I couldn’t be bothered to read all of the responses, but I thought it was a solid video with very valid and useful ideas.
I understand thoughts such as “I just want to go into the studio and relax”, or “I just make music for myself”, but at the end of the day don’t we all want to feel productive with the time we spend in our “studio spaces” and walk away having worked on music that pleases us? I think the types of tips shared here would help anyone who has these goals.
I watched the advert a couple of times.
It’s an advert.
When I pointed this out, OP responded with another advert (which he’s since edited out to make it slightly less adverty).
Sometimes there’s helpful information in adverts (like how women who work in offices like men that drink diet coke with their tits out), but it’s still first and foremost and advert masquerading as help.
My guy could have posted a two minute video saying “keep your shit organised and don’t do work you don’t need to do” without once mentioning the product he’s selling, but instead it’s all packaged up like all them other “self help” adverts all over YouTube with just enough subtle "oh yeah, our product (that we’re totally not trying to sell to you) does this too…
I’m all for people helping each other out, but this ain’t it.
It’s an advert.
Your rebuttal to the advert makes me want to hear the advert! I’m so confused! I have problems!
Absolutely. Personally though, I’m just a bit tired of YouTubers trying to get my attention by telling me I’m doing something wrong, or I’m not doing something that I should be doing. To me it just comes across at patronizing and disingenuous. YouTube is great in that anyone can put videos of there that are unique and personal. But it’s also not great when everyone using the same sort clickbait-y marketing ploys because views matter above all else.
sure I had allergic reaction to the techbros methodology before watching the clicky clacky video.
tried to be objective as u at first until the 5 star reviews came out.
said it before but these “ideas” could’ve been just a couple of paragraphs rather poorly produced promo video for the company, and much of this information already available in various techbros blogs
Thankful that I never feel victimized by a Youtube video.
Defo feels like an advert.
I like to finish shit and I’m always open to all kinds of ways to be inspired. Some work. Some don’t. All good.
Not seeing the overlap between those 3 and and the OPs video (other than referencing the word agile), but I appreciate the links, thank you.
these are just examples of 3-4 year old posts (and I’m sure there’s more updated material out there, I’m just too scared to look), and even with focus on the first link there’s bunch of overlap, the work-in-progress part (don’t get hang up on things), simplicity part (all you need is my template, definitely not all the gear I have behind me), the continuous delivery part (make several sketches over the weekend), and so on, same concepts wrapped in a different shell.
how is this “one released song per sprint” working with EPs or albums?
Maybe you want to sum up what you took away you in a few paragraphs and post it here:
This thread seems to be focused more on discussing the video’s presentation, framing, and intent the video. A summary of the ideas only might free them of that burden.
Curious that metrics bug people that much, you mentioned that twice now. Of course, metrics can be misused by management, but that does not appear to be your point.
In my experience, teams can’t reliably improve what they don’t measure. And the process of agreeing on what to measure, and how, is really helpful for getting a more nuanced perspective on what it is you’re trying to achieve, and why. Besides, it’s a fact of life that teams need to manage expectations around delivery, and measuring flow or velocity are the simplest ways I am aware of to do that. YMMV.
Applied to our experience in making music: what ever it is we seek from making music, whether it is relaxation, or the satisfaction of releasing music that other people care about, it can’t hurt to write that down, and then measure if we actually get that out of it. Because should we find out that we don’t, that would be a very good reason for adapting our approach.
I was speculating why people might feel victimised by Agile. I don’t.
In a work context metrics have a limited usefulness I feel. Story points for example (and everything derived from them, like velocity) are a surrogate measure, and can be gamed. They’re useful for an intra-team measure of how big a piece of work is, not for reporting to upper management. But we’re way off-topic now.
Jobs are shit, yeah…
The vast majority of us don’t really like our jobs (and why should we?). For most of us, jobs are a necessary evil, to be endured for financial gain.
Jobs used to connect to communities, fostering a sense of pride and belonging beyond the satisfaction that can come from a hard day’s work. They were still shit then, much more so in many cases and certainly in terms of difficulty/danger, but people generally felt “in it together” and worked together to get things done.
But over the years, as jobs have become increasingly detached from communities, more sedentary and significantly more micromanaged and isolated, middle management have filled the vacuum with absolute bollocks. And my word what excellent bollocks it all is.
Stuff like Agile exists mostly to give dumbass middle managers a nice, easy set of instructions so they don’t have to think too much about how to actually manage people. If productivity goes up, bonus, and doubly so if they can justify a few “efficiencies” with it, but a quick look at the enormous decline in productivity over the years suggests such things aren’t the primary goal of this management speak nonsense. Because if it was about productivity, we’d be declaring it a massive failure.
Work is pretty simple really. Give people work (preferably delegated according to skills/knowledge/experience), give them a reasonable deadline to complete it, performance manage them if they don’t keep up. It’s not fucking rocket science. But of course, keeping it simple doesn’t require an army of middle managers stanking the place up with their aftershave and exhaust fumes. Nope, in order to justify their increasingly bonkers existence and apparent need to multiply like a fucking virus, they need to create a whole ecosystem of management toss to measure their metaphorical little chodes with.
If you’re one of these middle managers, you’re probably well impressed by the idea of bringing your flexy little boss theories into your home music management regime. Most of us aren’t middle managers though (at least not yet, but I guess one day the west will all be middle managers, if current rates of spread are anything to go by).
Most of us don’t like it, because most of us don’t like our jobs, because most of us have middle managers gobbing off about shit they don’t really understand all day instead of doing their fucking job.
Doesn’t GQ magazine have a forum? They’d probably love this sort of shit over there…
Just my opinion like, don’t cry about it. Please try to take this in the same spirit of jovial self-delusion that most of my posts are written in.
I feel like OP statement escaped from LinkedIn.
You missed the point of Agile if you think that.
A fightback by middle management, yeah.
Because upper management showed an interest in what they were all up to probably.
oh I remember seeing this one sometime ago and wanted to do this in 2024 but couldn’t find it, thanks for the link!
btw the hiphop battles here on the forum are weekly too, right?
maybe we could make another one not genre specific?
and btw, on lines forum there’s a Disquiet Junto which is also a weekly thing, every week there’s a theme for a piece you should do over a week, one of the rules is to listen to other submissions and leave comments, very cool to give and receive feedback
D’oh! Thanks for the correction. Edited.
It is now. But it was originally proposed as an alternative to middle management. By focusing on small teams empowered to make decisions in direct collaboration with the customer, there was no room for micromanaging.
Of course middle management, always on the lookout for easy instructions so they don’t have to think, saw this and said “Let’s set ourselves up as the masters of ceremony to this new methodology that doesn’t actually require either.”
I only bring this up because if we forget the simplicity at the heart of agile then the purveyors of the monstrosity they’ve sold us in its name win.
It was a fightback from the grunts to management in general (even more the project managers of the time). The Agile manifesto showed up in my early years in this career and it was a fucking refreshment that my team and I had something to use to fight back against managers trying to extract very precise estimations and put all of them neatly into a Gantt chart after weeks discussing unknown stuff in details that we didn’t have a clue if would pan out in reality.
Agile was coopted later but for a brief glorious period we could use its values to pushback against the status quo of project management at the time. And it kinda worked, until people started going to Scrum courses, companies started having “Scrum master” as a title (fucking lol), etc.
Nowadays there’s either people living the Agile values without bogging themselves down in processes, certifications and all the other bullshit invented to gatekeep what Agile is, and the others not understanding the values and using Agile as a buzzword. The former don’t really think anymore about “we are doing Agile™”, it’s just a way of working that is absurdly more effective for some types of projects in software than all the rest.