I, like many since the COVID-19 pandemic started, was released from my contract in April. I’m not sending resumes out every day to every agile coaching job I see on the market, though. In fact, I am being much more selective in what I am looking for and what I’m doing. It’s not vacation time, either. I’m up every day, working.
What am I up to?
- Building this blogging habit. Thanks for joining me, by the way!
- I am also figuring out how to edit video and audio in order to launch a video/audio series with one of my colleagues, Tyler Haycraft.
- I am participating in coding projects where the customer is first and the art of the craft is second.
But why?
Why am I focusing on blogging, video editing, and seemingly anything but “finding a real job”? Because I’ve spent the last 10 of my 12 years in the industry dealing with situations that put me in dissonance with myself. And after a decade of being quiet, or even passive – I’m sick of it. So I’m going to spend the next several months saying what I have to say, and doing what I want to do. Period. Because It’s time I stop shutting up about it.
I’ve always used coding and technical practices as a way to do good in the world.
I’m not great at carpentry, metalworking, sewing, drawing, or other maker skills. Code is how I make things. I don’t code just for the sake of coding though. I code for people. I code to solve problems for people. And it’s the moment I see my software solving that problem, and the smile on the face of the person using it, that makes me think all the toil was worth it.
I adopted agile principles at my core two years into my development career because it made so much sense. It stopped releases from being late because it got rid of big, risky releases. It made us developers constantly talk with the customer so we would do the right thing.
Blending my technical skills and my people skills to become what’s been labeled as a “Technical Agile Coach” has always been my superpower, of sorts.
But looking around…
… a lot of the agile industry has gone away from doing what is right for the customer or the craftspeople. Scrum has come to be a synonym for agile (it isn’t) that gets forced onto teams. SAFe is becoming a synonym for agile at large enterprise companies (it isn’t). If you look, really look inside most corporations, especially in insurance and in finance industries, you can see that we haven’t changed at all. If anything, “Agile transformations” made things worse by wasting millions of dollars and making developers more miserable.
No more.
No more scrum mastering just to actually be expected to be a manager’s right hand. No more “Agile transformations” that are actually just big let’s-lay-a-bunch-of-people-off-and-do-more-with-less scams. No more.
Will I work again?
Absolutely. But I’m not actively looking for 40 hours a week “Agile transformation” positions right now, and that’s because I’m pretty frustrated with my industry. I’m frustrated with what we collectively have done to our own industry. And I want to get back to basics. I’m not sure what the next evolution is for a Developer turned Scrum Master turned Agile Coach, but it’s time to change.
So what’s next?
As you might have seen from my first video, Should Agile Coaches be Technical?, I am passionate about coaches having technical skills. I’m not just going to sit here and pontificate on a soapbox about that. I’m going to build some playbooks, some courses, some worksheets, maybe even an app or three, that help agile coaches, coaching software teams, get better at the craft. If that works out, cool.
I’m also going to keep blogging. I have a lot to say about my time working in this industry and it’s time I uncorked this bottle.
What I will probably do is talk with my network and, if the connection is right, do some non-transformation team level coaching, part-time. Teams that just want to get s#!t done but need an extra perspective. No SAFe, Scrum, or other framework BS. Just a radical focus on the customer and the team.
If none of this works out, I’m sailing away. You might find me on an island near the equator sipping something blue from a coconut.
Photo Credit: My lovely wife, Victoria Studley