> Have you heard about the horror that is SaFe?
Yes, and I successfully argued against it by pointing it was was a wolf in sheep's clothing. It has as much to do with agile as waterfall does.
> I'm not convinced that true agile works or has ever worked on a project that was bigger than a dozen devs.
It works fine, large projects are inherently trouble which is why organizations should spend some energy into reducing the scale of an individual team's work rather than piling dozens or hundreds of people into yet another Too Big to Fail megaproject. If Google can build and maintain Bigtable with like a dozen devs then maybe you don't need 200 people and a PMO for your enterprise data warehouse consolidation project.
In fact the biggest issue with SAFe is the size of the project you'd try to use it on, not that it references agile style methods. Waterfall methods were even worse, which is the only reason charlatan consultation manage to keep selling organizations on things like SAFe.
> One of the key ways these agile people are incredibly dishonest, is that Agile at the top level is sold to enterprises as a way of keeping the old high-level project management style, with push-only command-structures, and agile people subsequently try to sugarcoat it as it somehow 'empowering' the devs and giving them autonomy, when the truth couldn't be farther from it.
You're right that this is dishonest and that people try and fail to cargo cult successful efforts they watch from afar. But that doesn't mean these successful teams weren't successful, or that there aren't common attributes of those successes.
That's always been the problem with methodological fixes to the software delivery process for organizations, you usually can't impose the structure from the outside anymore than you can meld your bones with adamantium without having a crazy mutant healing factor...