Is Agile a joke internationally, or did I just land in contractor hell? [vent]
I've been working with Agile since 2018. I've led multiple products with this methodology in Brazil, and now I've got my first experience managing an international team with Agile and it's been frustrating as hell.
In the teams I've worked with in Brazil, whether you are an employee or a consultant, the whole team follows and applies the methodology to the best of their abilities. If something from the methodology doesn't work, we adapt, but we always stick to the best practices.
What I'm seeing at my current company is that once you get a job as an international contractor, fuck the methodology. Hell, even the company employees don't care about it. Is Agile a joke?
The daily stand-up is a simple attendance sheet. Developers don't participate in the refinement; they just want to be handed tasks. When they face blockers or anything that prevents them from working on their assigned tasks, they wait until the end of the sprint to say so, just shrugging their shoulders and saying, "I wasn't able to complete this."
I started with a team of 10. I've replaced 4 people so far, and the interviews were a horror show. Whenever I asked the contractors to explain how they work with Scrum, their answer was: "I used Jira." But once I got into details, such as task management, refinement, planning, roadmap, etc., they'd just look at the camera in panic. There was even this one time that the AGILE LEAD said: "But this is the responsibility of the Scrum Master." "This" was the developer managing their own cards and updating their status.
And the best part: they don't care. If you replace them, they just find a job somewhere else and keep getting their paycheck until they get fired again.
Before joining this company, I'd always hear how "perfect" working with Americans was because they'd stick to the methodology, apply it, follow it, document stuff, be organized, etc. What I'm seeing now is chaos, blue-collar kids with crayons up their noses.