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Right now, in 2026, knowledge work is being erased, bottom up, by machines
This is not intended to be hyperbolic. In the absence of massive global governmental intervention to stop AI development and deployment, knowledge work as we know it will be gone within a generation, possibly even within a few years. Just as the industrial revolution replaced most physical labour with machines, the cerebral revolution will replace most thinking labour with AIs.
Programming, my industry, is the canary in the coalmine.
If I returned to my engineering management job, I would no longer hire junior programmers. I would hire senior developers and give them all the AI tools money can buy (which is not even much money. I’m using a revolutionary tool to do things I simply couldn’t do before for $17 a month).
6th Feb 2026
This is part two in a series on how Scrum destroyed agile. Starting where we left off last time, one of the problems with Scrum is that product has an owner, the Scrum process itself has a master, but no-one is empowered to advocate for development priorities.
30th May 2018
Scrum lacks technical craft and fails to compensate for natural organisation tendencies to prioritise short-term product and management priorities. As as result, teams adopting Scrum are generally not getting the benefits agile is meant to provide. Couple that with the fact that it is, de-facto, the only agile methodology in use today, agile as a way of improving software development is being destroyed by Scrum.
(Of course, there are agile teams using Scrum and successfully running good software projects. Unfortunately, they're succeeding largely in spite of Scrum, not because of it.)
In this series, I’ll briefly describe the history of Scrum and agile. I’ll then cover what I see as the three main issues with Scrum: it is too process-oriented; it is too management centric; and it lacks technical craft. I’ll look at where it all went wrong and how Scrum’s own popularity has turned into a cargo-cult of itself. Finally, we’ll have a look at what’s next.
8th May 2018
Rather than trying to exhaustively test every possible path through complex algorithms, with a little thought you can often generate random examples and verify your code handles them correctly.
19th April 2018
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