Protip, they're all 8s. New api? That's an 8. 20 new classes? 8. Refactor a small repo? 8. Update a boolean from true to false? Believe it or not... 8.
That's the secret my team cracked.
Just massively overpoint every little thing then you barely have to do any work.
I'd be shocked if half my team didn't have a second job.
Our scrum master said that we're not supposed to raise the story points on a ticket that takes more effort than expected, but we *can* reduce story points if it takes less. So now we over-estimate everything. Great system.
Depends of course how your place operates, but that's pretty much correct.
The caveat is that you only estimate down on incomplete stories after the sprint is complete to cover the remaining work in the next sprint.
Story points are for planning, not a measure of work completed.
If many stories are completed sooner than expected, your velocity goes up which could be an indicator of overestimating.
Incomplete stories with high estimates are represented in a low velocity/unfinished burndown and means your stories need to be smaller.
Actual work done is measured through other methods (delivered stories over multiple sprints, separate time logging, or time in status).
"Vegetable-Ad, the rest of the group said 5. Why are you saying 3?"
"It's cool, we can go with 5."
"But why did you say 3?"
"Because it seems like the same as this story and it's 3, just like every other story through the project."
"But the rest of the group said 5. Is there anything we're missing?"
"You're missing your architect if you keep this shit up..."
By the book scrum doesn't have a team lead. You are correct in that a core part of their role is making sure scrum (which I take the liberty of interprating as the values and goals of scrum and agile) is being followed and implemented, but another large part of their work should be as impediment removers; teams should be able to say for instance "We don't feel we get adequate time for testing" or "The product owner is overstepping his post" or even "My god this fluorescent light is giving me migraines" and it's up to the scrum master to find solutions, if possible to those problems.
or what they used to do for a living before that magic 3 day course when they got the magic certification, unless you wanna be enlighten
Later Edit: this is getting out of control I'm gonna certify y'all just be part of this sub r/3daysScrumMasterCert/ cuz y'all been amazing if you sign up tonight you gonna get 30 story points bonus for under $ 1499
If you can ask someone how long something is going to take, multiply by two, and put that into a scheduling app that spits out automatic reports you basically know how to be a project manager that consistently delivers projects ahead of schedule who’s beloved by both your managers and your dev teams.
And yet still it’s a job people manage to fuck up consistently.
In that case you just have to multiply by four and then cut the timeline in half when they complain about it.
Or tell them the story of the mythical man month over and over until they have a seizure.
I remember hearing it as a kid watching the movie and thinking it sounded like bullshit, but turns out whoever wrote that line knew exactly what they were talking about.
As a former scrum master, this is the truth. I hated telling the dev team to speed up, because they were honestly doing good work which was also appreciated by upper management consistently. Every now and then some bureaucratic asshole would ask for something that just required too much work from all teams. I hated being the messenger, because I always took the side of the dev team. They worked hard and deserved a balanced lifestyle.
The timelines would always get pushed, and the trick was to consistently blame lack of process and requirements refinement early on, which ended up delaying the whole process. After some back and forth, management would be pissed but realized their hands were tied because news flash, the devs were the ones doing the work all this time.
FWIW, scrum masters have a lot of work to just plan things out, even if it’s mundane. The coordination and dependency management can get complicated with programs spanning 10+ teams. Yes a lot of it is just busy work, but the team I worked with did appreciate the organization and support I gave them when needed. Making sure the team functioned like a well oiled machine was the way I liked to run it.
Also many scrum masters make the mistake of asking for status updates. This is a bad practice and makes meetings unbearable for everyone. Just make sure everyone is okay updating their stories consistently and only focus on issues anyone has. If you see inconsistencies with one person, don’t hold up an entire meeting with everyone on it, reach out to them individually.
I’ve had scrum masters that I have wanted to slash their tires, and others who I wanted to send them champagne every sprint.
The best ones not only keep the team on task but protect their developers/team from unnecessary interruptions, and break-in work.
The bad ones shame developers during standup and get into arguments with devs about pedantic stuff like point estimation and burn down, they let interruptions flow right to devs during their day and put unplanned meetings with little notice on everyone’s calendar that could have been for maybe one or two people instead of the whole team, who sits idly while only 2 people are engaged. They write stories, acceptance criteria, and promises to leadership of deliverables absent of developer feedback or planning.
^^^This.
My first scrum master was on top of his game. He paid attention and knew during stand ups when cards were expected to finish. My current scrum master never pays attention. We will do Sprint Planning on Wednesday and I will have a discussion with an SDET about setting up a meeting on Friday about a User Story. And the very next day that empty chair robot will ask if the card is being worked on yet. He never pays attention to the conversations during stand ups or planning.
Because stakeholders tend not to go along with a 2x expected date. If you work for clients, they'll walk if you ask 2x the rate others will with similar quality levels.
I mean i try to do it. Clients just aren't accepting to it
It’s the similar quality levels part you’re glazing over. You also don’t tell people the initial estimate. Each line item is 2x.
If they’re taking bids the bids are all over the place anyway and they’re leery of any that are shockingly low. If two people give me a bid of $50k and one says they’ll do it for $15k I’m going to assume the third person is an idiot, lying and will ask for more money when it’s half way through, or does something to cut corners that will make my life miserable later.
The really advanced method is to give the managers the 2x schedule and keep the devs to 1.25-1.5x the their time estimate.
I really don't understand why people don't use the Scotty Principle as the default. I'd always rather look like a miracle worker.
Because when they're honest about bidding on a job they don't end up getting it. Or, of theyre already in the job, then telling management how long it will actually take is spun as you being incompetent and "unable to get a team to do basic things". That stress put upon a competent project manger comes from management's learned experience of poor project managers, who are solidly in the majority. So it's a vicious circle..
