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I was working on my own project. Medium-sized, a full-stack web application that I'll release somewhere this year. It's a Next.js front-end, I did all my own CSS and optimisations, semantic HTML, accessibility, load performance, TTI optimisations. The CMS is a headless one that I use Next.js to connect directly to the database with. It's hosted on a server I manage myself, and I set it up so that a git push to the main branch would build and deploy the entire thing.

Setting all that CI/CD stuff up took me maybe 6 hours. Building the website (front and back-end) took me a few weeks. It's a complicated piece of software, but fun to build.

I avoided using unnecessary tools. I only added what was absolutely necessary. And based on my 22+ years of experience (including some FAANG companies and the likes), in any professional setting, this project would've taken 5 front-end developers, 3 back-end developers, 2 testers, 1 project manager, 1 scrum master, 1 product owner, 1 UX and 1 UI designer, and perhaps one or two interns.

And it would've taken 2 years or longer.

I've done projects with teams like that in the past where trivial work was drowned in red tape, office politics, endless opinions and meetings, weekly time-wasters (Scrum... fuck I hate Scrum!), endless "documentation" that nobody reads...

And I remember being put on a dashboard page. The team was taking 4 hours to plan all the stories. During that time I just started working (remotely, muted, camera off) and I finished the entire dashboard completely to specs, no bugs, in the time it took them to write the stories and tasks and estimate them.

"Done."

"What?"

"I'm done. It's all done. I pulled all 18 tasks to myself, verified them, and the entire story and epic is now done."

"What?"

"I also wrote all the e2e-tests."

"What?"

"Scrum is a huge waste of time."

"Actually, I disagree, because..."

Yeah, consultant who is paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense to pull all 20+ people into a 6-hour long retrospective every single week. Because 12 of those people are from your employer, and that's a lot of money for doing fuck all.

When I worked at Apple, we had a small team and we just did standups on Slack. Just write "I did X, I will do Y, no impediments," and that's it. No scrum bullshit, no sprints, no retrospectives. We just communicated using words (written, preferably) and got shit done.

Now I'm working for a large corporate company that follows all the things by the book. And the book sucks. I counted: 16 hours per week in unnecessary meetings. Then another 10 hours in meetings where most people are unnecessary. And when I speak up against it, people don't trust me. Scrum is their God.

I hate my job so much.