Very unpopular opinion I think

I started at a new company and have been filling a scrum master role until they find me a replacement and I can move to the position I was supposed to be hired for and honestly, its the worst job I've ever had. Its literally hand holding and baby sitting. Its terrible. I almost got pushed in front of traffic when I asked "why cant the engineers move their own boards...?"

I earned certification in the early days. "Scrum Master" was supposed to be a team member who took on the role of interacting with external stakeholders, and help the team organize the work.

The scrum master protects the team from interruptions and un-scheduled work and facilitates planning meetings.

More recent iterations minimized the Scrum Master as a first class role. Scrum Manager sounds like a new role the process.

I did a search, came up with this gem.

All the other search results did not have "scrum manager", and the end of the video indicates this is not an official role in Scrum, but a term used for managers who are all in on the values of the scrum process.

Having worked in a lot of scrum teams in positions ranging from Jr Dev to CTO, I have become a huge proponent of scrum masters.

1. The scrum setup is that way for a reason. The Stake Holders speak for the company, the devs speak for the infrastructure, the Scrum Master speaks for the process, and the PO is also there. And none do each others speaking jobs well. The process of scrum will tend to drift back toward dev burnout without a good SM.
2. Devs shouldn't be spending their time managing tickets, we should be developing. Backlog grooming, sprint ready ticket reviews, fighting with POs, stake holders, and Support, and fretting about velocity should be left to the scrum master.
3. I will never again act as scrum master if I can help it.

And in my experience a SM becomes a full time position at about 15 devs.

Wait, are you talking about a scrum master under a different name or an actual position above that?

depends how big the project is. large projects benefit from it being broken down into multiple smaller projects and communicated from week to week to coordinate. but smaller projects, it's just a giant waste of time.

as a scrummaster who pleads incessently with management to let me actually run scrum correctly, this hits home, and it makes me sad. I could chat for hours with you about how stupid people ruin the Agile process

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

While true, that cuts both ways, a successful team is not successful because of 'scrum', it's successful because it finds a methodology that works for them, which can be in terms of scrum, but even if no one was chanting Agile buzzwords, that team would still self organize in a similar way, just without the precise buzzwords.

What's obnoxious is that a lot of folks, with a vested interest in, say, consulting, will give credit to "Agile" for teams succeeding and then simultaneously call all failures that ostensibly use Agile but fail "not true Agile". It can be harmless enough when self-organizing, but then it doesn't really matter if it is "big-A Agile" or not. People hung up on the "big-A Agile" may be expecting to cash in with consultancy money, or use it as a club to assert their authority by their self-proclaimed alignment to 'Agile'. They are advocating for Agile, therefore if you challenge anything about their direction, they will invoke the magic Agile word to silence criticism about their methods. Once an organization has "acheived Agile", ironically they frequently close the door on any consideration of methodology reform. "We are running Agile now, whatever you may think we are doing wrong the industry agrees with us because the industry uses Agile, so stop complaining".

So Agile may be technically workable, but the frustration is that it is vague enough to allow anyone to do almost anything and still 'fairly' claim Agile, but as a brand word it confers unreasonable authority for certain folks. As the most prominent brand word in the world of project management, it is further correlated with the 'default' asserted methodology of any crappy group looking toward consultancy/self-help to fix their bad team situation with a bandaid of methodology.

Really appreciate your based and realistic comment, thank you! Sound like a cool place to work at and shows, it can work out good.

I think the tool is very powerful and a benefit for all, but only when used right. Actually I find myself or at least my thoughts in almost all of your points about basic shit.

Edit: either I fckd up or the app but my reply about the cult thing was not meant to be a reply to your description and sharing

We had daily 45min+ stand-up at my old place, averaged 10 minutes per person. That team just reaaally loved meeting. Code was in de facto maintenance mode, even though there was years-long backlog and a shit tons of reasons to rework on the code base. It is like they hated coding, manager was old and he enforced coding standard like it was the early 00s, no OOP, no abstraction, bo new language features. Anyway, I disgress.

I raised the issue with the 15-25 hours of meeting per week and how little was being done, which I swear, they said was because we did not do enough "admin" and scrum work, and doubled down on the process. We were now expected to take 30min per day to write down how we spent our time to present to the team each retro.

Job was technically easy, because, well, we did very little technical stuff. I always had hated useless meetings, but I always managed to have some input on how to spend my time in othrr jobs. Someday I felt like crying in the morning before opening the mandatory webcam, thinking about the next hour of meeting, and I quit right then, I never joined another call and I kepty resignation to emails.

My intension was to make a harmless little fun about scrum masters who extensively use colors and communicate like they have a conversation with children.

Man if I had taken the fucking time to check which community this was post to, I could have saved myself a lot of typing since I wouldn't have bothered with the comment section :D Good post tho!

The last place i worked at they started pushing the same type of cringe. What made it worse was the PM/BA wasnt actually writing stories. One sprint I had 4 stories with just titles and "TBD" on the description. His boss was mad that my productivity was low when i couldnt do the work they couldn't describe.

