You’re the Mark
A critical examination of how Agile software development transformed from a liberation movement into a wealth extraction mechanism
Twenty-three years ago, seventeen software developers gathered at a ski resort in Utah and thrashed out the Agile Manifesto—a mere 68 words that would spawn a multi-billion dollar global rent-seeking industry. What began as a febrile attempt to improve the lot of software developers has metastasised into the most successful rent-seeking operation in corporate history. Today’s Agile ecosystem extracts enormous wealth from organisations worldwide while delivering pretty much zero value, creating a perfect case study in how good intentions can be weaponised for profit.
A Note to Developers
Most developers reading this already suspect something’s amiss. You’ve likely developed a nuanced, perhaps conflicted relationship with Agile practices—simultaneously recognising their theatrical aspects whilst navigating hiring expectations that demand fluency in the ceremonies. You may have already internalised that story pointing is largely kabuki theatre, that many retrospectives produce no meaningful change, and that velocity metrics often obscure rather than illuminate actual progress.
The challenge isn’t ignorance—it’s entrapment. Even developers who see through the performance still find themselves trapped by industry demand. Job descriptions demand Agile experience. Performance reviews measure engagement with Agile processes. Career advancement often requires demonstrating enthusiasm for practices you privately reject. This creates a sophisticated form of professional Stockholm syndrome where intelligent people participate in systems they recognise as dysfunctional at best because non-participation means no job, no income.
Some of you have found ways to work effectively within or around Agile constraints—delivering value despite the overhead rather than because of it. Others have embraced pragmatic subsets whilst ignoring the more theatrical elements. Still others have built careers on Agile coaching or Scrum mastery and face the uncomfortable reality that your expertise has become part of the rent-seeking apparatus.
The analysis that follows isn’t an attack on your intelligence or choices—it’s an attempt to name the economic forces that have shaped an industry where intelligent people spend increasing amounts of time on activities they know add next to no value, at best.
The Anatomy of Agile Rent SeekingRent seeking, in economic terms, occurs when individuals or organisations manipulate the environment to increase their share of existing wealth without creating new value. The modern Agile industry exhibits every hallmark of classic rent-seeking behaviour—extracting wealth from existing economic activity without creating new value.
The Certification RacketThe most obvious manifestation is the explosion of Agile certifications. Scrum Alliance alone has issued over 1.3 million certifications, each demanding fees, training courses, and periodic renewal. These credentials have no regulatory backing, no standardised curriculum, and no measurable correlation with improved outcomes. Yet they’ve become de facto requirements for countless positions.
Consider the absurdity: you can become a ‘Certified Scrum Master’ with a two-day course and $1,400, despite having never managed a software project. The certification teaches you to facilitate meetings and maintain a backlog—activities that competent professionals have done for decades without special training. But the certificate creates artificial scarcity and justifies premium salaries for what amounts to administrative work—classic rent-seeking through credentialism.
The Consultant Multiplication ComplexAgile has created an entire consulting ecosystem that extracts wealth by feeding on organisational anxiety. Anxiety about achieving appreciable ROI from Agile investments they’ve already made or are about to make. Companies spend millions on Agile coaches, transformation consultants, and implementation specialists who lack deep technical expertise but excel at selling process theatre.
These consultants arrive with identical playbooks: conduct ‘maturity assessments,’ implement story point estimation, establish retrospective ceremonies, and create elaborate metrics dashboards. They transform simple development work into elaborate rituals that require their ongoing presence to maintain. The process becomes the product, and the consultants extract rent as indispensable guardians of the process.
Tool Vendor CaptureThe Agile ecosystem has spawned specialised software tools that extract rent through expensive, long-term contracts whilst locking organisations into vendor dependency. Jira, Azure DevOps, and dozens of competitors have convinced companies they need sophisticated ‘Agile project management platforms’ to track work that developers previously managed with simple task lists.
