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I agree with all of this. The agile scrum methodology is not all bad. The issue is the mechanical way it is applied.

The Problems

My current team has recently adopted Scrum and started with two-week sprints. Issues have already developed and it reminds me of why I hate Scrum.
For this particular rant, I’ll define Scrum as the methodology developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland and documented in “The Scrum Guide.”
In my humble opinion, Scrum is not agile and, in practice, not very flexible. It is not agile because of its emphasis on time blocks for planning, typically two weeks. More on that later. It is not flexible in practice because there are strong adherents to the cause (aka zealots) who insist on following whatever they believe to be Scrum to the letter. The disciples have taken over!
Now let’s take a look at what Scrum is. “Scrum is lightweight, simple to understand, difficult to master.” Oh right, that is just the kind of process I want to adopt: one that is difficult to master. Major strike one against Scrum in my book.
Let’s take a look at the basic terminology: a “daily scrum” and “sprints.”
Apparently, a group of dirty men pushing against each other in a big pile is the metaphor for doing your daily routine of making sure the there are no blockers on the project. I prefer something a bet less sporty and a lot less aggressive: a daily standup. Same basic drill of what you did, what you are going to do and no blockers. But without the aggressive overtones.
Now on to sprints. In an industry where burn out from working extra hours is a problem, that is just what we want: a metaphor so management can tell everyone they just need to sprint faster. And then let’s put that in a two-week time box to regularly amp up the pressure to produce more. Looks to me like a great management technique to maximize free overtime from the staff. It’s amazing we don’t have a programmer’s union to clean this stuff up. I myself believe in 40-hour weeks and anything over that should be a rare emergency.

Source: Why I Hate Scrum – DZone Agile

Anuradha Mittal was about to step out of her home in Oakland, Calif., on the last Friday of May, but first she had one last email to send. She was on her way to one of the demonstrations that had broken out around the world five days after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Like hundreds of other protesters, she’d be praying and dancing late into the night, in streets blurred by billowing tear gas and teeming with riot police.

The note Mittal, the board chair of Ben & Jerry’s, was sending was to the chief executive officer, Matthew McCarthy, requesting that a statement be prepared by Monday. She wanted the ice cream brand to express support for the Black Lives Matter movement and decry the violence against Floyd, who’d died while being restrained by a White law enforcement officer less than 15 minutes after his arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. McCarthy replied immediately to assure her his team was already on it.

Source: How Ben & Jerry’s Applied Its Corporate Activism Recipe to BLM – Bloomberg

When deciding your product’s future, you have to collect data and opinions, analyze, and estimate issues and ideas. Unless, of course, you want your prioritization to be a gut feeling show in a zoo with HiPPOs, RHiNOs, and ZEbRAs.
A good prioritization framework will help you structure the data and be consistent. Deriving your own requires months of careful prioritization when you finally begin to understand how to detect small rare problems. And you have to define your priorities right from the start—a vicious circle.
Thanks to the community, that circle is easy to break. There are dozens of frameworks proven by hundreds of great teams. In this article, we want to discuss one of the most popular—RICE Score—why most use it incorrectly, when it really works and when it becomes useless.

Source: Is Using RICE Score Actually Increasing Productivity? – DZone Agile

Had a bad dream. Medyo traumatic. Huhu. I don’t want to go to sleep na .

The fact is starting or running a business is messy. That is especially hard for people whose views are more traditional. Unfortunately for me, that is my family. Well not exactly coming from a family of doctors we have our own version of traditional. The weird thing is since the risk-reward of small businesses/startups are not as sure as the risk-reward of having your own medical practice it translates to pretty much the same thing but with different intensity.
 
I can feel that they are trying to understand me, but it really is very hard for people to go beyond the way they see their lives.
 
I love my wife. I love my family. I hope I find success soon. I don’t want to go find a regular job or worse a government job.
 
 

Big Fucking Deal!

OpenAI API We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology.

Source: OpenAI API

I first encountered Bruno Maçães when he was interviewed by Tyler Cowen (Bruno Maçães on the Spirit of Adventure, Episode 50. Conversations with Tyler [September 2018]). With Maçães having recently completed a six-month overland journey across the Eurasian supercontinent while researching for his book, The Dawn of Eurasia (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018), Cowen asked him to design a dream tour for someone with two or three weeks to spend in Eurasia. Maçães responded “the best would be fly to Kashgar in China…then cross the border into Pakistan, and perhaps go down all the way to Lahore and then Delhi,” in the process making “one of the classical trips, to go from China to India by land.” Hearing this, I was struck with the sense that Maçães was a thinker with a uniquely credible perspective worth paying attention to, having spent significant time on the ground in locations across Eurasia where China has a growing presence. Having undertaken the first part of the route described by Maçães myself during the summer of 2014, traveling south from Kashgar down the Karakoram Highway to the Khunjerab Pass (the border of China and Pakistan), my curiosity was piqued to begin a more systematic investigation of the role of China in the developing world. This serves as the entry point to my interest in Maçães’ Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order, the subject of this book review.

Source: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order: The Independent Review: The Independent Institute

Saez: Yes. Kansas is an interesting case study, and I think it illustrates beautifully from a research perspective even though it’s a disaster in terms of public policy. This issue with tax avoidance, the second aspect that I discussed, is what Kansas experienced when it lowered or even effectively eliminated taxes on the profits of pass-through businesses under individual income taxes. The state provided huge incentives for high-income earners to reclassify, say, their compensation from wages toward pass-through businesses.

Source: In Conversation with Emmanuel Saez – Equitable Growth

Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.

Source: The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Right now, however, my biggest concern in this context is somewhat different: the past decade’s policies of anemic recovery are apparently not perceived as a failure by either those at the tiller at the time or by their successors. With a few honorable exceptions, Fed policymakers tend to say that they did the best they could, given the fiscal headwinds imposed on them. With a few honorable exceptions, Obama administration policymakers say that they stopped a second Great Depression, and that during the recovery they did their best given how they were hobbled by the Republican majorities in Congress.
For their part, conservative economists tend to either be silent on the subject or say that the policies — both fiscal and monetary — pursued by the Obama administration and by the Bernanke Fed were dangerously inflationary, and that we have been lucky to escape the fate of Greece — or Zimbabwe.
Economic analysis has made the rise and fall of economies easier to understand and easier to manage — or at least I thought it had. Yet once again, policymakers (including the decision makers at the top in the Obama administration) abandoned modern economics in favor of discredited policies born of a mixture of so-called common sense and 19th-century misunderstandings. We are all paying the price — well, the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.

Source: Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression? – Milken Institute Review