local councils get on with it even though many are way too lacking in competence to do it sensibly. The net result is reports like this - highlighting the disturbing levels of wastage in some areas.
I'm just glad I'm not paying council tax to that particular council any more at least though I've no idea what expenditure on this sort of thing is like at my current council as I don't know anyone that works there.
...and if it does, because we're talking about the real world here where ambiguities happen, and where there's not a single spec on earth that doesn't have at least some holes in it?
We're not talking about your imagined fantasy world now, let's just pretend we're in the real world where it actually happens. How do you justify the 4 weeks loss of time on the project?
Whilst I'm not saying China doesn't do any state sponsored hacking I've pointed out before that China has the largest online population of any nation and has about 1/6th of the world's population. Statistically if you get non-state sponsored hackers in every nation it makes sense that you're going to see more from China than anywhere else.
It's quite possible that it's nothing to do with the US "going public" and everything to do with the fact that a large number of hack attacks from China against the US is pretty much a statistical certainty regardless of state actors being behind it or not.
I think all governments do state sponsored hacking, I certainly think China does, to what extent is unclear but I do think at least the claims against China are probably overhyped.
Which may not inherently be a bad thing anyway though I guess if it gets Western firms to take security a bit more seriously so maybe there's a silver lining regardless.
"If he needs to know that, it means he doesn't trust me. If, however, he does trust me, he assigns a block of work X to be done by date Y and he can then essentially completely forget about me knowing I'll have it done by Y."
So he gives you four weeks of work, I know you think you're perfect, but let's just assume for a minute that you're not, and that you're a normal human being like anyone else because mistakes happen and people do misunderstand sometimes, you go off and develop thinking you're doing it all right and you get it wrong and no one finds out until the end of the four weeks. What happens then? Is it okay that you just wasted four weeks of time when the mistake in understanding could've been picked up on and rectified in a day or two instead?
"That's the project manager's job. I shouldn't have to care if he's doing his job. It's a matter of trust and competence. "
Right and how does he do his job when you don't wish to attend the very short and brief meetings he's set up to find out how you're doing? You're not letting him do his job in the way he - as a professional in project management and delivery unlike yourself - has deemed best to do it, that's kind of the problem.
"If I have a good auto-mechanic that I trust, I know I can drop off my car, he'll diagnose and repair the problem, do good quality work, and not rip me off. That enables me to have the peace-of-mind to not have to care about his work or how he gets it done. "
But normally you actually take some time to explain the problem and tell him when you'll pick it up or need it back by. You don't just leave him guessing.
"If I have to care about your work, it implies I need to baby-sit you because I don't trust your quality of work or that you'll get it done on time."
No, it implies you're a professional that knows what his team is doing and how they're progressing. The problem is, you're apparently not - you're saying the PM should know how best to do his job, but when he decides he wants to do his job using agile you're pretending you know better because you're arrogant, and that's the problem. You think you know better than absolutely everyone else, even when you're talking outside your field of expertise.
I was under the impression this is why Facebook implemented this feature in the first place, to try and ward off some of the people who were doing exactly that.
Perhaps now the whole "contact Facebook to get all personal data held on you on a CD" thing has calmed down they think they can backtrack on that. Maybe they need a reminder, maybe it's time to start requesting data again as you say?
"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I'd rather simply hire better people."
Bwahaha. Like you? Obviously you're the best developer in the world and we should only hire you.
"Then you're letting your personal feeling influence your objectivity. It's much better than 99% of the crap out there for the formatting, comments, variable-names alone. And most code is mundane in its purpose -- but it can still be done well."
No I'm really not. If what you're telling me is that your code is "better than a few samples on websites created by students and amateurs" then er, well done, congratulations on that.
"The problem is their code is often terribly formatted, not commented, and is often 3 times as long as it needs to be. Bad developers always write far more code than necessary because they don't know how to do things concisely."
Well there's a balance here. Sometimes code that is too concise can be unmaintainable, but yes, sometimes it can be better. Regardless your assertion that your team mates all write bad code may explain your bitterness if true, I guess you just got stuck at a really bad employer - don't hate agile for that, don't hate working in a team for that, find a new job.
"So no, I often can't make heads nor tails of somebody else's crappy code. I often throw it out and rewrite it from scratch in about a third the space (including comments)."
