I've used scrum while building cool VR tools for Architects, my Research Scientist was developing new algorithms and we were building stuff like real time collaboration with view tracking and hot spot overlays, all in a scrum framework.
This is like saying "office chairs makes miserable factory-like work", Scrum is just a management tool. If your manager is making your life miserable, that's not scrums fault.
Inb4 "That's not Scrum" yes, we know.
I've worked, briefly as a contractor, in one these places before: full day sprint planning, 3 hour retrospectives, 1-2 hour standups, breakdowns of simple stories into sub stories etc. etc. ... but I didn't blame scrum and points for the fact I was miserable.
Certainly it's not 'scrum' per se that bothers me - I was carefully not saying 'agile' because I think that's fine it's just the typical method of 'doing it' that I meant, but seem to have fallen into a different trap in the process - but it is the breaking down of the job into actionable work pieces, 'tickets', and some of the ceremony around that, whether strictly 'scrum' or not.
But that's just me right, obviously some (lots of) people like it! My initial comment was that it's surprising (to me) how few seem to not like it, so I'm perfectly aware that's just my (and some few others') opinion.
I guess it's a continuum ... I have people on my team right now that are working on a single story, other people who have a few dozen this sprint. If your team is breaking down what would be a single story on my team ... I could see that being annoying.
Now, the developer working on that story has a breakdown of tasks that they are managing as sub items in the story, but that's not getting managed with story points or any other heavy weight system.
I'm reminded slightly of an article submitted here recently - https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03... (though they're not really discussing motivation as such) - it's the detachment of engineering from product, I suppose. Little 'ownership' of or time to spend on thinking about the product experience, just 'do this', 'add that'. If I compare to people I know in other professions - accounting, doctors, tax - they all work more directly with a client or case, manage their own work. Of course they have managers too, but that relationship is more like 'I need some help with this problem that has arisen, let me now brief you on what I've been doing because otherwise you have no context' or longer-term performance etc. - not 'what tiny thing(s) did you do yesterday and which tiny thing(s) will you do today' every bloody morning.
This is only useful if you want to ship changes iteratively. If you're working a on a big blob of a thing that can have waterfall-style estimation and delivery then you'll avoid all that.
> it's the detachment of engineering from product, I suppose
This is more likely the cause. The emergence of product as a ruling class over engineering is a problem. Product is a useful concept, but I think we've all assumed only a person with a Product job title can be a product owner in a team, when I think Product adds much more value as a slightly more distant integration point for engineering, marketing, sales, customer support, legal, etc.
It seems that among the cool kids, "waterfall" is considered a bad thing that everyone should avoid.
I admit I miss the days when I could have spent weeks working on a project without being interrupted by daily "agile" meetings.
I think if there's no team you need to talk to very often and you're working in a pretty static environment then you should be fine. It's just that a lot of those nice problems are harder to come by these days.
Those are not common in my experience either. Perhaps I've just avoided working at depressing places :-)
I've never worked somewhere which actually named things 'stand-ups', 'points', 'stories', 'retros', or even 'sprints'. I'm familiar with the concepts, both from general reading, and thanks to someone who taught me all about Scrum, which was enough to put me off both Scrum and it's perverted form of Agile. If I hear those things mentioned in an interview, I soon have more questions, because there's "good Agile" and "bad Agile".
Sprints have occurred, in that there have been places with regular meeting and review cycles. That can work really well, imho. But even then, from the sound of it I've avoided the kinds of places where people feel under constant 2-weekly pressure to count up story points and highlight competitive ticket metrics.
I have a feeling I'll be starting at a place like that soon though. They use Jira, require a ticket for every PR, and by the sound of it are doomed to take a very long time to do anything. The tickets are written for accountability and reporting every change to management, so not written for developers. The approach smells like an anti-pattern to me. I don't expect to stay long; it's just a contract. I wouldn't choose a place like that for a long-term position, but I'm looking forward to the experience to find out what it's like with an open mind. I was hired as an interim team lead, but politics already changed what the role is since signing, and it's also been made clear that TLs there don't get to decide how anything is actually done. We'll see. I tend to bring new energy to a system.