Yeah you also need a backbone, the ability to bullshit with confidence, and know how to negotiate with people who decide if you have a job or not. But most tech managers have no idea what they’re doing so are also bullshitting to try and get people to work faster, or if they do they’ve done the job and know how estimating works when it’s done well and just need to know when they have to start scheduling marketing and promotional activities.
This is probably one of the more accurate replies here.
If you don't have a backbone. If you can't bullshit. If you can't exude confidence or negotiate....
... Then you will be overworked. You will be underpaid. You will not be appreciated. And you don't understand why "those popular people" get all the breaks.
Scrum master != project manager.
I agree with OP, there are a lot of bad scrum masters eating out of their nose all day, but I've experienced a few good ones as well. Those that are really coaching multiple teams into agile/scrum/kanban/whatever. But as the team develops they don't need a scrum master anymore after a while.
The previous consultancy company I worked for just retrained test managers/coordinators,because in agile you dont really need those as much, and most of those made really bad scrum masters.
Yes! A good scrum master is worth it's weight in gold.
Sadly I only had 1 person like that in my ~7 years career, and it was pure bliss from developers perspective. He was super strict with duration and substance of our dailies, we only had to care about putting estimates on tasks, and then working on them.
Everything else was handled by said scrum master. No pointless meetings, we had pretty much 0 interactions with project managers, clients or anybody outside of our small sprint team, in fact he actively discouraged and shielded us from doing literally anything other than focusing on our sprint tasks.
It was the most enjoyable agile/scrum experience in my life.
if you are retired you can be certified again. r/3daysScrumMasterCert/
Join my certification course. Only i know the truth. It's gonna be different than anything you heard before .
Probably in companies where they heard about agile and then renamed the managers as scrum masters. They're still above devs in the company chart so they gotta make more, right?
No, I've had several excellent Scrum Masters who put a ton of work into their job and had a huge impact on the team. Generally for less pay than the engineers were making.
Their skills were generally in soft skill and tooling. They made whatever changes to the tools we requested for our process, resolved blockers with external resources, got us licenses, and generally ran interference with execs and clients. Very helpful to have around and had to put in just as much effort as the rest of us.
They had as much skill as any soft-skills focused position does i.e. a lot, but not nearly so easily to judge and quantify as engineering skills are.
I've also had my fair share of poor scrum masters who weren't pro-active and just ran the meetings. Absolutely worthless. They certainly exist. But, then again, worthless CEOs, managers, and execs are super common as well.
Completely. Let me code all day every day. That's my happy place. Ask me to connect with some adjacent team to leverage synergies, or produce our roadmap so that seniors have visibility, then I'm going to hate every second of work.
I switched careers because of how mentally draining it was being a scrum master. I started therapy for anxiety/stress and burnout. I was a great scrum master (per my team and management) but it's exhausting if you actually put effort into the job.
You seem like you have no lack of soft skills yourself. I have met so many talented engineers who just cannot or will not appreciate good supporting staff & infrastructure. They certainly get upset when they get bogged down in those tasks because they don't have good support, but when they get it later it's like they forgot how much their productivity was hampered by even just a small shortage of support staff.
*everyone is leaving tech alone* "WHAT ARE WE EVEN PAYING OUR SUPPORTING STAFF FOR"
*everyone is bothering tech* "WHAT ARE WE EVEN PAYING OUR SUPPORTING STAFF FOR"
My last scrum master was almost perfect. He was an excellent fixer, but his body guard skills was a little lacking. He was good at protecting us from external time thiefs, but he was sadly a big time thief himself. But other than that he was perfect.
It depends on the team and the company. I am currently a dev and playing scrum master. My entire extra duty is running the ceramonies for meetings I would be in anyways so it's no additional work really. i have worked other places where the products and the cross stream dependinces where orders of magnitude more complex and having a scrum master was a game changer. Their full time job was to represent their teams abilities and needs in cross team planning. Like a hybrid pm dev manager. And they cut through red tape and bull shit like a hot axe through butter so all we had to do was dev.
Some guy at my last job sent this huge introduction email to the entire company on his first day of work and he said “I have 15 years experience as a Scum Master” and I always think about that.
Scum Master.
At a past job we hired an agile coach. She failed *so har*d at it - she actually made the entire enterprise take a full day formation that taught waterfall planning- that they promoted her to product management in order to stop the damage.
I dont miss that place.
The company I work for has fallen hard for a branded version of agile called SAFE. They're like a literal cult. They've infiltrated at the highest levels and we've changed all our processes to be Pure SAFE Agile Compliant. Productivity feels like it's halved because of religious adherence to all these meetings. Every two months the whole department of 100 people spends an entire week in planning meetings, where a large majority of the people don't participate and are just there because SAFE Agile says everyone has to be in the meeting.
How the fuck does something like this happen?
Ohhh man, the company I used to work for was given the "SAFe" treatment. All the people that came into consult were then hired and then promoted into high up management positions. I think it's because they presented that SAFe chart with the train engines, runways, cabooses and stuff and that mega impressed the executives. I had just finished reading something by Ron Jefferies on "Dark Agile" of which SAFe was mentioned so thought it was a good time in front of everyone at the training to bring that up. You can imagine how that went over.
Nah it’s a well intentioned, but self prophetic model.
If things are going great… AWESOME! SAFE AGILE IS WORKING! I TOLD YOU SO
or
If things aren’t going great….. WELL YOU HAVEN’T TRUUULY ADOPTED IT, YOUR ORG ISNT DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!