That's worrying. Either you really do need to find a new job, or you're utterly hopeless at reading code.
"Why does anybody care what you did yesterday? It's in the past. What's done is done. The only part of that that has any potential value is the problems. The yesterday/today stuff -- what problem does anybody else know that solve?"
Because it's good to know how well the project is progressing? It's good to know if you're on target? It's good if something happens to someone or multiple people that you all know what has and hasn't been done and is left to do?
"Which is why it's pointless. It gives project leads warm-fuzzies that they think they know what's going on."
As opposed to everyone not knowing what's going on, whether the project is on track, whether people have encountered any issues, whether the team can help each other with anything, which is all much better right?
"One justification for stand-ups I've heard is to prevent slacking off; now this one to mitigate stubborn and/or prideful people. It sounds like Agile is a way to baby-sit people with work-ethic or personality defects."
There's a certain irony in this coming from you given that that's EXACTLY what you need and given your other responses sounds like it's exactly what you're getting when your project lead makes you do them.
No wonder you don't like them, you're exactly the problem they're designed to solve.
"I'm a team player in that we're all working towards the same goal."
It sounds more like you're working towards your own goal and they just happen to be working to the same goal too, that doesn't make you a team player though - a team player helps their team mates achieve the same goal more effectively.
"As for effective developer, modesty aside, I write the best (correct, concise, efficient, well-commented, and even well-formatted) code in the project (or, in all my years, in any project I've even been part of)."
So why don't you like talking to your team to help them improve to your level?
"Go Google me and download some of my open-source code for a look."
I did what you said, what am I meant to be looking at? I don't see anything special, I don't see anything magical, it looks like bog standard code. From your arrogance I was expecting some really stand out stuff. The fact I didn't coupled with your arrogance I think just further highlights the fact you're not a team player and not a good person to have on a dev team.
"That's a complete fantasy. Even if I know what you're doing, that doesn't mean I'm familiar with your code, your algorithms, your data-structures, etc. If I have to be sufficiently familiar so I can take over (and I have to be able to do this for everybody on the entire team), when am I supposed to find time to work on my own stuff? Your fantasy could only possibly work for very small teams. It simply doesn't scale."
Wait, didn't you just pretend to be some kind of super-coder? You're some kind of super-coder yet you can't pick up another team member's work in say a SCRUM and carry on with it? If you're any good at coding then reading code and understanding algorithms isn't something you should be struggling with. Sure you wont be able to jump into it as fast as they can, but it shouldn't take you long either. Maybe if you listened to what your team members are doing a bit well you wouldn't struggle to jump in. Oh wait...
"That also can be done by e-mail, or simply walk into that person's office. The same is true for the rest of your reasons."
Right but e-mail loses a distinct richness of conversation and walking into an office disrupts that developer's concentration so you're damaging his productivity each time you do this because you can't be arsed to attend a 5 - 10 minute meeting in the morning?
"Most of my teams have been about a dozen people. If you limit every person to 1 minute, that's still 12 minutes. Again, Agile doesn't scale."
I don't know what type of agile methodology you're practicing, but SCRUM recommends 7 +- 2 for team size. It seems like you weren't doing it right. Anymore than that and you should split into teams and have each team responsible for different areas of the project (because if you need 12 developers it's large enough to cleanly compartmentalise). Even ignoring that though, 12 minutes is still within the 15 minute window and and 1 minute per dev is enough for the dev to say "I finished class X yesterday, today I'll be doing class Y, but I had a few issues with problem Z" which is all you need.
"I'm not suggesting you stand up on your desk and shout out to the entire office -- send a group e-mail. If I'm deep in concentration, I can ignore your e-mail for a while."
That's fine and that's exactly right. The meeting the next morning is just an opportunity to raise things that haven't been responded to / dealt with the day before without anyone having to break concentration.
"It is someone else's problem: the project lead's. That's what he gets paid (usually paid more) for."
Right and it sounds like the project lead has decided to solve it to get you attending stand up meetings, except of course you know better and are too arrogant to do what your lead wants it seems.
"If I spend my finite time staying informed about everybody else's work and nothing happens to them, then it was a waste of my time."
Yet you still think it's better rather than have everyone spend 15 minute
But again that's just an example of bad management than an inherent problem with agile.
