Yeah, having the group of smart people who can work together is a crucial ingredient, and the attempts to replicate the success with different teams will fails miserably. And the next step is giving those people autonomy. What is the point of hiring people who are smart, good at their work, often obsessed with their work… and then having them micromanaged by someone who probably couldn’t write a short shell script if their life depended on it?
The Scrum Guide is basically about how to get rid of managers, without everything falling apart. (All the bureaucracy introduced in Scrum was meant as a replacement for the usual company bureaucracy, not as an extra layer on top of it.) But companies somehow introduce “Scrum” while also keeping the managers and all the micromanagement, only now the developers have to do the extra daily stand-ups (where they do not literally stand up) and the ritual of estimating story difficulty (where the management has already decided that “this has to be done by the end of the month, because we have already promised that to the customer”, and you are just choosing which tasks get done during the first two-week sprint, and which during the second one).
(This is a sensitive topic for me, because I actually have a Scrum Master training, and then I see how all companies talk about doing “Scrum” while often doing the exact opposite of it. Whenever a manager tells me that we need to do some pointless thing “because of Scrum”, I suppress the urge to scream. But then, if you have a manager, you have already failed at Scrum. A good topic for the retrospective, except you probably don’t have a retrospective, because the one thing the management hates is feedback provided in ways that are not under their control.)
And I guess it is similar in science. When you have smart people collaborating, great things happen, you just need to avoid some possible failure modes… such as people doing some esoteric thing for years with zero ability to communicate the meaning of it to the public (which pays the bills) and sometimes even to other scientists. But instead of keeping it at a reasonable level (such as: once in a year you have to publish an article describing your current progress, and I want other scientists’ feedback on it) it becomes a game of maximizing the articles.
(Science is also broken on many levels. I know people who publish a scientific journal that contains some good articles and some bad ones. The good articles are worth it, but I asked why they also publish the bad ones, if they know they are bad? Their journal is not famous, so they do not get enough good articles. But why can’t they simply publish less? Turns out, journals themselves are also somehow graded by how many articles they publish, so a journal that published only 10 good articles a year would get a worse rating than a journal that publishes 10 good articles and 20 bad articles a year! The numbers are not exact here, but this is the idea.)
Yeah, having the group of smart people who can work together is a crucial ingredient, and the attempts to replicate the success with different teams will fails miserably. And the next step is giving those people autonomy. What is the point of hiring people who are smart, good at their work, often obsessed with their work… and then having them micromanaged by someone who probably couldn’t write a short shell script if their life depended on it?
The Scrum Guide is basically about how to get rid of managers, without everything falling apart. (All the bureaucracy introduced in Scrum was meant as a replacement for the usual company bureaucracy, not as an extra layer on top of it.) But companies somehow introduce “Scrum” while also keeping the managers and all the micromanagement, only now the developers have to do the extra daily stand-ups (where they do not literally stand up) and the ritual of estimating story difficulty (where the management has already decided that “this has to be done by the end of the month, because we have already promised that to the customer”, and you are just choosing which tasks get done during the first two-week sprint, and which during the second one).
(This is a sensitive topic for me, because I actually have a Scrum Master training, and then I see how all companies talk about doing “Scrum” while often doing the exact opposite of it. Whenever a manager tells me that we need to do some pointless thing “because of Scrum”, I suppress the urge to scream. But then, if you have a manager, you have already failed at Scrum. A good topic for the retrospective, except you probably don’t have a retrospective, because the one thing the management hates is feedback provided in ways that are not under their control.)
And I guess it is similar in science. When you have smart people collaborating, great things happen, you just need to avoid some possible failure modes… such as people doing some esoteric thing for years with zero ability to communicate the meaning of it to the public (which pays the bills) and sometimes even to other scientists. But instead of keeping it at a reasonable level (such as: once in a year you have to publish an article describing your current progress, and I want other scientists’ feedback on it) it becomes a game of maximizing the articles.
(Science is also broken on many levels. I know people who publish a scientific journal that contains some good articles and some bad ones. The good articles are worth it, but I asked why they also publish the bad ones, if they know they are bad? Their journal is not famous, so they do not get enough good articles. But why can’t they simply publish less? Turns out, journals themselves are also somehow graded by how many articles they publish, so a journal that published only 10 good articles a year would get a worse rating than a journal that publishes 10 good articles and 20 bad articles a year! The numbers are not exact here, but this is the idea.)