Does Fidelity's Reorganization Signal the Beginning of the End for 'Small-Team Agile'? (bostonglobe.com)
- Reference: 0183162930
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/1928254/does-fidelitys-reorganization-signal-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-small-team-agile
- Source link: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/07/business/fidelity-hiring-spree-job-cuts-return-to-office/
> Hiding inside another layoff report, Fidelity is reorganizing: "The changes are aimed at [2]moving the teams away from an 'agile' makeup -- comprising smaller, siloed squads -- and toward larger teams built to move faster on projects." OMG, as they say: "Sudden outbreak of common sense."
According to the Boston Globe, Fidelity is cutting about 1,000 jobs even as it plans to hire roughly 5,300 new workers, many of them early-career engineers. Half of the 3,300 new workers hired this year "will be in tech or product-related roles," the report says, noting that "about 2,000 of those jobs are currently open, and 400 of them are in tech/product-delivery."
"The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects.
The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in [3]a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."
[1] https://slashdot.org/~cellocgw
[2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/07/business/fidelity-hiring-spree-job-cuts-return-to-office/
[3] https://2dd3750b-b3c2-4728-9f6c-5e9b8f86b85d.filesusr.com/ugd/163ca5_dfca73d35f224b419c0463d3226f347c.pdf
Depends on your goals, I guess. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agile teams are a great way to waste small amounts of money quickly. But if you want to waste money in vast amounts on an enterprise scale, they aren't the way to go. Throwing huge teams at a problem is fantastic by comparison. It drives up burn rate, drives down efficiency, and extends timelines while claiming the opposite. Small teams cannot compete.
Tongue only partially in cheek... I watched a team of hundreds of local and remote workers burn $400M in a catastrophic waterfall grand attempt and fail completely. The worst agile failure I witnessed burned $4.5M before the plug was pulled.
Re:Depends on your goals, I guess. (Score:4, Interesting)
I looked at a waterfall project where the mayor ended up spending $3M to have an audit done on the current state of a project that was way behind on time and way over budget, only for them to come back and say that it'd be cheaper to burn all the effort to date and start fresh.
Re: (Score:2)
and no doubt it was waterfall that was to blame. Super important to get that detail in there.
$3M for an AUDIT but management couldn't be to blame, right?
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$3M is 0.00681818181818 percent of the cost of buying Twitter and firing everyone to rebuild it. Seems like a pretty cheap audit.
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Anyone an Amazon affiliate? Now would be a good time to post a link to the Mythical Man-Month :)
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i've experienced the same with huge agile team trees to catastrophic results. it's not really inherent to the methodology but to the real goals you mentioned: burn money to increase valuation to eventually sell off. any methodology will succumb to that. if anything agile actually allows for more confusion, discordination, obfuscation and most of all plausible deniability (i can almost hear some true believer shouting "then you're not doing agile right!" which ... just describes the majority of companies doi
Oh, please, not again. (Score:3)
First of all, the singular term is "agility" not "agile". Second of all, agility isn't a means, it's the end. The actual goal. And "agile software development" is a thing and will remain a thing in teams and "projects" where it fits and makes sense. Those are scenarios with experienced teams booked on a well-seasoned and under control stack with which every team-member has solid experience to basically take on any task in the scope of the project.
Agile software development is the _solution_ to the problem of clients not knowing what they want and developing a piece of software that isn't military, medical, space, aeronautic, nuclear, mission-critical embedded or some other hardcore stuff. This is why agile software development is most often used in web development and generic user-facing software for vertical markets. Because that's precisely where you find customers who are usually overwelmed with formulating the requirements of a piece of software to be programmed.
And no, it's not at an "end" and no, it's not "dead". Perhaps the fad with dimwitts has died and they've moved on to another new buzzword, but that would be a good thing.
Agility or Agile Software Development is still alive an well for anyone actually aware what those terms really mean. See the original [1] Manifesto for Agile Software Development [agilemanifesto.org] for further details.
Congratiulations, you are now ahead of 99% of the buzzword crowd. You're welcome.
[1] https://agilemanifesto.org/
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Great, Agile is the just manifesto. And we'll pretend that in the real world that it doesn't mean Project Managers that are certified Scrum Masters like to inflict time wasting ceremonies, some pointy hair manager trying to implement some Scaled framework (which is probably the case in big finance), or something that didn't get planned onto some obscure Kanban board for a pizza-boxed sized group. We'll No True Scotsman Agile into nothing but a theoretical ideal that can be wiped away as "just not implemente
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"...will remain a thing in teams and "projects" where it fits and makes sense"
Web page development.
"Those are scenarios with experienced teams booked on a well-seasoned and under control stack with which every team-member has solid experience to basically take on any task in the scope of the project."
Projects that have no need for specific experience or specialization, where everyone does the same thing. Web page development.
