Capital One Scraps 1,100 Tech Positions (reuters.com) 29
Consumer lending firm Capital One has cut 1,100 positions in its technology segment, Reuters is reporting citing a source familiar with the matter, a move that comes as its digital transformation matures. From the report: The company plans to eliminate its "Agile" job family and integrate it into existing engineering and product manager roles, it said in a statement. The affected employees have been invited to apply for other roles in the bank. "The Agile role in our Tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases but as our organization matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices," the statement said.
Stick a fork in it (Score:3, Insightful)
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Nope. Lots of places use Agile and make a lot of money doing it.
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:4)
You mean consultants?
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I am a consultant. The employer/client chose this form of cancer. Indian engineers love it because there is a seriously askew problem with their management and engineers valuing process so highly that they don't even care about why a process should exist in the first place.
Smiles all around if you destroy the product while following the process to the letter. A grades and head wobbles.
I'm bitter, sorry.
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I use Agile at work, it is the core process that keeps us on track and productive.
To be fair, we actually use Kanban, but Agile and Rally are the tools we use. Sort of. Mostly.
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Drain money doing it.
Agile is not agile it is scaled cancer
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Stick a fork in it (Score:5, Insightful)
Agile works pretty well when you don't know what you're building, like at startups. It's a good way to keep the team from going too far in the wrong direction before course correcting. It's also a good way to get outside stakeholders to play their part in steering the work.
It just sort of falls apart for complex multi-stage development, where no one person understands the code. The cross-functional team composition then needs to be replaced with managed silos with contracts for interacting with each other.
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Startups, even when they succeed, start off with a mess. The whole problem is the rapid rush to develop a product as fast as possible before funding dries up. The process isn't the problem, instead the lack of planning leads to both a bad design as well as sloppy coding. When it's done and the company survives, that dreadful codebase becomes the foundation that is taboo to change and in a decade becomes a technical debt nightmare. Process also isn't necessarily a solution either, except for the process
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Startups must make short-term development decisions, in order to survive. They need to make money in the short term, or they can't pay their developers and it all falls apart. Truly good software designs that take into account long-term thinking wind up costing WAY too much to build in the short term. And WAY too long. While all that long-term coding is going on, one's competitors are scooping up all the clients with their short-term crap.
So, the real trick to survival as a young software company is not
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I find most of it crap. Mostly because startups don't hire good programmers. They hire friends of friends. Or they hire RF engineers, hardware engineers, or subject experts, and make them write code. Some appear to never have worked on code developed in a team environment before, some don't know how source code control works, and few of them in my experience understand how to write sotware that can be maintained. Much of this is just lack of experience.
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That's why Agile works. It recognizes that there are a gazillion turns and decisions along the way. It provides measurement so we know how fast the car can actually
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You can do small iterations without Agile. Too many divide the world into Agile versus full blown Waterfall, and if you don't like Agile you must be one of those old stodgy Waterfall guys. Most real places out there are in the middle; a muddled ad-hoc mish mash. Generally a deadline is set and you have toa bide by id no matter how loud you scream you're an Agile house. As the deadline gets closer and closer then negotiations happen to drop unnecessary features. The development team and product managers
Re: Stick a fork in it (Score:2)
Agree with parent. Initially, they might have seen success with Agile, and then outgrew what it could offer. But you can be very dysfunctional with any methodology, Agile or otherwise.
PS: I didn't RTFA
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Even when your org or processes have matured, it's good to stay on course and not go too far in the wrong direction.
This is a never-ending goal...
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Agile rocks (Score:2, Insightful)
It also comes with a whole bunch of tools & processes around casework & documentation like user stories and Kanban boards. That really helps structure changes and make sure they're done intelligently. Especially when you're PMs get lost easily...
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Agility - this idea of smaller iterations where progress is delivered and demo'd frequently - is going nowhere. It's the most effective tool for reducing the risk of large-scale failure. It ensures a tight feedback loop between product and R&D.
Yes, dogmatic application of Scrum/Agile methodologies is problematic. Process for the sake of process is not agility. Dogma for the sake of dogma is religion and if folks wanna do religion AND computer programming..
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To dare to dream. No forks yet. Just a slight nudge.
Doesn't sound like scraping (Score:2)
Capital One: What's in your wallet? (Score:5, Funny)
Not a paycheck anymore!
Looking forward (Score:1)
With a little insider prespective (Score:3)
With a little inside perspective having done work for (but never worked for ) them, I suspect the broader implication given how they were organized is they are shifting maintenance mode.
My read of this is, "we are not planning any now digital/online products in the foreseeable future, its going to be just break/fix and cosmetics on our current stuff". I guess upper management thinks there will be something to all this resession talk.
agile isn't a tech position. (Score:3)
Wha? (Score:2)
'natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices'
I'm hoping this means they are disbanding the Agile-dedicated workers and integrating the roles into their general tech population.
Otherwise, they are doing it wrong. Or did it wrong. Bad Agile is not good either.
Agile⦠(Score:2)