These tools don’t improve development velocity—they hinder it with excessive overhead and forced workflows. But they generate subscription revenue whilst creating switching costs that trap organisations. The tools become shelfware that teams work around rather than with, yet the contracts auto-renew annually.
The Value Creation MirageProponents argue that Agile creates value through faster delivery, better collaboration, and improved quality. But where’s the evidence?
The Productivity ParadoxDespite decades of Agile adoption, software productivity remains stagnant or has declined by many measures. The average enterprise software project still runs over budget and behind schedule. Technical debt continues to accumulate. Developer satisfaction surveys consistently rank process overhead as a top frustration.
Meanwhile, the most productive software teams practice development methods that bear no resemblance to ceremonial Agile. They focus on technical excellence, autonomous teams, and minimal process overhead. Their success comes from owning and paying attendtion to the way the work works, and removing obstacles, not from following ceremonies—yet the Agile industry extracts zero rent from these approaches, which explains why they’re rarely promoted.
The Innovation SlowdownAgile’s emphasis on incremental delivery and user story decomposition actively discourages breakthrough innovation. The methodology breaks everything into small, measurable chunks that can be completed in two-week sprints. This works for maintenance programming but stifles the sustained, exploratory work that produces real advances.
The pressure for continuous delivery means teams avoid ambitious architectural changes or experimental features that disrupt their velocity metrics. Innovation requires periods of unproductive exploration that Agile frameworks penalise.
The Parasitic Nature of Modern AgileThe Agile ecosystem exhibits classic parasitic behaviour—perhaps even vampiric in its sophistication. Like successful parasites, it has evolved to maximise extraction whilst keeping the host organisation just functional enough to provide ongoing sustenance.
The infection spreads through professional networks, with each ‘transformation’ creating new vectors for transmission. Agile consultants don’t merely extract value; they’re blood-sucking entities that create psychological dependency whilst draining organisational vitality. The host organisation experiences symptoms—reduced productivity, innovation suppression, increased overhead—but the parasite has evolved elegant mechanisms to convince the host these symptoms indicate ‘transformation in progress.’
This parasitic industry has perfected the art of seduction over brute force. Rather than simply imposing systems, they seduce organisations with promises of ‘digital transformation’ and ‘competitive advantage.’ Like vampires creating willing thralls, they convert leadership into advocates who spread the infection throughout the organisation, believing themselves enlightened rather than sired.
The parasitic relationship explains why failed Agile implementations invariably lead to more Agile investment. The parasite ensures its survival by convincing the weakened host that salvation requires deeper commitment, more sophisticated tools, and extended coaching. The blood-sucking continues until it becomes normalised as the cost of ‘modern business practices.’
Most tellingly, the parasite suppresses the host’s immune system—the natural organisational instinct to question whether elaborate processes actually improve outcomes. Any attempt to reject the parasite gets reframed as ‘resistance to change’ or ‘lack of understanding,’ ensuring the parasitic relationship continues untrammeled.
The Self-Perpetuating MachineThe accidental genius of the Agile rent-seeking apparatus lies in its self-reinforcing nature and sophisticated psychological protection mechanisms. When Agile implementations fail—which they frequently do—the prescribed solution is always more Agile: additional training, better coaches, more advanced tools, or newer frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise—total bullshit, btw).
The industry operates as a mass delusion with profit margins. Any criticism gets deflected with ‘you just don’t understand Agile properly’ or ‘you need better coaching’ or ‘you’re not truly embracing the mindset.’ It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes defence that makes critics the problem, not the approach. The industry and its parasites have successfully convinced organisations that questioning Agile means you’re ‘not getting it’, rather than seeing through an elaborate wealth extraction scheme.
This voluntary rent-seeking represents a key innovation in wealth extraction. Traditional rent-seeking involves regulatory capture or monopolistic practices, but the Agile complex gets organisations to voluntarily pay for their own wealth extraction by convincing them it’s necessary for ‘digital transformation’ and ‘staying competitive.’