There are any number of examples of waterfall projects failing for bad management and you can't really do much about that, bad management where they don't have the right people doing the jobs they're supposed to be doing is going to cause chaos regardless of your project management methodology.
I think it's more the point that although you may not be able to get a perfect representation back from the dead, you will at least be able to extract or worthwhile information if it's XML.
Unfortunately I think developers and computer scientists have lost the battle for Slashdot.
It's now been taken over by clueless bottom of the rung IT technicians whose expertise doesn't stretch much beyond installing a new graphics card.
Hence, don't expect anyone with mod points to mod you up rather than mod you down. There's just too many clueless numpties in the pool of Slashdotters now who don't even know the difference between a compiler and an interpreter, or a software project and a car project either it seems.
"Additionally, this approach, especially given your description, will result in something like my current project, where there are 4 separate shopping carts, each for a different phase of the purchasing cycle, because no one with half a brain sat down and actually designed what the process would be. Nope, couldn't do that because it would take more than an iteration's time to properly get all requirements, design it, and then develop all required pieces. "
This is absurd, agile doesn't preclude the option of prior planning and I'm not really surprised to hear that you've been on a number of projects because they jumped straight into development. You can either still plan using classic techniques, or you can create a sprint or two, or three, or whatever dedicated to architecture before you ever even write a line of code. There's definitely nothing that says that global requirements gathering, design, and implementation must happen in one single sprint - I've no idea where you or your bosses got that idea from and I'm not surprised it turned into a trainwreck!
The problem is that even the client can't be sure what they want. I finished a roughly 2 year project last year and when you're working on a project of that scale 2 years is long enough that the client's business requirements wont necessarily be the same at the start of the project as when they finish. You can't blame the client for that, and it's something you have to deal with.
The clients have to deal with changing markets, they have to respond to competition, and so forth - that's just a reality of business for them. In the example of this 2 year project I'm talking about, tablets weren't even really much of a consideration when the client was first building their requirements but support for them became a necessity 18 months into the project - these are the sorts of things you just cannot predict ahead of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Lucky you. I haven't since about 2003.
Maybe that's what he wants to change? Take Dell back to the day where people actually wanted their systems because they actually stood for quality once?
Presumably because they think it'll stop the haemorrhaging of users to Chrome.
Ironically though it'll do the opposite, if Firefox looks like Chrome then I might as well just start using Chrome as that's the last thing stopping me switching to Chrome.
To be fair he seemed to be able to spell just fine, it was the inability to form meaningful sentences that was the problem.
Because young kids building space ships keeps them interested in space such that they may become future scientists or engineers in the field.
Because with Lego there's still some semblance of engineering involved. With 3D ray tracing it just becomes an art contest instead.
This is the thing that always baffles me about the US. Here in the UK we're fighting the snooper's charter and so forth but in America it seems it doesn't even need the government to get involved. The FBI, NSA, CIA etc. just seem to have free reign to do whatever they want, sometimes at least doing the courtesy of getting a supportive job to sign it off.
But how can these agencies even get away with this without legislation in the first place? Is there really no oversight by elected representatives of what the limits on these agencies abilities are or what judges can order?
"Is there some reason he thinks government employees waste any more time dicking around with computers than private sector computers do?"
I can't talk for every department across the UK of course, but I worked full time in public sector in local government for 6 years, and have done a few contracts in other areas of government and I can say that without question that's absolutely the case. Part of the problem is as much that they're given more money to dick around with computers in the first place than private sector and not given any reason not to spend the money.
All too often rather than have the head of IT write up a budget in public sector and get it approved by some board or the CEO, possibly with some negotiation on reducing it by cutting some things off the list they're just given a massive wad of money without question for the department that's way more than they actually need and they're outright told to spend it all because otherwise next year they'll be given less so it's easier to just waste it and get the same amount/more next year than it is to have some left over and have to be a bit more sensible with spending next year because you're given a little less.
"and most people do something else rather than stare at a booting PC."
We're talking about UK government office staff here, no they don't. They just sit drooling whilst mindlessly waiting for either Facebook or Solitaire to show up on their screen.
By taking into account the bad DNS configuration that drastically increases the login time on Windows PCs and that is rife throughout the networks supported by many incompetent public sector IT departments I would guess.
