I've been coding professionally for 11 years, have been hobby coding for about 20.
Recently, I've been exposed to Agile, Scrum, XP, TTD, User Stories, Sprints, Pair Programming, and now NoSQL. All these things, I have to say, are contributing massively to my strong considerations to hang up my mouse and keyboard.
My first experience of Agile was working for an investment bank where they decided that, no matter if the code was buggy or was only partly complete, we would push it out to the clients. No problem, our next sprint would fix the bugs. Another project I worked on saw me having to attend hours and hours of meetings, filling out small cards to stick to white boards, listening to people who have no relevance to my project talking about what they were doing, and constantly giving estimates to project managers so that they could make further adjustments to later sprints. When I finally sat down to code that day, it was about 3 lines. I wasn't allowed to work on anything else, because that hadn't been assigned to this sprint. Fun.
I recently had a telephone interview with a man who spoke to me for 40 minutes straight about agile and did not ask me one single technical question. Nothing on Java, Spring, Hibernate, XML, SQL, or anything else listed on my CV. He even wanted to know whether I used physical note paper or software for details the tasks and user stories. When he asked me two days later if I would like to come in for an interview, I declined. I want to code, not work for a bureaucracy.
I remember when coding was fun and we didn't have to adopt all these so-called methods. I have no idea what NoSQL is, all I remember is someone at my last contract deciding we were going to use it and then teaching everyone how to query using JSON or Javascript or whatever. It took us a few weeks to get our heads around the idea, and I have to wonder what the benefit of writing Java-JSON-Mongo DB interfaces were over SQL. He did not do this because the project needed it, but because he had heard about the system and wanted to shoe horn it into the project. Seriously, that was the only reason.
I'm not even sure what Agile is, to be honest. I think it's just some fancy term used by managers to make it sound as if they're being efficient and know what's happening.
One has to wonder exactly what was wrong with the previous approaches. We all still had working software 6 years ago, from what I remember ...