@ghostinit0x
Benjamim Castell
23 years building software. Zero tolerance for bullshit.
The Disillusionment
I've spent over two decades in the trenches of software development. Not in conference rooms selling certifications. Not in consulting firms billing by the buzzword. In the actual trenches — writing code, debugging production at 3 AM, and watching promising projects die slow deaths under the weight of process theater.
My career has taken me through the full spectrum of industries where software actually matters: finance, where a bug means losing millions; banking, where compliance isn't optional; automotive, where your code might be the difference between a car stopping or not.
I've seen every methodology the industry has invented to avoid admitting that software development is fundamentally a creative engineering discipline, not a manufacturing process you can optimize with ceremonies.
What I've Survived
Industries
- Financial Services & Trading Systems
- Banking & Core Banking Platforms
- Automotive & Embedded Systems
- Enterprise Software
- Startups & Scale-ups
Methodologies Endured
- Waterfall (the honest one)
- Extreme Programming (had potential)
- Scrum (the cult)
- "Cascagile" (waterfall in disguise)
- SAFe (corporate theater)
"Somewhere along the way, an industry that was supposed to empower engineers decided that engineers were the problem. That we needed to be managed, measured, and ceremonied into submission."
After 23 years, I realized something uncomfortable: the Agile movement didn't fail. It succeeded — at becoming exactly what it claimed to oppose. A certification industry. A consulting goldmine. A framework for making engineering feel productive while accomplishing less.
The original Agile Manifesto was written by developers, for developers. It was a rebellion against bureaucracy. But like every rebellion that gets popular, it was captured, commodified, and sold back to us as the very chains it promised to break.
I watched talented engineers — people who could solve complex problems, design elegant systems, build things that matter — reduced to story point estimators and standup attendance machines. Their expertise dismissed. Their judgment overruled by process.
That's when I decided to stop being complicit in the lie.
Why AgileLie Exists
AgileLie is not about hating change or progress. It's about exposing the uncomfortable truth that the software industry refuses to discuss openly:
- →That methodologies are sold as silver bullets to avoid admitting that software is hard
- →That the certification industry profits from your team's dysfunction
- →That most "Agile transformations" are theater for executives
- →That developers are burning out under processes designed to measure them, not help them
I write for the engineers who feel gaslit. The ones who know something is wrong but are told they're "resistant to change." The ones who remember when building software felt like craftsmanship, not assembly line work.
You're not the problem. The system is.