I guess it does depend on what is classed as maintaining as you say and I'm not sure what sections of government they're referring too.
I can however speak for local government, specifically my local council and whilst it differs council by council I can quite imagine it for mine.
At my local council around 2009 they were paying £28k for bottom of the rung helpdesk/front line support monkeys, and they upped their wages to £32k around 2009 - 2010 right at the height of the recession when they were axing outright other departments and services. For reference the equivalent member of staff in private sector with an equivalent degree of competence and responsibilities would be paid around the £18k - £20k mark in this region so they were paying £12k - £14k a year premium for each member of support staff alone and there was a decent number of them. If support costs are factored into this figure then I can full well imagine grossly over-inflated wages in at least some IT departments across the spectrum of government departments across the UK is a big factor.
Further to this, in 2011 the council decided, again, whilst making cuts to real actual useful services to blow a few million on upgrading everyone from Office 2007 to Office 2010, because of course that was totally worth it, I mean Office 2010 was so fundamentally different that despite being at the height of an austerity drive and despite having to cut useful services and despite cutting funding for real actual problems like 1 foot deep potholes and so forth it was essential that all staff got bumped from 2007 to 2010. Oh, and of course they hired a bunch of people on £32k a year to install it, because of course you need people paid a 23% premium over the national average wage in a relatively cheap part of the country to stick a CD in and click next next next a few times rather than just get your existing well paid support team to just install it remotely using the city-wide fibre network you'd built to every single satellite office a few years beforehand. It's all this sort of wastage that causes that figure.
Put simply, if my local council is representative of government in general then I'd say the £6k is probably about right because for some reason they have a hard-on for IT and all common sense and fiscal responsibility just goes right out the window. Government has enforced public sector pay rise increase limitations of 0% for a few years and 1% some years after so the wages issue at least will begin to be dealt with via inflation if they keep that up, though the problem is it's a blanket thing so unfairly harms government roles that were underpaid but this is typical of our current government's cuts - rather than grappling the fundamental issues of wastage and overpayment in some areas they just demand blanket cuts and let local councils get on with it even though many are way too lacking in competence to do it sensibly. The net result is reports like this - highlighting the disturbing levels of wastage in some areas.
I'm just glad I'm not paying council tax to that particular council any more at least though I've no idea what expenditure on this sort of thing is like at my current council as I don't know anyone that works there.
...and if it does, because we're talking about the real world here where ambiguities happen, and where there's not a single spec on earth that doesn't have at least some holes in it?
We're not talking about your imagined fantasy world now, let's just pretend we're in the real world where it actually happens. How do you justify the 4 weeks loss of time on the project?
Whilst I'm not saying China doesn't do any state sponsored hacking I've pointed out before that China has the largest online population of any nation and has about 1/6th of the world's population. Statistically if you get non-state sponsored hackers in every nation it makes sense that you're going to see more from China than anywhere else.
It's quite possible that it's nothing to do with the US "going public" and everything to do with the fact that a large number of hack attacks from China against the US is pretty much a statistical certainty regardless of state actors being behind it or not.
I think all governments do state sponsored hacking, I certainly think China does, to what extent is unclear but I do think at least the claims against China are probably overhyped.
Which may not inherently be a bad thing anyway though I guess if it gets Western firms to take security a bit more seriously so maybe there's a silver lining regardless.
"If he needs to know that, it means he doesn't trust me. If, however, he does trust me, he assigns a block of work X to be done by date Y and he can then essentially completely forget about me knowing I'll have it done by Y."
So he gives you four weeks of work, I know you think you're perfect, but let's just assume for a minute that you're not, and that you're a normal human being like anyone else because mistakes happen and people do misunderstand sometimes, you go off and develop thinking you're doing it all right and you get it wrong and no one finds out until the end of the four weeks. What happens then? Is it okay that you just wasted four weeks of time when the mistake in understanding could've been picked up on and rectified in a day or two instead?
"That's the project manager's job. I shouldn't have to care if he's doing his job. It's a matter of trust and competence. "
Right and how does he do his job when you don't wish to attend the very short and brief meetings he's set up to find out how you're doing? You're not letting him do his job in the way he - as a professional in project management and delivery unlike yourself - has deemed best to do it, that's kind of the problem.
