Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
I just recently learned what “scrum manager” is and it sounds like a cult of useless middle managers.
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…?”
checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak. So we all know we’re just working with the window as close to the camera as possible so it looks like we’re listening
Your company and mine seem to be very different. We have agile coaches, but they mostly organise cooperation and shoulder check our stakeholders if they try to scope creep some bullshit in.
We also have agile coaches but the way my team uses jira is not at all how its supposed to be used. They are basically forcing it on us and people arent thrilled so the agile coaches are trying to mold it to what they want but they dont want it. Its a whole thing. Im also not a scrum master, Im an engineer pretending to be a scrum master as well as doing my other work and our agile coaches are…clueless for lack of a better word. Jira works great for our other teams. Just not the team Im on.
Yeah, that sucks. Let’s hope for better times my friend
Hey thanks I appreciate it. Like I said, just waiting for them to find a real scrum master for my team then I get to do my actual job but at least its pushing me into more of a “people skill” position. Trying to silver lining it haha
The temporary construct is the most durable of them all 😔
Scrum master = project manager.
Definitely not, Scrummasters should not be connected to the project at all. Their job goes directly against it, a PM is a stakeholder who will ask for everything to be done immediately, and needs to get stuff done. A Scrummaster should be neutral, and should uphold the process and defend the dev team.
Common scenario:
- PM: “I need this task done immediately”
- Scrummaster: “This task does not have any definition, and the team is already working on things. Once you have requirements we can discuss options on prioritization for next sprint”
That right there highlights where a scrummaster should be working. Most companies do treat them as neutered dogs though, and don’t give them the power. True scrummasters have the ability to push back on PMs and defend their teams, keeping developers out of it so they can stay heads down. (Less useless meetings)
A project manager should never be a stakeholder. A project manager should be managing expectations and pushing back against scope creep and ridiculous demands for immediate results as part of managing the project based on available resources and the estimates of the project team compared to overall progress. They will also address situations where different interacting parts need to be timed correctly, but that would also be the same responsibility of a scrum master, because they manage the project when using agile terms.
Most places treat project managers as neutered middle men who are implementing the will of the stakeholders, which is why so many end up being the terrible type that you are stereotyping project managers to be. Those same organizations will do the same thing to the scrum master or whatever name they give to the person who is supposed to be managing the project. You know, a project manager.
That sounds awful, I feel for you.
Wait, are you talking about a scrum master under a different name or an actual position above that?
Honestly, I just heard of the turn “scrum” the other day on an application, and after some looking into what that is, I came to the conclusion that it’s the corporate version of a Liberal Arts degree. Not completely useless, but almost.
I’m sont have any influence on that applicant, btw, so I’m not influencing someone’s life based on my half assed googling.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
From all of the replies it was to me that a Scrum Master can be very useful in specific projects that involve interplay between many departments. But in reality it seems like it’s a way for companies to avoid creating clear job requirements.
I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it’s comments.
We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.
How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don’t even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D
I’ve never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I’ll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:
- Start doing X
- Keep doing X
- Stop doing X
Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.
e.g. “The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows”
Quoting from some of the comments
Its literally hand holding and baby sitting.
That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.
checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak.
This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like “JoBob I’ll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig” or “After standup I’d like to talk to the team about XYZ”. We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says “I couldn’t figure out how to schoop the woop, so I’m still working on that.” but again our scrum master will say “Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don’t we chat it out after stand up”.
I hate that paragraph but I can’t find a good place to break it up, sorry.
Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:
- Your scrum master is fucking terrible at their job
- Your team actually does behave like a group of toddlers
- Your manager is actually a micromanager and this is just another micromanaging tool to them
- You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process
I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.
First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.
Second: There’s such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it’s a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to “type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit”.
Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren’t just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says “eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that”, we just suck it up and do it.
This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it’s crazy to me how ridiculous y’all make the process.
edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you’ll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that’s almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it’s our own fault when it happens to us.
Yay, it’s Story Time! There will be milk and cookies, right?
Right?
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Of course. Management has to be able to understand them 😉
Down with sprints! Down with weekly retros! Down with scrum masters! Down with burn down charts! Just give me a feature to work on and a tool to track tickets. Everything else can fuck off.
