I’m the technical lead on a code development effort. Every time my program manager says we should transition to Agile/Scrum/etc, I say “Absolutely, sure thing. We can start on that after the next release.” Then we go back to what we were doing until they get distracted and forgot about it. Rinse, lather, repeat. I know what needs to be done and I communicate that to my team. What I need is less friction and less overhead, not more.
OP’s insistence that he’s posting this to “help people” really turns my stomach. No, you’re selling a product. If you wanted to help people, you’d post it for free. The assertion that he doesn’t make much money from advertising here is even more galling. So he’s just doing it for sport, I guess?
Last point: I would respect it more if he was just nakedly promoting his own music. Posting “Hey, listen to my crappy music” is more noble than saying “Hey, pay for a template to make music like my crappy music.” At least one is ostensibly about art. That’s all I’ve got
I remember when we had unions to protect ourselves with, when we didn’t have to play their game to survive.
Attempts to out manage your own managers will never work, because they will co-opt everything, that’s what they do. Collective bargaining though, motherfuckers can’t fuck with that…
I don’t think of it as “Agile™” but I guess if I was challenged to call it something, I’d still call it (the things I practice as a developer/ team member) agile.
I think this thread turned into “miserable git” v2.0.1 . I’m not complaining! It’s kind of fun to read agile bashing some place other than hacker news for a change.
It was a forum thread about a particular video from the OP. It got diverted from that after a few posts. If you nuked all of the conversations about that digression I’d guess you’d find only 10 were actually about what the video said.
EDIT: Which is largely what got me ranting. There’s very little here about the content of the video music and a lot about middle management, and misconstrued ideas about agile.
If a moderator WAS to nuke the digression (including mine) I’d be very happy.
Hummmmm. So: A post titled “run your studio like a tech startup” a video mentioning “agile” in the name. Both picked by the OP. And we’re supposed not to even mention middle management, its vices, and how inappropriate it may or may not be to apply that to music?
Yeah, or at they very least, walk us through your process on video rather than describe it, and show us your music. This video is is almost entirely him on camera with a few graphs about agile. At one part he’s talking about “track sketches” and says he uses a controller to bring stuff in and out, and play that one line in session view live by fading controllers in and out on stage. I’ve used Ableton since 2011 and I’ve got no clue what he means by that. There’s just a single screenshot of Ableton with dozens of tracks and like 100~ clips. I probably would have found it more insightful if he demonstrated that actual process with his own music. Maybe not personally useful, but interesting at the very least.
Agile was the recognition that business customers are bad at specifying what they want. The proposed solution is to make something simple and approximately what you think they need, let them react to it and then adjust accordingly. Repeat until everyone is happy, and rake in the big bucks.
The music version might be a rapper and a beat maker collaborating. Beat maker throws down a beat and the rapper tries to rap over it and makes some suggestions. Beat maker improves the beat and eventually a track is made.
Nothing wrong with that. There is a lot of methodology that has sprung up and been adapted into this world because teams of 100+ engineers struggle to do that. They need long term budgets and strategy and stuff. So what once was a very sensible seat of the pants approach grew into a vast edifice of management techniques with specialized priests and wizards to oversee the whole thing.
This has recently degenerated into “email jobs” where people with little practical knowledge collect large six figure salaries while relaxing by the pool and occasionally sending an email. It’s pretty easy to understand why this makes almost everyone except the email-job-haver mad.
Some of those tools may be useful to creative pursuits, but if someone comes in selling magic beans, it’s fair for everyone to get mad and run them out of town on a rail as a proactive defense measure.
The alternative is to dig through the shit in search of flakes of gold. They are in there, but you’d be a fool to pay money for the privilege. There are plenty of free resources that a motivated person can comb through.
(The cycle of simple and useful management technique that balloons into a sprawling mess isn’t unique to Agile, which is why the spy satellite guy warned about the futility of buzzword management. Management is hard, few people are good at it and many people are good at pretending to be good at it while adding negative value)
I don’t feel “victimized” by Agile. It has been abused and misused in every instance I’ve encountered it, it’s that simple. But the more important point: I really don’t want or need every aspect of my life to be corporatized, streamlined, and commodified by tech and business bro mindsets.
As far as the video itself goes. I finally watched it. Nothing here is particularly novel or even interesting. Work quickly, get your song idea done before you go into the details, use standardized mixing and mastering chains for your basic mix, use a template (and oh look, we have a template) etc. It’s also not-so-subtly selling the products while pretending it isn’t, which I find disingenuous. Anyone who has been in the “music production” space - forums, reddit, youtube, etc for more than a month has definitely heard all these points in different packages from dozens or hundreds of sources.