The system creates perfect conditions where questioning the value means you’re culturally backwards, failure is always the customer’s fault (insufficient buy-in, wrong coaches, inadequate training), success stories remain anecdotal whilst failures require more investment, and the solution to Agile problems is always more Agile.
SAFe represents the apotheosis of Agile rent seeking. It takes the bureaucracy that Agile originally opposed and rebrands it as ‘scaled Agile practices.’ Organisations that adopted Agile to escape process overhead find themselves implementing elaborate hierarchies of Product Owners, Release Train Engineers, and Solution Architects—all requiring specialised training and certification. And money, money, money. Ka-ching!
Most frameworks’ complexity ensures that organisations need permanent Agile transformation teams and ongoing consulting support. Success is measured not by software quality or business outcomes, but by ‘Agile maturity metrics’ that conveniently require more investment to improve.
The Real CostsThe opportunity cost of the Agile industrial complex extends beyond direct spending on consultants and tools. It includes:
Developer time diverted to ceremonies instead of real developmentManagement attention focused on process rather than product strategyTechnical debt accumulation due to sprint pressureOrganisations have internalised these costs as the price of ‘modern software development,’ but they represent pure waste—resources extracted by the Agile ecosystem without corresponding value creation.
The Largest Wealth Destruction Scam in Corporate HistoryThe sheer scale of Agile rent seeking dwarfs any previous rent-seeking operation in corporate history.
You’re the MarkA critical examination of how Agile transformed from a development philosophy into a wealth extraction mechanism
Twenty-three years ago, seventeen software developers gathered at a ski resort in Utah and penned the Agile Manifesto—a mere 68 words that would spawn a multi-billion dollar global industry. What began as a febrile attempt to improve the lot of software developers has metastasised into the most successful rent-seeking operation in corporate history. Today’s Agile ecosystem extracts enormous wealth from organisations worldwide whilst delivering little to no value, creating a perfect case study in how good intentions can be weaponised for profit.
A Note to DevelopersMost developers reading this already suspect something’s amiss. You’ve likely developed a nuanced, perhaps conflicted relationship with Agile practices—simultaneously recognising their theatrical aspects whilst navigating market expectations that demand fluency in the ceremonies. You may have already internalised that story pointing is largely kabuki theatre, that many retrospectives produce no meaningful change, and that velocity metrics often obscure rather than illuminate actual progress.
The challenge isn’t ignorance—it’s entrapment. Even developers who see through the performance still find themselves trapped by industry-wide adoption. Job descriptions demand Agile experience. Performance reviews measure engagement with Agile processes. Career advancement often requires demonstrating enthusiasm for practices you privately question. This creates a sophisticated form of professional Stockholm syndrome where intelligent people participate in systems they recognise as flawed because non-participation carries professional risk.
Some of you have found ways to work effectively within or around Agile constraints—delivering value despite the overhead rather than because of it. Others have embraced pragmatic subsets whilst ignoring the more theatrical elements. Still others have built careers on Agile coaching or Scrum mastery and face the uncomfortable possibility that your expertise might be part of the rent-seeking apparatus.
The analysis that follows isn’t an attack on your intelligence or choices—it’s an attempt to name the economic forces that have shaped an industry where intelligent people spend increasing amounts of time on activities they privately suspect add little value.
The Anatomy of Agile Rent SeekingRent seeking, in economic terms, occurs when individuals or organisations manipulate the environment to increase their share of existing wealth without creating new value. The modern Agile industry exhibits every hallmark of classic rent-seeking behaviour—extracting wealth from existing economic activity without creating new value.
The Certification RacketThe most obvious manifestation is the explosion of Agile certifications. Scrum Alliance alone has issued over 1.3 million certifications, each requiring fees, training courses, and periodic renewal. These credentials have no regulatory backing, no standardised curriculum, and no measurable correlation with improved outcomes. Yet they’ve become de facto requirements for countless positions.