Yeah, I've also found that having a great team lead and manager has been better than relying on a dedicated SCRUM master. (Beacuse my favorite SCRUM masters always take a promotion within a year.)

I do require my team to commit to and help me occasionally update a shared values document. I hate teams that don't have one. Teams have so many unspoken agreements that are genuinely easy to just write down.

That said, I say screw "accountability". I have the biggest paycheck on the team, so I can afford to keep the accountability to myself. My team has my back because I find them good pay and reasonable hours, not because of our of values document.

As manager, I have to say that is uncalled for. As a developer, I will say you are 100% accurate.

My intension was to make a harmless little fun about scrum masters who extensively use colors and communicate like they have a conversation with children. But holly F this escalated quickly and just sounds creepy. Like a cult where non-believers are considered evil or unholy. Do these people still live in a reality where they go to work to earn money in first line? Are they hostile to people thinking different? Sorry, but this really creeps me out.

Simplicity is great. Infantilization just makes me check out.

I don't remember the source, could have been anything from Stand Up Comedy to someone I know IRL, but I feel like they really cracked the "2 truths 1 lie" code.

• My name is Korthrun.
• I use Lemmy.
• I truly believe that this is a high value exercise that we should continue on with.

I obtained that especially new people or those who don't want to work too hard, love all of these meetings. You dont mess around with the Scrum Master or management alone or in a very small group. A democratic team stands as a whole and also falls together in the end. Otherwise you're just the one disturbing the harmony. This does not mean, I don't like Scrum, but in my opinion it is a tool that should be used very specifically and adjusted, not only by reading and praying the generic book you had in university back then.

Scrummaster here. Interesting enough, Agile was built to be completely developer driven, to reduce meetings and stress on developers and reduce waste time. Instead we have what I have coined "corporate agile". Agile has been bastardized and ruined by corporations to sneak in their bullshit.

For example, the most basic rule of Agile is that it should be Team driven. This means:

• The team should drive how many meetings happen and when they happen. (You always have a planning and daily standup, but length, time of day, how they run, should all be developer chosen)
• The team should decide kanban/sprints/sprint length, wip length, everything. They should decide what process works best for them, with hints and guidance from the scrummaster
• The team should decide what points mean and how they represent work items. Points should never be linked directly to time or be a limitation (i.e. you should never point something as '4' hours, because now you have business looking at that like it's some expectation, and all developers know that that doesn't work.

Instead I've seen

• Director/senior business people demand extra meetings, followups, random bullshit meetings that are not relevant to the developers and really should have just a PO.
• Company wide mandates on sprint length, expected capacity per sprint, meetings, times, "one size fits all" when in reality no team is the same
• Points that are treated as punishments. "You said this would get done in 26 hours". Code doesn't work that way, and all it does is teach developers to lie.

So, I'm very burnt out as a scrummaster. We get no power, and us who truly do believe in true agile are shot down continuously because people who don't understand developers or development want us to micromanage, and I hate micromanaging my teams. If they let me actually do my job I could get them all the data they need, but they think they know agile better than I do.

Thanks for letting me rant. I'm sorry Corporate Agile has failed you

Agreed in spirit, but this is the Internet, so here's my unrequested take:

As a manager, if there's only one part of the development process I'll keep, it's the retro. The retro is the critical bit that gives me insights to help get the rest unstuck.

Sprints have one and only one true purpose, I use them to tell stakeholders how long to fuck off and leave the dev team alone for, in a minimum of two week increments. I don't think my team actually gives a rip what sprint we're in.

I don't do burn charts. I've never seen the point. I'm pretty good at telling stakeholders "it's done when it's done" and that sentence takes way less time than making a chart that says the same thing.

I do track total tickets closed because a big jump up or down in that number is a a leading sign of oncoming burnout.

I've appreciated great SCRUM masters, but I've never managed to keep that role filled long term.

Agile is definitely not for everyone and every team. This is quite the irony because it was meant to be completely flexible and beside retros, all this businsss jargon was not made up by the creators of agile.

In some positions I only wished to be left alone with the relevant developers and make progress. Ultimately I get intertwined in a billion different metting to "loop me in", years later after leaving one of those companies, I like to think of the hundred of wasted meeting hours for stuff I never had to act on in the company.

So when I started in the current startup I am in, we did the anarchy approach of just give a feature to work on and a tool to track tickets for 3 years. Eventually as team leader we migrated to scrum development. And as the team has expanded I've actually gotten stricter about it.

The rituals of scrum seem pointless when you start out and with a team of less than 4 people but at 4+ people it's important just to keep track of what on earth is happening in the team. Like end of sprint allows us to work out if things are vaguely on track. If they are not we can identify where the weaknesses are. Someone took on a task estimated at 8 story points and it took 2 weeks to do, need to find out what the issue is (usually because either because there is a knowledge gap in that aspect of the system or because the task just simply hasn't been defined clearly enough and needs the product owner to give more details).

I never thought I'd be that guy who defends the scrum process but 5 years of being a team lead changes you.

Though because this system was one that evolved naturally as we grew and realised what we were doing as a company wasn't working we largely avoided the corporate bullshittery version of scrum.