"If I have a good auto-mechanic that I trust, I know I can drop off my car, he'll diagnose and repair the problem, do good quality work, and not rip me off. That enables me to have the peace-of-mind to not have to care about his work or how he gets it done. "
But normally you actually take some time to explain the problem and tell him when you'll pick it up or need it back by. You don't just leave him guessing.
"If I have to care about your work, it implies I need to baby-sit you because I don't trust your quality of work or that you'll get it done on time."
No, it implies you're a professional that knows what his team is doing and how they're progressing. The problem is, you're apparently not - you're saying the PM should know how best to do his job, but when he decides he wants to do his job using agile you're pretending you know better because you're arrogant, and that's the problem. You think you know better than absolutely everyone else, even when you're talking outside your field of expertise.
I was under the impression this is why Facebook implemented this feature in the first place, to try and ward off some of the people who were doing exactly that.
Perhaps now the whole "contact Facebook to get all personal data held on you on a CD" thing has calmed down they think they can backtrack on that. Maybe they need a reminder, maybe it's time to start requesting data again as you say?
"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I'd rather simply hire better people."
Bwahaha. Like you? Obviously you're the best developer in the world and we should only hire you.
"Then you're letting your personal feeling influence your objectivity. It's much better than 99% of the crap out there for the formatting, comments, variable-names alone. And most code is mundane in its purpose -- but it can still be done well."
No I'm really not. If what you're telling me is that your code is "better than a few samples on websites created by students and amateurs" then er, well done, congratulations on that.
"The problem is their code is often terribly formatted, not commented, and is often 3 times as long as it needs to be. Bad developers always write far more code than necessary because they don't know how to do things concisely."
Well there's a balance here. Sometimes code that is too concise can be unmaintainable, but yes, sometimes it can be better. Regardless your assertion that your team mates all write bad code may explain your bitterness if true, I guess you just got stuck at a really bad employer - don't hate agile for that, don't hate working in a team for that, find a new job.
"So no, I often can't make heads nor tails of somebody else's crappy code. I often throw it out and rewrite it from scratch in about a third the space (including comments)."
That's worrying. Either you really do need to find a new job, or you're utterly hopeless at reading code.
"Why does anybody care what you did yesterday? It's in the past. What's done is done. The only part of that that has any potential value is the problems. The yesterday/today stuff -- what problem does anybody else know that solve?"
Because it's good to know how well the project is progressing? It's good to know if you're on target? It's good if something happens to someone or multiple people that you all know what has and hasn't been done and is left to do?
"Which is why it's pointless. It gives project leads warm-fuzzies that they think they know what's going on."
As opposed to everyone not knowing what's going on, whether the project is on track, whether people have encountered any issues, whether the team can help each other with anything, which is all much better right?
"One justification for stand-ups I've heard is to prevent slacking off; now this one to mitigate stubborn and/or prideful people. It sounds like Agile is a way to baby-sit people with work-ethic or personality defects."
There's a certain irony in this coming from you given that that's EXACTLY what you need and given your other responses sounds like it's exactly what you're getting when your project lead makes you do them.
No wonder you don't like them, you're exactly the problem they're designed to solve.
Um, so you don't want a 5 - 10 minute meeting each day but you have a 30 - 60 minute meeting once a week?
Do the math on that one, then ask which one is more responsive to changing circumstances throughout the week. Maybe then you'll get it.
"I'm a team player in that we're all working towards the same goal."
It sounds more like you're working towards your own goal and they just happen to be working to the same goal too, that doesn't make you a team player though - a team player helps their team mates achieve the same goal more effectively.
"As for effective developer, modesty aside, I write the best (correct, concise, efficient, well-commented, and even well-formatted) code in the project (or, in all my years, in any project I've even been part of)."
So why don't you like talking to your team to help them improve to your level?
"Go Google me and download some of my open-source code for a look."
I did what you said, what am I meant to be looking at? I don't see anything special, I don't see anything magical, it looks like bog standard code. From your arrogance I was expecting some really stand out stuff. The fact I didn't coupled with your arrogance I think just further highlights the fact you're not a team player and not a good person to have on a dev team.
"That's a complete fantasy. Even if I know what you're doing, that doesn't mean I'm familiar with your code, your algorithms, your data-structures, etc. If I have to be sufficiently familiar so I can take over (and I have to be able to do this for everybody on the entire team), when am I supposed to find time to work on my own stuff? Your fantasy could only possibly work for very small teams. It simply doesn't scale."