Consider the absurdity: you can become a ‘Certified Scrum Master’ with a two-day course and $1,400, despite having never managed a software project. The certification teaches you to facilitate meetings and maintain a backlog—activities that competent professionals have done for decades without special training. But the certificate creates artificial scarcity and justifies premium salaries for what amounts to administrative work—classic rent-seeking through credentialism.
The Consultant Multiplication ComplexAgile has created an entire consulting ecosystem that extracts wealth by feeding on organisational anxiety about achieving appreciable ROI from Agile investments they’ve already made or are about to make. Companies spend millions on Agile coaches, transformation consultants, and implementation specialists who lack deep technical expertise but excel at selling process theatre.
These consultants arrive with identical playbooks: conduct ‘maturity assessments,’ implement story point estimation, establish retrospective ceremonies, and create elaborate metrics dashboards. They transform simple development work into elaborate rituals that require their ongoing presence to maintain. The process becomes the product, and the consultants extract rent as indispensable guardians of the process.
Tool Vendor CaptureThe Agile ecosystem has spawned specialised software tools that extract rent through expensive, long-term contracts whilst locking organisations into vendor dependency. Jira, Azure DevOps, and dozens of competitors have convinced companies they need sophisticated ‘Agile project management platforms’ to track work that developers previously managed with simple task lists.
These tools don’t improve development velocity—they hinder it with excessive overhead and forced workflows. But they generate subscription revenue whilst creating switching costs that trap organisations. The tools become shelfware that teams work around rather than with, yet the contracts auto-renew annually.
The Value Creation MirageProponents argue that Agile creates value through faster delivery, better collaboration, and improved quality. But where’s the evidence?
The Productivity ParadoxDespite decades of Agile adoption, software productivity remains stagnant or has declined by many measures. The average enterprise software project still runs over budget and behind schedule. Technical debt continues to accumulate. Developer satisfaction surveys consistently rank process overhead as a top frustration.
Meanwhile, the most productive software teams practice development methods that bear no resemblance to ceremonial Agile. They focus on technical excellence, autonomous teams, and minimal process overhead. Their success comes from hiring great people and removing obstacles, not from following Scrum ceremonies—yet the Agile industry extracts zero rent from these approaches, which explains why they’re rarely promoted.
The Innovation SlowdownAgile’s emphasis on incremental delivery and user story decomposition actively discourages breakthrough innovation. The methodology breaks everything into small, measurable chunks that can be completed in two-week sprints. This works for maintenance programming but stifles the sustained, exploratory work that produces real advances.
The pressure for continuous delivery means teams avoid ambitious architectural changes or experimental features that disrupt their velocity metrics. Innovation requires periods of unproductive exploration that Agile frameworks penalise. This innovation suppression extends to hiring practices that prioritise ‘Agile experience’ over technical skill, further diluting organisational capability.
The Parasitic Nature of Modern AgileThe Agile ecosystem exhibits classic parasitic behaviour—perhaps even vampiric in its sophistication. Like successful parasites, it has evolved to maximise extraction whilst keeping the host organisation barely functional enough to provide ongoing sustenance.
The infection spreads through professional networks, with each ‘transformation’ creating new vectors for transmission. Agile consultants don’t merely extract value; they’re blood-sucking entities that create psychological dependency whilst draining organisational vitality. The host organisation experiences symptoms—reduced productivity, innovation suppression, increased overhead—but the parasite has evolved elegant mechanisms to convince the host these symptoms indicate ‘transformation in progress.’
This vampiric industry has perfected the art of seduction over brute force. Rather than simply imposing systems, they seduce organisations with promises of ‘digital transformation’ and ‘competitive advantage.’ Like vampires creating willing thralls, they convert leadership into advocates who spread the infection throughout the organisation, believing themselves enlightened rather than infected.
