Come on, Phil, there was no reason to hit Agile quite that hard; after all, anyone who understands development knows that Agile is vacuous anyway, just a silly misunderstanding of principle of economy of effort wrapped up with a little pseudo-psychological lunatic sociology jargon to convince people that it's useful do it faster by not bothering to try to do it right, and people who aren't bright enough to understand development aren't bright enough to understand your editorial either.

It was great to read - so cheering to see that someone is still batting for technical ability against the fitting face; but I hope that the days of the misfit are not over. Misfits cause change; since our systems are not perfect we need change; so lets have more misfits. It's probably a forlorn hope: in the early 2000s I and my people wasted time skimming hordes of irrelevant CVs because recruitment agencies were incapable of understanding that a developer doesn't become competent by churning out the same old muck year after year and never getting out of step with the organisation, but by doing new and different things so that he or she can find out what works best and what doesn't, and people who want to do new and different things - well, they won't fit in socially, will they, because they will argue about being required to do what they are told without being able to question anything.

edit: I perhaps shouldn't be so nasty about agile. If divorced from the idea that someone must have the right social habits in orer to participate, and done right instead of sloppily, it might even make sense; it wouldnt then be much different from doing the minimal viable amount at each stage, which of course was a well understood design, development, validation, and release method long before the name "agile" was invented - sufficiently well understood that, unlike many brands of snake oil, it wasn't hyped as a panacea.