I hate being the bad guy here, because Greg is correct. However, it’s worth noting that the people on the other side of this are completely rational. In the 30 years I’ve been professionally programming, I’ve watched the quality of the average engineer drop, delivery times lengthen, output grow poorer, and results become less impressive. I’ve watched manager after manager get frustrated at teams who run their leaders around in circles, promising everything while delivering little. I’ve seen teams setup complicated task boards designed to look like they’re busy without delivering any actual value to the business. I once even called a team out on accident by mentioning this during a training I was hosting. Is it any wonder that managers want more? Especially when “more” is just the most basic levels of predictability and quality of delivery? We, as a community of programmers and engineers, are just as guilty of creating this mess as managers are. Just as managers need to up their skills and learn to better manage their teams, we need to up our skills and learn from our own rich history of delivery. Every time we say, “agile sucks”, “Java sucks”. “XML sucks”, “JSON sucks”, or whatever else it is that’s cool to hate on today, we ignore our own potential and fail to learn from history. We just want to be angry rather than learn to be productive. And we somehow thought the consequences would never come to roost? Well, the consequences are here. And they’re going to get worse before they get better. And we’re not going to fix it by pointing fingers at each other.