Is it time to retire Agile?

That's mostly about Scrum, and Scrum is not the entirety of Agile. Scrum in practice is often also decidedly not Agile if you go back to the manifesto, though that's not an issue with Scrum proper but an issue with Scrum as implemented. Scrum as implemented is often too ceremony focused (so values the processes over individuals and interactions) and inflexible in the face of certain kinds of change (valuing following a plan over responding to change). Again, not strictly a problem with Scrum, but just how nearly every good process (or at least decent process) gets corrupted when it becomes institutionalized.

You can see the same issues facing Lean and Theory of Constraints (both predating the Agile Manifesto, but sharing many of its characteristics or objectives).

There is nothing wrong with Agile. There is not even anything wrong with learning how to do Scrum well and adapting it to your team. At the same time, there is something wrong with failing to learn Scrum well but telling your team to do it badly, then locking on to bad practices.

The thing is, these are all just tools. Use them well and they help you. Use them badly and they hurt you. Same as a table saw.

There’s no substitute for incentivizing smart people and getting the fuck out of their way. Everything else is either friction or window dressing.

I still think bad scrum is still better than bad anything else. If you have to have a badly managed project, scrum keeps it from going off the rails.

My favorite project was this thing where everyone just chatted non-stop on Slack from morning to 4 AM on all the cool things they wanted to do. Since the conversation was non-stop, everyone just knew how the progress was and what needed to be done and we had almost no meetings, and onboarding was seamless.

It didn't scale though. The managers who kept it running that way eventually left. The conversation just became noise and as the teams grew bigger, nobody knew each other, so they broke off into different cliques.

So what's cutting edge? What are the Googles of the future using today?

Saying Scrum in practice is not true Agile is like saying Stalinism in practice is not true Communism.

Scrum is not true Agile, but Scrum is what happens when you mix average company incentives with the Agile dream.

The principals were good, the average company couldn't implement them, and it's time to improve on these ideals.

We've had 20 years to implement the Agile principals but average companies couldn't. There are systemic reasons why Agile can't be implemented in the average company as the manifesto dreamed. A new manifesto should make changes that reflect these systemic problems.

On the one hand, it's a stupid meme that was literally a mind virus that spread the way teenage girls copy each other's dressing choices. On the other, it's the Devil you know. God knows what memery will replace it.