Wait, didn't you just pretend to be some kind of super-coder? You're some kind of super-coder yet you can't pick up another team member's work in say a SCRUM and carry on with it? If you're any good at coding then reading code and understanding algorithms isn't something you should be struggling with. Sure you wont be able to jump into it as fast as they can, but it shouldn't take you long either. Maybe if you listened to what your team members are doing a bit well you wouldn't struggle to jump in. Oh wait...
"That also can be done by e-mail, or simply walk into that person's office. The same is true for the rest of your reasons."
Right but e-mail loses a distinct richness of conversation and walking into an office disrupts that developer's concentration so you're damaging his productivity each time you do this because you can't be arsed to attend a 5 - 10 minute meeting in the morning?
"Most of my teams have been about a dozen people. If you limit every person to 1 minute, that's still 12 minutes. Again, Agile doesn't scale."
I don't know what type of agile methodology you're practicing, but SCRUM recommends 7 +- 2 for team size. It seems like you weren't doing it right. Anymore than that and you should split into teams and have each team responsible for different areas of the project (because if you need 12 developers it's large enough to cleanly compartmentalise). Even ignoring that though, 12 minutes is still within the 15 minute window and and 1 minute per dev is enough for the dev to say "I finished class X yesterday, today I'll be doing class Y, but I had a few issues with problem Z" which is all you need.
"I'm not suggesting you stand up on your desk and shout out to the entire office -- send a group e-mail. If I'm deep in concentration, I can ignore your e-mail for a while."
That's fine and that's exactly right. The meeting the next morning is just an opportunity to raise things that haven't been responded to / dealt with the day before without anyone having to break concentration.
"It is someone else's problem: the project lead's. That's what he gets paid (usually paid more) for."
Right and it sounds like the project lead has decided to solve it to get you attending stand up meetings, except of course you know better and are too arrogant to do what your lead wants it seems.
"If I spend my finite time staying informed about everybody else's work and nothing happens to them, then it was a waste of my time."
Yet you still think it's better rather than have everyone spend 15 minute
But again that's just an example of bad management than an inherent problem with agile.
There are any number of examples of waterfall projects failing for bad management and you can't really do much about that, bad management where they don't have the right people doing the jobs they're supposed to be doing is going to cause chaos regardless of your project management methodology.
I think it's more the point that although you may not be able to get a perfect representation back from the dead, you will at least be able to extract or worthwhile information if it's XML.
Unfortunately I think developers and computer scientists have lost the battle for Slashdot.
It's now been taken over by clueless bottom of the rung IT technicians whose expertise doesn't stretch much beyond installing a new graphics card.
Hence, don't expect anyone with mod points to mod you up rather than mod you down. There's just too many clueless numpties in the pool of Slashdotters now who don't even know the difference between a compiler and an interpreter, or a software project and a car project either it seems.
"Additionally, this approach, especially given your description, will result in something like my current project, where there are 4 separate shopping carts, each for a different phase of the purchasing cycle, because no one with half a brain sat down and actually designed what the process would be. Nope, couldn't do that because it would take more than an iteration's time to properly get all requirements, design it, and then develop all required pieces. "
This is absurd, agile doesn't preclude the option of prior planning and I'm not really surprised to hear that you've been on a number of projects because they jumped straight into development. You can either still plan using classic techniques, or you can create a sprint or two, or three, or whatever dedicated to architecture before you ever even write a line of code. There's definitely nothing that says that global requirements gathering, design, and implementation must happen in one single sprint - I've no idea where you or your bosses got that idea from and I'm not surprised it turned into a trainwreck!
The problem is that even the client can't be sure what they want. I finished a roughly 2 year project last year and when you're working on a project of that scale 2 years is long enough that the client's business requirements wont necessarily be the same at the start of the project as when they finish. You can't blame the client for that, and it's something you have to deal with.
The clients have to deal with changing markets, they have to respond to competition, and so forth - that's just a reality of business for them. In the example of this 2 year project I'm talking about, tablets weren't even really much of a consideration when the client was first building their requirements but support for them became a necessity 18 months into the project - these are the sorts of things you just cannot predict ahead of time.