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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

I think Scrum might be defensible when used for rare, genuine emergency situations. If a make-or-break the company project with a tight deadline comes along, you might want to change it up with something like Scrum for a short time period to manage that as a reasonable, defensible choice.

But I think it's devastating to developer happiness and overall productivity if you're just running as a Scrum forever and have people with literal job-titles like "Scrum Master" who (IMO) feel pressured to create as much process as possible to justify their position. The ceremonies and process are going to grate on developers long-term. IMO, the managers will have a bad long-term sense of the effort and difficulties and progress of each sprint if you're perpetually doing that.

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> like "Scrum Master" who (IMO) feel pressured to create as much process as possible to justify their position

Having been trained and acted as a scrum master for a large tech corporation, this doesn't track with my experience at all. I, and the other "scrum masters" (which is an incredibly cringe term) I knew tried to minimize process as much as possible, and weren't concerned with finding busywork to "justify out position" -- especially because our positions were primarily devs. Being a scrum master was extra work on top of our daily duties.

In my opinion, the problems with Scrum are because of how Scrum works and what management wants to use scrum for. Being a scrum master was what convinced me that Scrum in particular is extremely problematic and that if you must use an Agile methodology, it should be one of the other ones, not Scrum.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that you and your Scrum Master peers were all top of the class and genuine in your understanding of development and desire to help facilitate project success and never acted in a self-interested way. That's a fairly big assumption, but let's roll with that.

And maybe, a really solid big-tech company with great people who "get it" can largely make Scrum work "well enough". I'm sure you oversaw a lot of products shipping successfully.

Was that because of Scrum, or in spite of it and you might have been even more successful doing something else?

Overall though, I think you recognize how Scrum might devolve in many typical situation, right?

PS: To make it clear, no disparagement is intended in anything I said or say even though the consequences of that might seem like an attack on your profession.

> Was that because of Scrum, or in spite of it and you might have been even more successful doing something else?

There's no question in my mind: in spite of it. In every place I've seen it done, Scrum has impeded quality software development, not enhanced it.

As I stated, my experience acting as a Scrum Master is what convinced me that Scrum is not a good thing.

>people with literal job-titles like "Scrum Master" who (IMO) feel pressured to create as much process as possible to justify their position

Wait till you hear about Agile Coaches™

In a scrum using firm:

I was the Team Lead of a team, and I told my management: "SCRUM will not work for our workload. We have too many shifts in priority to plan for 4 weeks at a time."

I was told I could choose any process I needed to get the job done, but we needed a "Scrum Master" to interface with the other teams. I played Scrum Master. I also had the team running on Kanban, which while imperfect, it beat the alternatives for a team that had to shift targets rapidly.

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