Most tellingly, the parasite suppresses the host’s immune system—the natural organisational instinct to question whether elaborate processes actually improve outcomes. Any criticism gets deflected with ‘you just don’t understand Agile properly’ or ‘you need better coaching’ or ‘you’re not truly embracing the mindset.’ It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes defence that makes critics the problem, not the methodology. The industry has successfully convinced organisations that questioning Agile means you’re ‘not getting it’ rather than seeing through an elaborate wealth extraction scheme.
When implementations fail—which they frequently do—the parasite ensures its survival by convincing the weakened host that salvation requires deeper commitment: additional training, better coaches, more advanced tools, or newer frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise). The blood-letting continues until it becomes normalised as the cost of ‘modern business practices.’
This voluntary rent-seeking represents a key innovation in wealth extraction. Traditional rent-seeking involves regulatory capture or monopolistic practices, but the Agile complex gets organisations to voluntarily pay for their own wealth extraction by convincing them it’s necessary for ‘digital transformation’ and ‘staying competitive.’
SAFe represents the apotheosis of this approach. It takes the bureaucracy that Agile originally opposed and rebrands it as ‘scaled Agile practices.’ Organisations that adopted Agile to escape process overhead find themselves implementing elaborate hierarchies of Product Owners, Release Train Engineers, and Solution Architects—all requiring specialised training and certification. The framework’s complexity ensures permanent dependency on Agile transformation teams and ongoing consulting support, with success measured not by software quality or business outcomes, but by ‘Agile maturity metrics’ that conveniently require more investment to improve.
The Largest Wealth Destruction Scam in Corporate HistoryThe sheer scale of Agile rent seeking dwarfs any previous rent-seeking operation in corporate history.
Conservative estimates place the total economic impact at approximately $1.8 trillion annually in 2025—potentially the largest wealth destruction scheme ever devised.
To put this in perspective, this matches the GDP of countries like Russia ($1.8 trillion) and approaches major economies like Canada ($2.1 trillion). Whilst only a fraction represents direct wealth extraction, the total economic impact from systematically choosing elaborate theatre over effective approaches destroys value equivalent to six times the entire global consulting market ($300 billion annually).
The breakdown reveals the sophistication of the operation:
External Agile Services: $35-50 billion annually from enterprise agile transformation consulting, coaching, and implementation services. The enterprise agile transformation services market reached $35.7 billion in 2023 and continues growing at 17.6% annually, with over 20,000 enterprises using SAFe worldwide.
Corporate Internal Spending: $25-40 billion annually on internal Agile transformation teams, process overhead, and organisational restructuring. 70% of Fortune 100 companies have SAFe implementations, requiring substantial ongoing internal investment beyond external consulting.
Enterprise Software Ecosystem: $10-15 billion in Agile-specific tool licensing and platform fees. Atlassian generates $4.3 billion annually with over 127,528 companies using Jira globally, representing just one vendor in a vast ecosystem of process-centric platforms that add questionable value.
The Certification Mill: $3-5 billion in credentialing, training, and continuing education fees. Despite Scrum Alliance generating only $74 million annually, the global certification ecosystem encompasses hundreds of bodies extracting fees from over 2 million SAFe practitioners and 1.5 million Scrum Alliance certifications.
Direct Rent-Seeking Total: $73-110 billion annually in measurable wealth extraction.
Opportunity Costs: $1.71 trillion annually—the true cost of systematically rejecting approaches that actually work in favour of elaborate theatre. With global software development spending at $570 billion annually, this represents three times the entire industry’s expenditure wasted by choosing process-heavy rent-seeking over people-centric methods that managers systematically reject because they can’t be monetised. The greatest waste isn’t Agile’s inefficiency, but the productivity gains foregone by refusing to trust developers, eliminate process overhead, and focus on outcomes rather than ceremonies.
No management consulting scam in history approaches this scale. McKinsey’s global revenue is roughly $15 billion annually—the Agile complex destroys 120 times that amount whilst delivering demonstrably worse outcomes. It represents the perfect storm of rent-seeking: voluntary adoption, self-reinforcing mechanisms, psychological capture, and a product (meetings and processes) with essentially zero marginal cost to produce.
