Freelance Mag

The world is changing fast and so is the world of Agile. The Agile I had experienced when I worked as programmer at my last IT firm was more about project management and successful completion of a release through the phases of development and testing to delivery and support. There was a healthy collaboration between team members of a project that worked really well but command chain was still there. Developers and Testers still had to report to their Project Manager (PM). The PMs further reported to their seniors in the firm until the chain ended at VP (Operations). Our client was a company located abroad and the stakeholders communicated through emails and Skype.

Most IT firms where I worked as programmer were IT services industry, there was very little greenfield work and most of the time we had to maintain/fix code written by other engineers who couldn't even be found in some cases!

I worked as a programmer at several IT firms which practiced Agile in some form or other, there used to be stand-ups, scrums, TDD, code reviews and even peer coding but not once did I find anyone have issues with following hierarchy or seniority of order in teams. That's not to say that hierarchies are a pristine thing, they have their share of problems too.

Writing is an art where its easy to define success in terms of what others say about your writing. You write an article and it immediately gets a 100K views within a few minutes? You then start thinking about yourself as a "smart and successful writer", you suddenly get a certain amount of confidence and self-esteem even though the reasons your article got those clicks may have nothing to do with your writing skills!

Writing is hard, there is no doubt about it. The internet keeps generating lots of noise every second which sort of gives the impression that a lot of "writing" is happening but really, how many best-sellers do you see pop up every day or how many truly successful professional writers have you met?

In general, most people hate it when they see Adsense ads on the internet, so they install blockers which block these ads. They do this in order to stop being "nagged" by ads. They also hate it when an open source project on github asks them for donation, again they don't want to be "nagged" by them so they simply press the "I don't want to donate" or "I've already donated" button.

Let's face it, an open source programmer who contributes code to the community isn't generally motivated by money (unless she works at a "FOSS friendly" firm such as Red Hat or Canonical). In fact, she doesn't even know about how to monetize or earn income by contributing to that development which she so rightly deserves, assuming its a highly used product and many people use it.