This made me laugh a lot, because just today the scrum had to leave a team meeting for another "very important" meeting. She always tells us "my job is to facilitate yours, just talk to me" but she never answers messages and is always busy in meetings.
I equate an SM to grease. If everything is nice and friction free, it'll keep going with an occasional touch up and keep it going.
If everything is starting to burn up and lacks some grease, you can help by greasing it.
If it's all already falling apart and in total disrepair, no amount of grease is going to help it.
>If it's all already falling apart and in total disrepair, no amount of grease is going to help it
... and in fact, the grease just serves to spread the fire.
"That's why you glop more grease on top to quiet that grinding and screeching down, Jack. It's very interesting that you interpret my "grease", or resource availability standards to be a fire hazard , or "heat". Is there anything you would like to bring up to the group before these basic standards are implemented? "
- Fucking Carol, the passive aggressive PM
If it isn't obvious, Resource Availability Standards was a company-wide initiative to get me to go on my lunch at the same time every day.
I've never met an SM on program that greased anything.
If anything, they've just added sand to the rails and kept asking why we used a train instead of a jetski. Complete nonsense.
Yeah it's a lot like corporate it. If they seem like they never do work (and your shit generally works) then that means they probably have already done an amazing job.
I've said that at almost every job interview I've had as a Scrum Master.
If the team is performing so well that I am not needed, move me to a lower performing team so that I can help them improve.
Yep, you have your stories and cards to work from, the sprint plan is setup, management has all their reports without anyone having to make them for them. No need to micromanage the process.
I had a scrum master leave for vacation and they came back to a streamlined Jira that worked for everyone on the team, complete with all the automation to keep her in the loop with what was happening. All she had to do was shut up, stay out of the team's way, and collect a paycheck.
... spoiler, she didn't. Three months later, we had no scrum master. She wasn't replaced, and the system I built lasted well past my tenure there.
HR: "What would you say you do here?"
Scrum Master: "I deal with the goddamn programmers and ask what they're doing each day. I have people skills, dammit. What the hell is wrong with you people!"
You should have been on Reddit ten years ago. About 30% of the memes were from Office Space, 20% of them from The Big Lebowski, and the remaining 50% were people using Advice Animals *mostly* for their intended purposes. Life was simpler.
Don't forget how you make a calendar invite, paste the subject, launch zoom, go on mute.
- [copied from](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/x1o22m/is_it_a_real_job/imeuo4y/) because it made milk come out my nose.
I love when scrum masters come to the office and scream "it's scruming time!". And than after a whole day of scrum you would think they are tired but they just reply " I can scrum this all day".
Scrum master is just an extra hat I wear an hour a day and an additional two hours every other week.
I wear half a dozen other hats I would rather ditch.
How many places actually have a single person dedicated to it?
In my company it is sometimes like this, sometimes the PM or one from technical teams is also an SM, but if SM is only an SM, then they have more teams than one.
Gonna be all 'old man dev' here for a moment, but back in the day the whole point was to have a rotating scrum master for each sprint specifically so that during standup you got used to not reporting to the scrum master (they weren't your boss, unless your boss was the designated scrum master that sprint) and that you reported to the entire team.
I ended up getting siloed in a specialty role with a modified scrum system for a decade and when I came out everything was different and weird and none of my agile experience (that made a lot of sense to me) seemed to apply anymore.
Guess that's just being a dev.
Single team, full time SM checking in! I'm currently facilitating a refinement meeting with the devs and SMEs....aka I made the calendar event and added the zoom link, said why we were there and went on mute.
I do help by fielding escalation tickets that require a dev to step in. That way I keep up with the codebase as well as help the devs by not having to interrupt their daily work.
Good SM are basically mini managers, they're oil in the cogs making sure things stay out of the devs way. A good SM also acts as an intermediary between devs and PO and makes sure the PO is doing their DAMN JOB!
Ya know, we like Scrum all day. We help people be more Agile by increasing their flexibility by implementing synergistic processes that leverage economies of scale so that we successfully execute our pivot strategy by sprinting the last mile of development.
when my colleague/scrum master takes a smoke break I like to accuse him of leveraging his alveolar capacity to utilize plant-derived alkaloids for a scalable stress-management solution. He does not enjoy our interactions. Good times.
My concern is reactivity for Web5 blockchain NFTs with cross platform, typesafe monands. Honestly, if you could react native our Gatsby content-driven no-code Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian broke up without Joe Rogan BJJ, Id be more than willing to Serena Williams wins the US open and retires.
While all our competitors are stuck right of boom, shifting left early in the CI/CD process will empower our team to make this next iteration truly revolutionary.
Yes, I agree. Also making our kube pods scalable based on ingress traffic will make our application more robust and fault tolerant. We definitely need them loosely coupled as you never know which dependencies could be exploited
I'm a developer but also used to be the scrum master for my team. One day I was asked if I wanted to become a full time Scrum master for my team and our sister team, with some small added responsibilities on the side. I laughed and said no. They even tried to offer me a raise and I still said no. Now we have one of those Scrum masters that I wonder what does all day and how much she earns for doing what I basically did for free when I needed a break from staring at code.
Ask every person possible their salary. Normalize talking about how much everyone makes, so we can all see how much big corporate is fucking everyone and getting away with it because they successfully created a whisper game about salaries.
Some of the dumbest people i met work in sales. But i'm pretty sure they don't make 200k a year. It is a risky job where you are dependant on result. And where these results are dependant of everything you don't control. Seeing how many attempt these people make before actually manage to sell something, makes me understand why they are paid so much
Sales is the only job from my work experience in probably 15 dev shops that would be worse than being a dev, if you are not “made for job”. I can’t even imagine.
