Staring at the red ‘call ended’ icon on my screen, I feel a strange, hollow sort of peace. I just hung up on Mark. It was an accident-my thumb slipped while I was trying to mute the 12th notification of the hour-but as I sit here in the 32nd-floor office, I realize I’m not going to call him back. Not immediately. Mark is the kind of manager who believes that if you aren’t in a meeting, you aren’t working, and if you aren’t ‘agile,’ you’re a dinosaur. But after 22 months of this ‘transformation,’ I’ve realized that we haven’t actually transformed anything. We’ve just renamed our bottlenecks. We call them ‘blockers’ now, as if giving the stagnation a more active name makes it move faster. It doesn’t. It just means we spend 52 minutes a day talking about why we can’t do the work instead of actually doing it.
I’m currently slated for my 12th ‘standup’ of the week. I have 2 projects, and both of them have 2 scrum masters, which somehow results in 22 people staring at a digital board every morning at 9:02 AM. We go in a circle. We say the same things. ‘No blockers,’ I’ll say, while my soul slowly exits my body through my ears. The reality is that the entire system is a blocker. We are participating in a corporate cargo cult.
In the 1942 era, certain island tribes saw planes landing with cargo and tried to replicate the effect by building runways out of straw and headsets out of coconuts. They had the form, but they lacked the physics. We have the Post-it notes and the ‘sprints,’ but we lack the autonomy. We are building straw runways and wondering why the innovation isn’t landing.
In my world, we’ve forgotten the physics.
The Patience of Chronometers
“
This reminds me of Camille S., a woman I met in a small town about 82 miles outside the city. Camille S. is a restorer of grandfather clocks. Her workshop smells like 122 years of accumulated dust and linseed oil. When I told her about my job-the 2-week cycles, the constant pivot, the ‘fail fast’ mentality-she looked at me with a pity that was almost physical.
“
She was working on a clock from the 1892 period, a massive thing with 102 moving parts. She doesn’t ‘sprint.’ If she tried to sprint through the calibration of an escapement wheel, the clock would simply never keep time again. She understands that some things require a chronological patience that cannot be squeezed into a Jira ticket. She spends 12 hours sometimes just listening to the tick, waiting for the metal to tell her where the friction is.
Process Comparison: Clock vs. Code
In my world, we don’t listen. We just move the ticket to ‘Done’ and hope the bug doesn’t trigger a 2:02 AM PagerDuty alert.
The Velocity Trap
We’ve reached a point where the process has become the product. Management loves Agile because it provides the illusion of total visibility. They get to see the 122-point burndown chart. They get to see the velocity. But velocity is a vector, and if you’re moving at 112 miles per hour toward a brick wall, having a high velocity isn’t exactly a success metric. We are shipping broken code 12 minutes before the deadline just so the sprint board looks clean. It’s a performative art piece.
High Magnitude
Zero Progress
There is a fundamental lack of trust at the center of this. If you trust your craftsmen, you don’t need to ask them what they did yesterday, what they are doing today, and what is in their way every 24 hours. You know they are working. Camille S. doesn’t have a ‘clock-master’ hovering over her shoulder asking for a status update every 12nd minute. She is trusted because she is a master of her craft.
Value cannot be rushed.
We’ve traded mastery for ‘predictability,’ and the irony is that our schedules have never been less predictable. We spend $2222 on software licenses for project management tools that only serve to document our failure to launch. You cannot rush a 12-year-old spirit, and you cannot rush a complex architectural shift in a legacy codebase just because a scrum master wants to hit a ‘stretch goal.’
This is like forcing a rare bottle to mature in a compressed timeframe, evident when looking at resources like Old Rip Van Winkle 10 Year Old.
Infinite Meta-Work
I think about the 122 tickets currently sitting in our ‘Backlog’ and I feel a sense of profound exhaustion. Each one represents a conversation we didn’t have because we were too busy updating the status of the conversation we were supposed to be having. We’ve automated the ‘what’ but completely ignored the ‘why.’ My boss, Mark-the one I accidentally hung up on 22 minutes ago-thinks that the solution to our slow delivery is more meetings. He wants to add a ‘pre-planning’ session to the ‘planning’ session. He wants a ‘retro-retro’ to discuss why the last retrospective didn’t result in any actionable changes.
Infinite Loop
If I were Camille S., I’d take a 12-pound hammer to the whole thing and start over with just the gears that matter.
“
We are drowning in the shallows of our own efficiency.
“
Optimized for Busy, Destroyed for Productive
There was a time, maybe 12 years ago, when I actually enjoyed the rhythm of a build. You’d get into a flow state, and the world would disappear for 2 or 32 hours. Now, that flow is broken every 12 minutes by a Slack ping or a ‘quick sync.’ The average developer takes about 22 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. If you have 2 standups and 12 notifications, you literally never reach focus. You spend your entire day in the shallows, pushing digital pebbles around. We’ve optimized for ‘busy’ and accidentally destroyed ‘productive.’
I see it in the eyes of my teammates during our 2:02 PM technical grooming sessions. They aren’t thinking about the architecture. They are thinking about how to phrase their update so that nobody asks them a follow-up question.
Culture as Warped Wood
I’ve leaned into the process when I was scared of the technical complexity. It’s easier to argue about whether a task is a ‘3-point’ or a ‘5-point’ story than it is to admit you don’t know how to scale the database. We’ve replaced ‘people over processes’ with ‘processes that pretend people don’t exist.’ It’s a lonely way to build things. I remember Camille S. telling me about a clock she couldn’t fix. It wasn’t because she lacked the parts, but because the wood had warped over 112 years in a way that made the internal geometry impossible.
The Quiet Tick
I’m looking at my phone now. Mark hasn’t called back yet. Maybe he’s in a meeting. Or maybe he’s staring at his own screen, wondering if he should call the guy who just hung up on him. I think I’ll wait 12 more minutes before I send the ‘sorry, dropped call’ text. Or maybe I won’t send it at all. Maybe I’ll just go for a walk and think about 122-year-old clocks and the beauty of things that take exactly as long as they need to take.
We’ve spent so much time trying to ‘transform’ our work that we’ve forgotten how to just do the work. The next time someone asks me for my ‘blockers,’ I might actually tell them the truth. I might tell them that the 32nd meeting of the month is the only thing standing between me and a finished product. I might tell them that we don’t need a scrum master; we need a sense of purpose.
The Final Question:
Does the clock still tick if nobody is there to log the hours in Jira?
I’d like to think it ticks even better. For now, I’ll just sit here in the quiet, enjoying the 2nd most peaceful moment of my week, and let the 12th sprint of the year fail on its own merits.