Perhaps your work experience hasn't been VC funded tech firms with inexperienced managers and cargo cult dev processes.
Especially you need to be able to understand the main bit about not needing to do anything at all after daily standup, err I mean punch in the stomach. (because likely the work will be thrown away soon, or the company will pivot.) and then the pre-climax (there's a name for this in plot development but I don't know it), the perf review. and finally the firing. The unnamed peers used as an excuse for a single instance of not being a team player, ie not participating in a nonsense ritual. It is indeed fatal for such firms, so to that degree the firing was a correct action.
To me this is a story about big-A Agile as a disease. But there are other meanings (side messages?) that can be taken away.
Well I worked at VC funded firms, and we were sorta doing agile, and there were stand-ups that lasted 15m, and before and after the stand-ups, work happened, in the form of writing software that we then sold to paying customers.
And, yeah, not all meetings were the best use of our time, it's better to write things down, it's tricky to find out which software to write and which to throw away, we got things wrong lots of time, we wrote legacy code for ourselves, etc...
But "being punched in the stomach and then spend your day doing nothing" was not part of it.
But I guess "burning books" is not yet a thing in the USA, and yet "Farenheit 451" is still a good metaphor of "something" ?
I've never been confortable with the literary genre of "let's slide through the slippery slopes and imagine unrealistic worst case scenarios to sound smart and not really make a case about anything cause fiction".
Especially you need to be able to understand the main bit about not needing to do anything at all after daily standup, err I mean punch in the stomach. (because likely the work will be thrown away soon, or the company will pivot.) and then the pre-climax (there's a name for this in plot development but I don't know it), the perf review. and finally the firing. The unnamed peers used as an excuse for a single instance of not being a team player, ie not participating in a nonsense ritual. It is indeed fatal for such firms, so to that degree the firing was a correct action.
To me this is a story about big-A Agile as a disease. But there are other meanings (side messages?) that can be taken away.