Gassing

Finally I understand what it is like to be the traditional-world employee trying to make sense of what the hell these new-world employees are going on about.

I had about a year at the start of my career doing ASAP and PRINCE2 before going agile native. Since then I have been turning up in organisations trying to demonstrate the "new way".

I have defended the use of new terminology like "user stories", "roadmaps" and "backlogs". Always on the grounds that new terminology supports new ways of doing. Old terminology drags us back into old ways of organising. But once we bring the future here, we will act and sound like it is here. No time like the present.

But as I try to make sense of Gas Town and Gas City, my comeuppance is upon me.

What is a "Bead"? It looks like a ticket. I think it is a ticket. Is it a story, task or job to be done? I think it's just a ticket. What is a "Polecat"? I think it is an agent we spin up and kill when it is done. Why aren't we using normal words? Oh it's a Scrum because you are invoking the metaphor of a rugby team. Why are you doing that? I'm busy, what are we doing? Why are you trying to put me under the spell of these metaphors? I have my own cognitive architecture and interpersonal constructs thanks, back off.

So, I sort of know how this works and can see both sides. We have our tools for navigation, orientation and storing memories, decisions and agreements in ways we can retrieve and understand later. But then sometimes the territory shifts and our maps are badly out of date.

I'll have to take my chances. Maybe I shouldn't be going through all the aspects of Steve Yegge's imaginarium and dragging them back into my legacy mindset. If I do that, maybe I squash the magic out of it and miss the whole thing.

I don't know. But neither do I want to be sucked into a world with "Vampiric AI" that seems to be sucking energy out of the people at the frontier. No Vampires Delta Green, that's an order.

So perhaps a legacy mindset is my cognitive defence and I'll proceed with my translation game: let's bring the exciting future into the amusing present, we can do that without resurrecting the Gantt chart.

If Yegge's concepts help me in my quest to minimise the amount of garbage in my social media feeds, and I can complete my quest from my phone in the garden, then I think software factories are a success. Even better if I can just yell responses at an Alexa that only bothers me when it is urgent, but I'm not there yet. I don't even trust autocorrect.

Still, my legacy mindset tells me that feature factories are not the answer. We need to get to empowered product teams and a great product organisation. Then maybe start making ecosystems of competing venture firms to fund them and see what wins.

So let's automate that maybe and see where we are. Perhaps we'll be able to put this delirious techno-babble to bed once and for all.