"Agile software development is the _solution_ to the problem of clients not knowin
Dissing Agile (Score:3)
People diss agile today because they don't remember how it was before Agile, and how teams that actually succeeded kinda sorta did something like Agile. Agile wasn't adopted by software companies because it was some new religion. It was often adopted because software companies were already "cheating" and Agile just set a framework that could make it work and not feel like cheating anymore.
That being said, successful companies cheat in Agile too.
What's going to replace Agile is some methodology where the new AI tools are going to interconnect to make the team much more productive.
Fidelity hiring 5000 juniors to replace their 1000 seniors .. hmm.. frankly that's not going to work.
Sounds like an idea some MBA came up with to "save money".
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Ageism is illegal. But that isn't stopping Fidelity from ditching the senior level staff to replace them with a bunch of greenies.
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Nah, today is all about dumping both the seniors and the juniors not replacing them. Then you "empower" what's left with AI tools and have the stockholders pat you on the back.
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"People diss agile today because they don't remember how it was before Agile, and how teams that actually succeeded kinda sorta did something like Agile. "
No and no. Real software development requires design. Agile is a race to accumulate band-aids. Never time to fix anything, only time to cover garbage up.
"Agile wasn't adopted by software companies because it was some new religion."
Even though it was a new religion. Agile targets managers, it defines doers as literally all the same and interchangeable,
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AI development tools are a thin LLM veneer around using traditional software tools packaged into an MCP api. Think of them as a PHB who knows some technical buzzwords and is trying to vibe design the company product by micromanaging a team of competent engineers.
Same crp (Score:1)
We're firing a bunch of people we're hiring a bunch of people small is out big is in (previously: big is out small is in), same sht on perpetual repeat, who cares.
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[1]Fidelity Investments. [fidelity.com] They're a financial-services company that offers trading, banking, financial planning, education, and other stuff. Similar to ETrade, Schwab, etc.
[1] https://www.fidelity.com/
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> So a nobody company that doesn't deserve a story. Gotcha.
Hardly. From TFS:
> The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion.
As I said, they're peers with ETrade and Schwab.
And as for them deserving a story, they're abandoning an "agile" approach in favor of larger teams focused on specific projects. It will be interesting to see whether they succeed with the new development model. So, the story fits the Slashdot ethos of "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters."
Is this really about Agile? (Score:2)
From the description it sounds more like the company is replacing older but experienced staff with young but manipulable staff. All the talk about protecting the company interest and investing in new tech sounds like a more evolved narrative for AI displacement.
In short, newbies wil use AI to hope for the best, won't argue about work conditions and will do it for less money.
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Cut the pay for the doers, redirect the pay to executive staff.
Just stop (Score:2)
Saying waterfall. Stop using the word. Stop pretending it means something.
Larger teams will move faster than smaller teams? (Score:2)
Think about CPUs. If you have 2 cores, the processor is 2x the speed of 1 core, right? And 16 cores is 16x faster than 1 core, right?
Hardly. The more cores you have, the more coordination overhead is required. If your tasks are truly parallel, with no dependencies, then sure, you can get 16x work done with 16 cores. But real software has dependencies. So Core 2 might have to wait for Core 1 to finish something.
Teams of people are the same. If you have a team of 16 working on truly independent tasks, sure, t
Nimble vs. bulk quantities (Score:2)
A ship is the fastest way to get huge amounts of cargo from one place to another. But it's the opposite of nimble. And it requires extensive pre-preparation (loading cargo into boxes, onto pallets, into shipping containers) before the journey can begin, and then unbundling at the end.
A motorcycle is that fastest way to get ONE person and a small amount of cargo, from one place to another. No need for a tun of up-front prep, just pick up your bag of groceries and throw it in the trunk.
Team size depends on wh
One behemoth isn't a trend (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as Agile is the perennial punching bag that many would celebrate dying, reading too much on financial behemoth as an industry trend seems silly.
And call me skeptical on current news like this being anything but creative storytelling exercise on the reason for staff reductions.
Also could use a different "cooler" finance company as trend like Coinbase with microteams with Project Managers with AI agents doing the coding, oh wait they they are cutting staff too...
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Also, bigwigs always think their latest reorganization idea will help teams "move faster." Everything is always "move faster." They say that is the intent, but they have zero evidence that the reorganization will in fact lead to "moving faster." I predict yet another reorganization aimed at "moving faster" within a few months, after this attempt starts to get stuck in the mud because...too many people per team.
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It's the current meta for CxO suite: the idea is there are too many middle level managers. They don't have enough work so they spend their time playing office politics and in useless meetings.
The idea is to have bigger teams and fewer managers. Maybe instead of team sizes 4-6 move to team sizes 12-15.
Personally I think the problem isn't team size, it's a matter of having people who's entire job is to manage. If managers spend 50% (or some reasonable percentage) of their time doing practical work (ie, wo