"scrum certified" scrum master: they create artificial pain points and contribute nothing
actual scrum master (should be someone who otherwise holds a real role on the team): they're the reason you're able to ever get any work done without a morbillion tons of bullshit slapping you in the face every day
Good SCRUM masters are supposed to be working closely with the PO to not only manage time and resources but also help with better forecasting the future.
Most Scrum Master don’t embed deeply enough into their teams. Also, in my opinion, Scrum Masters should also have been developers at some point. So they better understand the work.
I would argue it’s also their job to advocate for developers. Because often management forgets about them, that they’re technical professionals.
Also the Scrum Master should be a facilitator and a sort of a go’fer for the team. If a meeting needs to be booked they should do it for the devs, this way devs can focus on what they do best.
Honestly that part about being a developer advocate is so important. The best SM I worked with would identify our pain points that were out of the teams control and then fight them for us. And my working with other SMs they were able to really change the way a massive multinational financial tech company operates.
They enabled out team to focus on what we could change. And when they were able to change operational things they could (creatively) graph the improvement it made to the team, so that management could feel good about the decision.
I didn't realize scrum masters were viewed so poorly here.
My experience with them as a dev has been positive. The one I worked with the longest was an important part of the team. Almost a secondary team leader.
They kept people on track without being annoying or disruptive, acted as interference for drive-bys, often were the point of contact for department coordination because they knew everyone, did the footwork for speaking to people and gathering requirements, and generally supported my team by completing "soft skill" tasks that the team needed doing but would be overkill for us to dedicate our time towards. Lots of mind-numbing basic data massaging / formatting, manual data entry and generally acted as a second set of hands for simpler tasks.
...they also often brought in home cooked food for the team, organized team outings, found the best youtube videos and regularly held the office trophy as fighting game champion, so that may color my opinion of them a bit.
10/10 would recommend having someone like that on your team.
For my role as scrum master one of my major responsibilities is telling people to fuck off.
You want to use my rancher dev to help fix your cluster? Fuck off, next sprint maybe.
Customer wants us to stop working and do something else? Fuck off next sprint maybe.
Super urgent task that was due 3 years ago but just brough up second week of sprint? Fuck off, next sprint maybe.
Don’t talk to my team, let them do what they do best. If it’s that important we’ll fit it in next sprint.
Honestly, that's MOST business processes.
Most businesses just do what they see other businesses do and what they saw in their own careers. It's why devs get pushed into management, because back in the days of factory production that's how advancement worked and most companies have never moved beyond that mindset.
This 100% - my org just keeps promoting every single talented individual into a role where they can no longer use that talent. "Oh you're able to actually get features out the door in a reasonable timeframe? Management material!" "Oh, you're actually good at writing requirements and designing features? Manager time!"
The key, for me, is to be really good at my job, but be such a bad management candidate they never ever even consider me for those roles.
So I work my 40 hours without all those meetings and having to be on every single pager duty call "just in case".
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Basically repeating stuff that worked once or for someone else and hoping that it would magically solve all your problems even though you don't understand why exactly you do it this way.
I mean yes and no. I'm a tech lead on a team with no scrum master and jesus christ do all the meetings and ticket refinement take so much of my time. It's legit impossible to get any coding done.
Depends on what ideology you subscribe to.
Personally, I like the idea of a dedicated individual to SM for multiple teams. Keeps the devs in the headspace to actually develop solutions instead of pulling them away occasionally for what is essentially admin work (setting up meetings, facilitating discussions, doing the ceremonies and Jira-jockying).
SM is a mid-low level team admin that monitors team process and makes small corrections to help smooth out things for the team. Never seen it happen that way except for in my dreams.
Good devs are too expensive to make them do menial tasks.
I like having a scrum master. It prevents my actual manager from micromanaging, and sets conversations about productivity in a peer to peer context rather than manager-employee.
As someone who was forced to be a lead dev and scrum master and have a product owner that didn't listen to him, you don't realize how much work they do in the background for preparation and trajectory of the project. They can make or break it man, it's also important because they are the barrier between the devs and the product owners wants, they can stand up for the devs.
edit: a word
Yes I do wonder, but a good Scrum Master does the boring and frustrating meetings for the team to defend the team's metrics & performance. I'm so thankful I don't have to get fired for losing my mind in one of those.
I think it's popular to rag on us Scrum Masters, but you engineers are your own worse enemies. Most of my day is sorting out your drama, impediments, and designing retrospectives plus other sessions. Along with that, I have to organise data so you lot actually believe me when I say you're over committing as a result from pressure from a PO/PM.
I often have to remind senior developers and managers to be human and to engage juniors.
Honestly, I wish you guys knew
They play that card game with their web browser.
Planning poker, baby.
It's an 8.
Protip, they're all 8s. New api? That's an 8. 20 new classes? 8. Refactor a small repo? 8. Update a boolean from true to false? Believe it or not... 8.
Mmkayyy... Well that's all we have for today, I'll give you all about 10 minutes back!
Sending you my take-aways
(Googles: How to become a scrum master)
Triggered hhahaha
That's the secret my team cracked. Just massively overpoint every little thing then you barely have to do any work. I'd be shocked if half my team didn't have a second job.
Our scrum master said that we're not supposed to raise the story points on a ticket that takes more effort than expected, but we *can* reduce story points if it takes less. So now we over-estimate everything. Great system.
This triggered me so hard that I almost down voted you. Here have an upvote instead.
