alt Hacker NewsThat's the thing all these "easy bake recipe for success" blog posts miss: it's all about the people. I've been in companies with the exact same processes and wildly different outcomes because staff was more competent (which includes soft skills) and experienced.
But that is anathema to tech companies that think having the right X (agile, Spotify guilds, kanban, etc.) will fix everything because that's what they sell to end users.
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That does raise the question of what those tech companies' motivation really are though.
The processes you described would work really well if the goal is to meet a hiring target and ship just enough product that marketing and sales can run with it.
If they don't necessarily care about quality of end product or quality of the engineering that went into, throwing heavy process at the team may get them there just fine. That heavy process may even work better for them if the goal is more managerial control to meet sales and marketing deadlines.
> But that is anathema to tech companies
One of the biggest dangers in business is believing your own PR. And yet tech companies do it over, and over, and over again.
These rigid processes and ceremonies are the mcdonalds approach. You can get a group of unskilled randos and produce passable slop (e.g. MS Teams). The problem is that people with actual skill suffocate in such an environment.
If you have a crappy team and only light processes, you get garbage.
If you have a crappy team and heavy processes, you get barely passable results.
If you have a good team and only light processes, you get great results.
If you have a good team and heavy processes, you get barely passable results.