Ask HN: Experience Using the Scaled Agile Framework?

My experience with it is as follows: the way it was implemented resulted in a process that was far too prescriptive, bureaucratic, heavyweight and burdensome... pretty much the complete antithesis of anything that you could call "agile". But, I should add, this likely has as much to do with the managers, scrum masters, etc. in the organization, as it does with SAFE per-se.

The simple truth is, very few (if any) LoB managers, and vanishingly few "scrum masters", really understand, internalize, and practice the core principles from the Agile Manifesto. They slap together some bullshit with bits of ceremony and practices drawn from Scrum, XP, OpenUP, RUP, Waterfall, etc., call it "Agile" and then proceed to operate in a way that mixes the very worst of a highly prescriptive, top-down, command-and-control model with the very worst of pure ad-hoc cowboy-coding. Meanwhile the LoB types are still planning based on fixed feature sets with fixed release dates, with both decided 6 months or more in the future.

Anway... I'd take the use of SAFE in an organization as a bit of a red flag, but not much more so than any organization that says "we do Agile". No you don't, there's no such thing as "Agile" as a prescriptive methodology.