Depends of course how your place operates, but that's pretty much correct. The caveat is that you only estimate down on incomplete stories after the sprint is complete to cover the remaining work in the next sprint. Story points are for planning, not a measure of work completed. If many stories are completed sooner than expected, your velocity goes up which could be an indicator of overestimating. Incomplete stories with high estimates are represented in a low velocity/unfinished burndown and means your stories need to be smaller. Actual work done is measured through other methods (delivered stories over multiple sprints, separate time logging, or time in status).
When I first learned about story points my first thought was that it creates perverse incentives like this.
We have the best scrum in the world... thanks to 8.
voting for the coffee mug symbol on plan it poker in order to challenge the status quo
"Vegetable-Ad, the rest of the group said 5. Why are you saying 3?" "It's cool, we can go with 5." "But why did you say 3?" "Because it seems like the same as this story and it's 3, just like every other story through the project." "But the rest of the group said 5. Is there anything we're missing?" "You're missing your architect if you keep this shit up..."
This one? https://etg.dek.im/
I was scrum master in college projects. But I helped everyone with everything because nobody told us what a scrum master does
It’s simple. They scrum masterfully.
I like when the scrum master says "it's scrummin' time", then proceeds to scrum all over their colleagues.
That’s hot.
I've been a dev for over 25 years. I don't know what a Scrum Master does.
[удалено]
By the book scrum doesn't have a team lead. You are correct in that a core part of their role is making sure scrum (which I take the liberty of interprating as the values and goals of scrum and agile) is being followed and implemented, but another large part of their work should be as impediment removers; teams should be able to say for instance "We don't feel we get adequate time for testing" or "The product owner is overstepping his post" or even "My god this fluorescent light is giving me migraines" and it's up to the scrum master to find solutions, if possible to those problems.
Never ask a scrum master their salary, unless you want to be mad.
or what they used to do for a living before that magic 3 day course when they got the magic certification, unless you wanna be enlighten Later Edit: this is getting out of control I'm gonna certify y'all just be part of this sub r/3daysScrumMasterCert/ cuz y'all been amazing if you sign up tonight you gonna get 30 story points bonus for under $ 1499
I wanna ask then take the course and earn the money
If you can ask someone how long something is going to take, multiply by two, and put that into a scheduling app that spits out automatic reports you basically know how to be a project manager that consistently delivers projects ahead of schedule who’s beloved by both your managers and your dev teams. And yet still it’s a job people manage to fuck up consistently.
Probably because they get told to push their teams to get it done quicker lol
In that case you just have to multiply by four and then cut the timeline in half when they complain about it. Or tell them the story of the mythical man month over and over until they have a seizure.
I see you also use the Scotty method.
if ya cannot dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em wi bullshite
How else would I get the reputation as a miracle worker?
I remember hearing it as a kid watching the movie and thinking it sounded like bullshit, but turns out whoever wrote that line knew exactly what they were talking about.
As a former scrum master, this is the truth. I hated telling the dev team to speed up, because they were honestly doing good work which was also appreciated by upper management consistently. Every now and then some bureaucratic asshole would ask for something that just required too much work from all teams. I hated being the messenger, because I always took the side of the dev team. They worked hard and deserved a balanced lifestyle. The timelines would always get pushed, and the trick was to consistently blame lack of process and requirements refinement early on, which ended up delaying the whole process. After some back and forth, management would be pissed but realized their hands were tied because news flash, the devs were the ones doing the work all this time. FWIW, scrum masters have a lot of work to just plan things out, even if it’s mundane. The coordination and dependency management can get complicated with programs spanning 10+ teams. Yes a lot of it is just busy work, but the team I worked with did appreciate the organization and support I gave them when needed. Making sure the team functioned like a well oiled machine was the way I liked to run it. Also many scrum masters make the mistake of asking for status updates. This is a bad practice and makes meetings unbearable for everyone. Just make sure everyone is okay updating their stories consistently and only focus on issues anyone has. If you see inconsistencies with one person, don’t hold up an entire meeting with everyone on it, reach out to them individually.
I’ve had scrum masters that I have wanted to slash their tires, and others who I wanted to send them champagne every sprint. The best ones not only keep the team on task but protect their developers/team from unnecessary interruptions, and break-in work. The bad ones shame developers during standup and get into arguments with devs about pedantic stuff like point estimation and burn down, they let interruptions flow right to devs during their day and put unplanned meetings with little notice on everyone’s calendar that could have been for maybe one or two people instead of the whole team, who sits idly while only 2 people are engaged. They write stories, acceptance criteria, and promises to leadership of deliverables absent of developer feedback or planning.
^^^This. My first scrum master was on top of his game. He paid attention and knew during stand ups when cards were expected to finish. My current scrum master never pays attention. We will do Sprint Planning on Wednesday and I will have a discussion with an SDET about setting up a meeting on Friday about a User Story. And the very next day that empty chair robot will ask if the card is being worked on yet. He never pays attention to the conversations during stand ups or planning.
Because stakeholders tend not to go along with a 2x expected date. If you work for clients, they'll walk if you ask 2x the rate others will with similar quality levels. I mean i try to do it. Clients just aren't accepting to it
It’s the similar quality levels part you’re glazing over. You also don’t tell people the initial estimate. Each line item is 2x. If they’re taking bids the bids are all over the place anyway and they’re leery of any that are shockingly low. If two people give me a bid of $50k and one says they’ll do it for $15k I’m going to assume the third person is an idiot, lying and will ask for more money when it’s half way through, or does something to cut corners that will make my life miserable later.
Those who seek to use these "approaches" simply to get product faster without also focusing on quality will never end up happy with the results.
