It's absolutely a thing. We have a guy with no technical or product management responsibilities who is the "scrum master." He doesn't know how to use Jira, and seemingly delegates everything to one of his direct reports. Last meeting he literally phoned it in from a soccer game.

I did actually complain about him to my own manager. It didn't go well.

Yes. We had a team of 20 with 2 scrum masters, because they wanted to grow the team, and they had 2 scrum masters available. It was ridiculous. But don't worry, they will manage to fill their time with meetings. Just try to avoid them.

There were three dedicated scrum masters at a previous job - two seemed to watch Youtube all day and eventually left and the other one read about tech all day and got made redundant. The scrum masters that survived did dev work as well.

It is definitely a thing. And for big projects it can be helpful. But in most cases I think a scrum master should probably handle multiple projects if that is going to be their dedicated role.

Oh lord, yes. The scrum masters at my last gig had no technical knowledge at all. All kinds of certifications for scrum, had no idea about actual software development.

I know. When your thing is a process and not tangible work output then you need to be fired.

Absolutely a thing. Our dedicated agile lead establishes and "runs" a 15-person standup, story refinements three days a week, a short S2 standup three days a week, sprint planning, product increment (three-sprint groupings) planning and pre-planning meetings, a demo and a retrospective and a standing "team lead AMA" every sprint, and handles setting up inter- and intra-team discussions when that need is expressed in standup or via slack. Also, they maintain "Program" section on our team wiki, set up story boards and pull team velocity metrics, and generally work full time doing all the things that I would be doing for these teams as a team lead, if they weren't there.

Having been without an agile lead for a couple months this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much they do, because they're often doing things that I was just letting drop on the floor as non-emergency.