Tea Ceremony

Six years ago I left the loose world of web development for enterprise. I wanted to try being a PM at a large company.

It felt like waking up in another world.

File a ticket, set priorities, whoever is free picks it up. Ship when ready. That was the development I knew. The world I entered looked nothing like it. Everything moved slowly.

First, my entire career was nullified. Ticket-driven development, in a universe that recognized only waterfall or agile, was null. Not one or the other. Not even zero. Nonexistent.

Agile had its own orthodoxy. Appoint a scrum master. Perform the rituals — sprint reviews, retrospectives — with correct form. It resembled tea ceremony. I do not mean that dismissively. There is meaning in honoring the form, in its spiritual discipline. But sometimes you lose track of whether the goal is to prepare the tea or to drink it.

Waterfall had its own gravity. Write enormous design documents before touching code. Implementation was less programming than transcription. The role of programmer did not exist. You were either a designer or an implementer. Binary. Nothing in between.

I did the PM thing for a while. My experience counted for nothing. I was not supposed to write code. But learning to keep my hands off was its own discipline. My lazy instinct to eliminate unnecessary work somehow charmed the clients. Before long I was promoted to account manager.

I got bored and quit. Preparing the tea was not enough. I wanted to drink it.