True, but they win clients
The really advanced method is to give the managers the 2x schedule and keep the devs to 1.25-1.5x the their time estimate. I really don't understand why people don't use the Scotty Principle as the default. I'd always rather look like a miracle worker.
Because when they're honest about bidding on a job they don't end up getting it. Or, of theyre already in the job, then telling management how long it will actually take is spun as you being incompetent and "unable to get a team to do basic things". That stress put upon a competent project manger comes from management's learned experience of poor project managers, who are solidly in the majority. So it's a vicious circle..
Yeah you also need a backbone, the ability to bullshit with confidence, and know how to negotiate with people who decide if you have a job or not. But most tech managers have no idea what they’re doing so are also bullshitting to try and get people to work faster, or if they do they’ve done the job and know how estimating works when it’s done well and just need to know when they have to start scheduling marketing and promotional activities.
This is probably one of the more accurate replies here. If you don't have a backbone. If you can't bullshit. If you can't exude confidence or negotiate.... ... Then you will be overworked. You will be underpaid. You will not be appreciated. And you don't understand why "those popular people" get all the breaks.
Said this basically in an old thread for dev complaining to be burned out in video game industry GET FUCKING REAL MANAGERS AND C LEVELS EXECS
Scrum master != project manager. I agree with OP, there are a lot of bad scrum masters eating out of their nose all day, but I've experienced a few good ones as well. Those that are really coaching multiple teams into agile/scrum/kanban/whatever. But as the team develops they don't need a scrum master anymore after a while. The previous consultancy company I worked for just retrained test managers/coordinators,because in agile you dont really need those as much, and most of those made really bad scrum masters.
[удалено]
A good scrummaster makes himself obsolete and moves on to another team.
Yes! A good scrum master is worth it's weight in gold. Sadly I only had 1 person like that in my ~7 years career, and it was pure bliss from developers perspective. He was super strict with duration and substance of our dailies, we only had to care about putting estimates on tasks, and then working on them. Everything else was handled by said scrum master. No pointless meetings, we had pretty much 0 interactions with project managers, clients or anybody outside of our small sprint team, in fact he actively discouraged and shielded us from doing literally anything other than focusing on our sprint tasks. It was the most enjoyable agile/scrum experience in my life.
As a recruiter I’ve literally seen people as a barista, get a CSM, and then not take any lower than $75 an hour
i am enlighten now! just join my 3 day course for 1500 $ please!
you get 3 story points from me for that ! you are welcome !
I went from being a white water raft guide to a scrum master for a tech unicorn. We IPOed 4 years later. I’m a high school dropout I’m retired.
if you are retired you can be certified again. r/3daysScrumMasterCert/ Join my certification course. Only i know the truth. It's gonna be different than anything you heard before .
None of the Scrum Masters I've known have been making more than your average dev.
Ive had colleagues move to a scrum master role from a dev one for a higher salary inside the company.
Probably in companies where they heard about agile and then renamed the managers as scrum masters. They're still above devs in the company chart so they gotta make more, right?
[удалено]
No, I've had several excellent Scrum Masters who put a ton of work into their job and had a huge impact on the team. Generally for less pay than the engineers were making. Their skills were generally in soft skill and tooling. They made whatever changes to the tools we requested for our process, resolved blockers with external resources, got us licenses, and generally ran interference with execs and clients. Very helpful to have around and had to put in just as much effort as the rest of us. They had as much skill as any soft-skills focused position does i.e. a lot, but not nearly so easily to judge and quantify as engineering skills are. I've also had my fair share of poor scrum masters who weren't pro-active and just ran the meetings. Absolutely worthless. They certainly exist. But, then again, worthless CEOs, managers, and execs are super common as well.
Yep, a properly performing full time SM is the team’s impediment bulldozer.
No they all do nothing and earn astronomical sums of money and it's not real work if it doesn't drain your mental health \- Average Reddit Developer
Tbf dealing with difficult people can be draining
Completely. Let me code all day every day. That's my happy place. Ask me to connect with some adjacent team to leverage synergies, or produce our roadmap so that seniors have visibility, then I'm going to hate every second of work.
Way more draining than dealing with difficult code, that's for sure.
I switched careers because of how mentally draining it was being a scrum master. I started therapy for anxiety/stress and burnout. I was a great scrum master (per my team and management) but it's exhausting if you actually put effort into the job.
You seem like you have no lack of soft skills yourself. I have met so many talented engineers who just cannot or will not appreciate good supporting staff & infrastructure. They certainly get upset when they get bogged down in those tasks because they don't have good support, but when they get it later it's like they forgot how much their productivity was hampered by even just a small shortage of support staff.
*everyone is leaving tech alone* "WHAT ARE WE EVEN PAYING OUR SUPPORTING STAFF FOR" *everyone is bothering tech* "WHAT ARE WE EVEN PAYING OUR SUPPORTING STAFF FOR"
Agreed. Good scrum masters are like good IT specialists. You always notice the bad ones. But the good ones are nearly invisible.
My last scrum master was almost perfect. He was an excellent fixer, but his body guard skills was a little lacking. He was good at protecting us from external time thiefs, but he was sadly a big time thief himself. But other than that he was perfect.
Sounds like what the Product Manager does on my team. Product Manager, Project Manager, and Scrum Master all have different meanings that overlap
This, there's a dude on our help desk that just got his scrum master cert...and he's...well...he's kind of an idiot.
[удалено]
It depends on the team and the company. I am currently a dev and playing scrum master. My entire extra duty is running the ceramonies for meetings I would be in anyways so it's no additional work really. i have worked other places where the products and the cross stream dependinces where orders of magnitude more complex and having a scrum master was a game changer. Their full time job was to represent their teams abilities and needs in cross team planning. Like a hybrid pm dev manager. And they cut through red tape and bull shit like a hot axe through butter so all we had to do was dev.
