The Crescendo of Absurdity

Now, the stinging is reaching a crescendo in my left eyelid, a sharp, soapy reminder that I shouldn’t have rushed the shower just to make it to a 9:07 AM stand-up that hasn’t started on time in 17 months. I’m squinting at Gary, our Scrum Master, who is currently screen-sharing a Jira board that looks like a digital graveyard. He’s asking me for an ‘update’ on a ticket that I’ve already updated 7 times in the last 27 hours. My eye is twitching, partly from the pH imbalance of the cheap shampoo and partly from the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of explaining the same logic to 7 people who aren’t actually listening.

We call it Agile, but it’s really just Waterfall in a costume, holding a wooden spear and praying for the planes to land. If you aren’t familiar with the term ‘Cargo Cult,’ it stems from post-WWII Melanesian islanders who saw cargo planes dropping supplies. They didn’t understand the global logistics or the industrial military complex; they just saw that when people built runways and wore headsets made of coconuts, planes arrived. So, they built their own runways out of straw and waited. They did all the right movements, but no planes ever came.

The Concrete Reality of Reese Y.

That is exactly what we are doing in this conference room. We have the sticky notes. We have the ‘sprints.’ We have the retrospective where we all pretend we’re going to ‘do better’ next time. But the planes-the actual, working software that ships on time and solves problems-never seem to land. We’re just wearing coconut headsets and wondering why the sky is empty.

Reese once told me, while leaning on a rusted spade, that the biggest mistake people make is thinking they can negotiate with the earth. “The ground doesn’t care about your schedule,” he said, spitting into the dirt. “It’s either dug or it isn’t.” In our world, we’ve replaced the digging with the discussion of digging. We spend 37 hours a week talking about the 7 hours of work we might do if the meetings ever end.

I remember a project back in 2017 where we tried to be ‘Pure Agile.’ We hired a consultant who charged us $7,777 a week to tell us that we shouldn’t have titles anymore. We were all ‘Team Members.’ It sounded great until a server caught fire and everyone looked at each other, waiting for the ‘Self-Organizing Team’ to spontaneously generate a fire extinguisher. We spent 47 minutes debating the ‘Definition of Done’ for putting out a fire while the data center turned into a barbecue. It was a failure of leadership masked as a triumph of process.

The Illusion of Measurement

This distrust is the silent killer. When a manager insists on a 45-minute stand-up, they aren’t looking for blockers; they’re looking for evidence of laziness. They don’t trust that the developers-the people actually touching the code-know how to manage their own time. So, they implement a ritual of transparency that acts as a psychological leash. It’s exhausting. By the time the meeting ends, I’ve used up 97% of my creative energy just trying to sound productive, leaving me with exactly 3% to actually be productive.

We focus so much on the ceremony because the ceremony is easy to measure. You can’t easily measure the ‘soul’ of a piece of software, but you can measure how many story points were completed in Sprint 17. The problem is that story points are a fictional currency, like Monopoly money or the ‘credits’ you get at a roadside arcade. You can run 17 miles on a treadmill and end up in the exact same spot where you started, albeit sweatier and more frustrated.

In the world of high-stakes infrastructure, this performative nonsense falls apart. When you look at something like the Email Delivery Pro, the value isn’t in a daily meeting about sending emails; it’s in the actual, verifiable delivery of the message to the inbox. It’s a binary reality. Either the email arrives, or it doesn’t.

The Straw Runway Confession

I’ve made this mistake myself. I once insisted that my team adopt a ‘scrumban’ hybrid because I read a medium article that convinced me it was the secret to 10x productivity. We spent 27 days setting up the boards, defining the swimlanes, and arguing about whether a bug was a ‘story’ or a ‘task.’ We did zero actual coding during that time. We were so busy building the straw runway that we forgot we didn’t have any planes. It was one of the most embarrassing periods of my career, and I still feel the phantom itch of that failure whenever I see a Jira notification.

We’ve reached a point where the ‘Agile Coach’ is a more common job title than ‘Senior Systems Architect.’ Think about that. We have more people coaching us on how to work than we have people actually building the things. It’s a lopsided ratio that leads to a slow, grinding death by a thousand ‘quick syncs.’ My eye is still burning. I think the shampoo had some kind of exfoliating beads in it, which felt like a good idea at the time but now feels like I’ve invited 7 tiny construction workers to renovate my cornea.

The Cost of Avoiding Decisions

Most of the time, our ‘Agile’ processes are just ways to avoid the hard work of making decisions. It’s easier to say ‘we’ll discuss it in the next retro’ than it is to say ‘we are going in this direction, and I take responsibility if it fails.’ True agility requires a level of trust that most corporate structures are designed to prevent.

It requires acknowledging that we don’t know everything and that the plan will change, not because we have a ‘sprint planning session’ scheduled for Tuesday, but because the reality of the market changed on Monday.

As the 47-minute mark passes, Gary asks if anyone has any ‘last-minute blockers.’ I want to say that my blocker is this meeting. I want to say that my blocker is the fact that I can only see out of one eye right now. Instead, I just shake my head and say, ‘No blockers from me.’

The Way Out

Gary smiles, satisfied that the ritual has been completed. He thinks we are more aligned. He thinks the planes are coming. I look out the window at the gray sky and wonder how much longer we can keep building these straw runways before someone realizes that the cargo isn’t coming back.