I'll use this as an opportunity to vent about agile. It promises developers a larger voice, but in my experience, it heavily favors management and product management types, since they are usually the ones in control of the ticketing/tracking systems. They aren't under the sprint deadlines that developers are, so they are able to better organize and build their cases for what gets done. Even if developers can build a case, it often gets sent to the bottom of the backlog. Developers are forced to take on technical debt due to the short-term product oriented thinking. Is this because of the design of agile, or just the misapplication? Considering it's a cargo-cult management technique, I think it is part of the design.

2 week sprint deadlines are entirely too short. say there's a larger project, it takes a lot of overhead to split everything up into neat 2-week releasable pieces. After the slicing and dicing, the big picture gets lost and garbled, adding more stress to developers.

Third, and most importantly, it offloads responsibility and ownership from management (especially upper management) onto lower level employees. Why should managers do their job if agile teams are "self organizing" and "self managing"?

On top of this, I'm not convinced product or business types are better able to design a good product than most developers are.

The deadlines are completely unrealistic because they are so divorced from the actual planning and design of the feature being delivered.

My favorite is when I take the time to break something management puts tasks 4, 6, and 10 into the sprint because the hours fit. Disregarding any dependencies or natural order.

Yes, that happens to me often.

I think the real problem is that we, as a society, have lost the ability to manage. Agile being associated with these problems is a symptom, not the cause. It won't fix bad developers and it won't fix bad management. But if the developers and management are good, then it can work fine.

> 4. Removal of vacation time (unlimited PTO means you have no vacation days)

That's just not universally true at all. Using my current employer as an example, they have been very good about encouraging employees to take advantage of unlimited PTO.

Managers take PTO and encourage people that haven't taken it in a while to do so. Even the CEO goes in front of the company at all hands every once in a while and tells people "I just came back from a week vacation, you guys should too, remember to take time to recharge". It's something you have to get right in the company culture early on, granted.

I personally am so spoiled by this that the thought of having a set number of vacation days gives me anxiety. I don't want to count vacation days. It's not that I take a ton of vacation, I'm not a big traveler. But I like knowing that I can go to my manager and say "I'm taking friday off cause I'm going on a road trip this weekend" and he can just say "cool, just put it on the calendar" without worrying about counting days.

That said, I know this is really dependent on the company and have been in the opposite position at a company where PTO wasn't counted but was culturally discouraged, so I get where people are coming from. But I wouldn't just flat out dismiss the idea like so many on HN do.

How many days of vacation per year does the average employee take?

> I personally am so spoiled by this

I had the standard six weeks of vacation per year at my first real job. How many weeks of vacation do you use per year?

6 weeks is not standard in the US. I'm used to seeing 15 days of flexible pto/sick time and 6 holidays. Also, due to how the pto time would accumulate per each pay period, it can take many months to save up a whole week. I'm much happier with unlimited pto, as I now take 4-5 weeks spread out however I prefer.

> 6 weeks is not standard in the US.

I know, I was trying to add some outside perspective. Where I'm from, 5 weeks is the legal minimum, and everyone has the legal right to get 4 consecutive weeks off in the summer. Consequently, since everyone does this, and expects this, companies adjust for it, and most importantly: No-one bitches about it. There's no masochist culture around not taking vacation.

The problem with "unlimited" vacation is that it's of course not unlimited. There is a limit, it's just not written down on paper, it's not part of your employment contract. It's arbitrary. At one point, either your boss or your boss's boss is going to say no.

And if you get told no, you have no legal recourse! If you get fired for taking "too much", you can't sue for wrongful termination!

Fixed vacation time protects you as an employee. Why doesn't your company just give everyone five weeks of vacation and have that written down in the employment contract?

It's exactly like bonuses vs. salary. A bonus can always be withdrawn for any reason or no reason, but it's very difficult to lower someone's salary.

The number of holidays is always written in the contract. A company would never write that you have unlimited holidays, that's just plain stupid.

If it's written, it means that you have the minimum legal number of days in your jurisdiction and you are being screwed severely.

The legal minimum in most of the US is 0 days, right?

You'd need to check with your local jurisdiction. I highly doubt that it is zero.

Which in your case is nice. But you never know when it's going to end, or they're going to start evaluating you on how much vacation you take.

Technically it's scrum that causes that, not Agile. Scrum is a way for people to make money off Agile via consulting. Srcum is rigid, Agile is the opposite.

This discussion takes me way back - it reminds me of people in the Eastern Bloc talking about communism. A widespread meme was that communism was allegedly good "in theory", it was just the practice that somehow got derailed.