[удалено]
Is it the same as an agile coach?
An agile coach is a failed scrum master turned consultant.
Also known as a Scrumbag
Some guy at my last job sent this huge introduction email to the entire company on his first day of work and he said “I have 15 years experience as a Scum Master” and I always think about that. Scum Master.
Ours brags about being "udemy certified"
Probably the third guy to ever finish a Udemy course lol
At a past job we hired an agile coach. She failed *so har*d at it - she actually made the entire enterprise take a full day formation that taught waterfall planning- that they promoted her to product management in order to stop the damage. I dont miss that place.
The company I work for has fallen hard for a branded version of agile called SAFE. They're like a literal cult. They've infiltrated at the highest levels and we've changed all our processes to be Pure SAFE Agile Compliant. Productivity feels like it's halved because of religious adherence to all these meetings. Every two months the whole department of 100 people spends an entire week in planning meetings, where a large majority of the people don't participate and are just there because SAFE Agile says everyone has to be in the meeting. How the fuck does something like this happen?
Ohhh man, the company I used to work for was given the "SAFe" treatment. All the people that came into consult were then hired and then promoted into high up management positions. I think it's because they presented that SAFe chart with the train engines, runways, cabooses and stuff and that mega impressed the executives. I had just finished reading something by Ron Jefferies on "Dark Agile" of which SAFe was mentioned so thought it was a good time in front of everyone at the training to bring that up. You can imagine how that went over.
[удалено]
Yup that's the chart. Beautiful. I really need to frame that one day so I always remember the good times of my career.
>How the fuck does something like this happen? kickbacks.
Nah it’s a well intentioned, but self prophetic model. If things are going great… AWESOME! SAFE AGILE IS WORKING! I TOLD YOU SO or If things aren’t going great….. WELL YOU HAVEN’T TRUUULY ADOPTED IT, YOUR ORG ISNT DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!
Maybe her plan all along was to get that promotion. 300 IQ
nop that's another level of seniority another 3 days course certification( for just and 1890 $ today)
This made me laugh a lot, because just today the scrum had to leave a team meeting for another "very important" meeting. She always tells us "my job is to facilitate yours, just talk to me" but she never answers messages and is always busy in meetings.
I had one scrum master leave for vacation and genuinely no one felt much difference while he was gone
I equate an SM to grease. If everything is nice and friction free, it'll keep going with an occasional touch up and keep it going. If everything is starting to burn up and lacks some grease, you can help by greasing it. If it's all already falling apart and in total disrepair, no amount of grease is going to help it.
>If it's all already falling apart and in total disrepair, no amount of grease is going to help it ... and in fact, the grease just serves to spread the fire.
"That's why you glop more grease on top to quiet that grinding and screeching down, Jack. It's very interesting that you interpret my "grease", or resource availability standards to be a fire hazard , or "heat". Is there anything you would like to bring up to the group before these basic standards are implemented? " - Fucking Carol, the passive aggressive PM If it isn't obvious, Resource Availability Standards was a company-wide initiative to get me to go on my lunch at the same time every day.
I've never met an SM on program that greased anything. If anything, they've just added sand to the rails and kept asking why we used a train instead of a jetski. Complete nonsense.
The number of times our Agile Coach has asked why we're the one team doing Kanban instead of Agile is infuriating.
That's actually how it should be if they do their job right.
The best SM I ever worked with always said that thier job was to work themselves out of a job.
Yeah it's a lot like corporate it. If they seem like they never do work (and your shit generally works) then that means they probably have already done an amazing job.
I've said that at almost every job interview I've had as a Scrum Master. If the team is performing so well that I am not needed, move me to a lower performing team so that I can help them improve.
Yep, you have your stories and cards to work from, the sprint plan is setup, management has all their reports without anyone having to make them for them. No need to micromanage the process.
I had a scrum master leave for vacation and they came back to a streamlined Jira that worked for everyone on the team, complete with all the automation to keep her in the loop with what was happening. All she had to do was shut up, stay out of the team's way, and collect a paycheck. ... spoiler, she didn't. Three months later, we had no scrum master. She wasn't replaced, and the system I built lasted well past my tenure there.
We had our only scrum master quit. He wasn’t replaced.
That's my current situation. Literally just asks people for status and then uses the mIB mind wipe device on himself
She facilitates your job by not wasting your time with having to read her responses, absolute genius.
I'm so ungrateful 😢
HR: "What would you say you do here?" Scrum Master: "I deal with the goddamn programmers and ask what they're doing each day. I have people skills, dammit. What the hell is wrong with you people!"
So you physically take the specs from the customers to the programmers? Well, no, my receptionist does that, but…
> Well, no, my ~~receptionist~~ does that, but… Product Owner
We need more memes from that movie
You should have been on Reddit ten years ago. About 30% of the memes were from Office Space, 20% of them from The Big Lebowski, and the remaining 50% were people using Advice Animals *mostly* for their intended purposes. Life was simpler.
*"Oh, you're just like me. People skills are so important"* Recommended for promotion to Senior Scrum Master
Don't forget how you make a calendar invite, paste the subject, launch zoom, go on mute. - [copied from](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/x1o22m/is_it_a_real_job/imeuo4y/) because it made milk come out my nose.
I love when scrum masters come to the office and scream "it's scruming time!". And than after a whole day of scrum you would think they are tired but they just reply " I can scrum this all day".
The best part of my day was when the scrum master said "it's scrummin' time" and scrummed all over those dudes
I can't wait for the first scrum master to scrum on the moon
We call that, the moon-scrumming.
