Shut Up, Bob

February 18th, 2010

Some of us are hurting our profession with the casual way we treat language. In the following examples, that guy is Bob.

Scenario 1

Bob: "Hey, where should we go to lunch?"

Joe: "I dunno, get in the car and we'll decide later."

Bob: "Yeah, we'll just be agile about it."

Giggle, giggle. Tee hee hee.

Scenario 2

Bob: "Hey, what are you working on?"

Joe: "I'm not sure what to do, Manager X told me to … and Manager Y told me to …"

Bob: "Ah, so you are being agile then?"

Gales of laughter, followed by a knowing wink.

Shut Up, Bob

Bob, you are causing harm. You are the reason agile has been coopted. You are undermining the efforts of your peers who are actually trying to better our profession. They are doing this for you, Bob.

Your cheap joke mocks a body of knowledge and professionals who are trying improve the life of your teammates. The fact that you will spend the next 20 minutes hanging out at the water cooler and planning lunch instead of driving positive change in your team lets me know where you are coming from.

When your CTO passed by and heard your little joke, it confirmed his suspicion he needs to keep the current command-and-control mechanisms in place. This also influenced his ideas of what agile really means, because all he had before is the contents of a 3 year old InfoQ article.

Bob, shut up. You aren't just hurting yourself. You are undermining all of us.

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  • http://charlieflowers.wordpress.com Charlie Flowers

    Dude, you need to lighten up. I love agile, and I work with a whole bunch of other good developers who love agile, and we all joke like this all the time. The only crime we commit is that it is starting to become trite, but hey, we’re developers, not comedians.

  • http://charlieflowers.wordpress.com Charlie Flowers

    I wrote an extraordinarily fabulous comment here, then it disappeared. Oh well, screw you Bob.

  • Darrel Carver

    Having worked in the industry for a number of years and for a number of organizations I guess I am an architect and developer who does not get agile to the level you do.

    I see it as another SDLC with a great deal of good practices. Some make sense in a organization, some do not. For example, TDD is the hardest to sell for me as a consultant. Most developers today are trained in the more standard waterfall methodologies. I can usually sell automated tests, build machines, etc… But TDD is very difficult.

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