Agile has been weaponised against the very people it was meant to help. The developers who created the manifesto to escape bureaucratic oppression are now the primary victims—being sold a corrupted version of their own liberation movement. They’re not just marks; they’re marks being conned with their own revolutionary manifesto.
The 68-word manifesto created to help software developers has spawned a nearly $2 trillion industry that primarily exists to extract wealth from the organisations it claims to help. This isn’t just rent-seeking—it’s wealth destruction on an unprecedented scale.
The Real CostsThe opportunity cost of the Agile industrial complex extends beyond direct spending on consultants and tools. It includes:
Developer time diverted to ceremonies instead of codingManagement attention focused on process rather than product strategyTechnical debt accumulation due to sprint pressureOrganisations have internalised these costs as the price of ‘modern software development,’ but they represent pure waste—resources extracted by the Agile ecosystem without corresponding value creation.
Breaking Free from the Industrial ComplexThe original Agile Manifesto emphasised ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ I’ll say that again: the Agile Manifesto emphasised ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ Today’s Agile industry has inverted these priorities, creating elaborate and fee-winning processes that constrain individuals and expensive tools that complicate interactions.
Successful software development doesn’t require Agile certification programmes, specialised consultants, or enterprise platforms. It requires empowered and motivated people with clear goals, adequate resources, and minimal interference. Some companies successfully building software figured this out long ago.
The Agile industrial complex persists because it sells comfort and blame-avoidance to anxious managers who prefer following established processes to making difficult decisions about technology, people and work. But that comfort comes at an enormous price—one that’s extracted from productive work and diverted to rent seekers who’ve weaponised professional anxiety into a profit centre.
It’s way past time to recognise Agile for what it’s become: not a development approach, but a sophisticated rent-seeking mechanism that enriches consultants whilst impoverishing the craft of software development and the businesses that depend on it. It’s too sophisticated and voluntary to be called racketeering (Cf. RICO)—it’s just exceptionally effective rent-seeking that operates through willing participation rather than criminal coercion. (Personally, I’d call it criminal, but that’s me).
Agile has been weaponised against the very people it was meant to help. The developers who supported the Agile Manifesto to escape bureaucratic oppression are now the primary victims—being sold a corrupted version of their own liberation movement. They’re not just marks; they’re marks being conned with their own revolutionary manifesto.
If you’re paying for Agile certifications, consultants, and tools, you’re being played.
The emperor’s new clothes were always just clothes, and good software was being built long before anyone needed a certificate to prove they could facilitate a standup meeting.
Further ReadingBeck, K., Beedle, M., van Bennekum, A., Cockburn, A., Cunningham, W., Fowler, M., … & Thomas, D. (2001). Manifesto for agile software development. Retrieved from http://agilemanifesto.org/
Buchanan, J. M., Tollison, R. D., & Tullock, G. (Eds.). (1980). Toward a theory of the rent-seeking society. Texas A&M University Press.
DeMarco, T., & Lister, T. (2013). Peopleware: Productive projects and teams (3rd ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional.
Krueger, A. O. (1974). The political economy of the rent-seeking society. American Economic Review, 64(3), 291-303.
Little, T. (2005). Context-adaptive agility: Managing complexity and uncertainty. IEEE Software, 22(3), 28-35.
McConnell, S. (2006). Software estimation: Demystifying the black art. Microsoft Press.
Menzies, T., Butcher, A., Cok, D., Marcus, A., Layman, L., Shull, F., … & Zimmermann, T. (2013). Local versus global lessons for defect prediction and effort estimation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(6), 822-834.
Sommerville, I. (2015). Software engineering (10th ed.). Pearson.
Tullock, G. (1967). The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies, and theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.
The author has worked in software development for over five decades and has witnessed the transformation of Agile from grassroots liberation movement to corporate industrial opression complex.
