This is new terminology for a concept that has existed for a long time in our industry. People are slowly rediscovering old paradigms. NoSkills is actually referring to an old working technique that maximizes efficiency of planning, processes and meta work by ensuring no actual work gets done. Here’s what one should do to get highly skilled in NoSkills:
- learn industry terminology like: scrum, lean, kanban, agile, CI/CD
- read first links that pop-up on google about the aforementioned terms
- learn that waterfall is bad
- learn that documentation is bad and people interaction is good
- complain about people not interacting
- apply 2 week sprints, so that “we can track velocity”
- never finish the work defined in a sprint
- have constant meetings
- religiously impose all process ceremonies
- NEVER write tests if there is no time
- switch from scrum to kanban, because “scrum doesn’t fit our work flow” (= we never finish the work in any sprint)
- use GitFlow, with independent feature branches, because our 5 dev team needs faster progress
- use CI/CD (= install a jenkins server)
- have refactoring sprints (“oops, but we’re kanban now…”)
This is by no means an exhaustive list, because there are so many things to be studied and so many wonderful certifications to be purchased in the NoSkills world, that it would take more than a sprint to list them here.
Folks, work is more important than meta work (and don’t let anyone fool you). If software doesn’t get done, it’s because software doesn’t get done, not because the process around it is obsolete and needs to be changed. Eating the same food with different tools won’t make it better. Something we need to re-learn is that complexity-first is a bad approach. It makes us focus on the wrong things.
One great skill to acquire is recognizing the smell of NoSkills. Don’t fight it, just walk away.