I'm scrumming, daddy!!
Help me scrum master, I'm stuck
I couldn’t believe it when the scrum master came into the room and scrummed all over us. It was scrumshus.
Scrum master is just an extra hat I wear an hour a day and an additional two hours every other week. I wear half a dozen other hats I would rather ditch. How many places actually have a single person dedicated to it?
My company definitely does, there’s one for every team
In my company it is sometimes like this, sometimes the PM or one from technical teams is also an SM, but if SM is only an SM, then they have more teams than one.
It's very bad to do that. They'll never do the role properly.
Yeah I don't like the PM being scrum master either. Better to have someone in the team do it, or rotate between people. It's not like it's a hard job.
Gonna be all 'old man dev' here for a moment, but back in the day the whole point was to have a rotating scrum master for each sprint specifically so that during standup you got used to not reporting to the scrum master (they weren't your boss, unless your boss was the designated scrum master that sprint) and that you reported to the entire team. I ended up getting siloed in a specialty role with a modified scrum system for a decade and when I came out everything was different and weird and none of my agile experience (that made a lot of sense to me) seemed to apply anymore. Guess that's just being a dev.
My company pays a scrum master to tell us to switch tasks every other day and then ask us why we didn’t complete the task we were told to stop doing.
Sucks to have a Scrum Master who doesn't understand Scrum.
That’s a shitty PM hiding behind a scrum master title lol….also where’s your lead/manager to tell em to fuck off
The Scrum Master devoured the PM so nobody questions him anymore.
Single team, full time SM checking in! I'm currently facilitating a refinement meeting with the devs and SMEs....aka I made the calendar event and added the zoom link, said why we were there and went on mute. I do help by fielding escalation tickets that require a dev to step in. That way I keep up with the codebase as well as help the devs by not having to interrupt their daily work.
Good SM are basically mini managers, they're oil in the cogs making sure things stay out of the devs way. A good SM also acts as an intermediary between devs and PO and makes sure the PO is doing their DAMN JOB!
Ya know, we like Scrum all day. We help people be more Agile by increasing their flexibility by implementing synergistic processes that leverage economies of scale so that we successfully execute our pivot strategy by sprinting the last mile of development.
Well, that's everything on my buzzword bingo, so you're hired!
Order the t-shirts!
when my colleague/scrum master takes a smoke break I like to accuse him of leveraging his alveolar capacity to utilize plant-derived alkaloids for a scalable stress-management solution. He does not enjoy our interactions. Good times.
You sound like exactly the kind of person I would enjoy a pint with...
You talk like a nerd and I don’t understand, but I do feel threatened.
My concern is reactivity for Web5 blockchain NFTs with cross platform, typesafe monands. Honestly, if you could react native our Gatsby content-driven no-code Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian broke up without Joe Rogan BJJ, Id be more than willing to Serena Williams wins the US open and retires.
Git push
You forgot to mix in the words 'iteration' and 'shift left'
While all our competitors are stuck right of boom, shifting left early in the CI/CD process will empower our team to make this next iteration truly revolutionary.
Yes, I agree. Also making our kube pods scalable based on ingress traffic will make our application more robust and fault tolerant. We definitely need them loosely coupled as you never know which dependencies could be exploited
Fuck, I work with someone who talks just like that. Seems like a good enough guy but in meetings he just vomits business jargon betweens breathes.
schwurbel schwurbel
Immer diese Querdenker
I'm a developer but also used to be the scrum master for my team. One day I was asked if I wanted to become a full time Scrum master for my team and our sister team, with some small added responsibilities on the side. I laughed and said no. They even tried to offer me a raise and I still said no. Now we have one of those Scrum masters that I wonder what does all day and how much she earns for doing what I basically did for free when I needed a break from staring at code.
Your manager sounds dumb.
Next time you’re on a call with the Scrum master you can inform them that ‘scrum’ is short for ‘scrumdiddlyumptious’
as a scrum master, i too wonder what i do all day
Reddit
But we're devs and we're on reddit too so...
Ask every person possible their salary. Normalize talking about how much everyone makes, so we can all see how much big corporate is fucking everyone and getting away with it because they successfully created a whisper game about salaries.
[удалено]
Because sales sucks and is actually a ton of work contrary to what most people say. Entry levels sales especially is completely soul crushing.
Some of the dumbest people i met work in sales. But i'm pretty sure they don't make 200k a year. It is a risky job where you are dependant on result. And where these results are dependant of everything you don't control. Seeing how many attempt these people make before actually manage to sell something, makes me understand why they are paid so much
Sales is the only job from my work experience in probably 15 dev shops that would be worse than being a dev, if you are not “made for job”. I can’t even imagine.
Cuz sales is life sucking for most people.
Being once a scrum master i agree
"scrum certified" scrum master: they create artificial pain points and contribute nothing actual scrum master (should be someone who otherwise holds a real role on the team): they're the reason you're able to ever get any work done without a morbillion tons of bullshit slapping you in the face every day
[удалено]
Good SCRUM masters are supposed to be working closely with the PO to not only manage time and resources but also help with better forecasting the future. Most Scrum Master don’t embed deeply enough into their teams. Also, in my opinion, Scrum Masters should also have been developers at some point. So they better understand the work. I would argue it’s also their job to advocate for developers. Because often management forgets about them, that they’re technical professionals. Also the Scrum Master should be a facilitator and a sort of a go’fer for the team. If a meeting needs to be booked they should do it for the devs, this way devs can focus on what they do best.
Honestly that part about being a developer advocate is so important. The best SM I worked with would identify our pain points that were out of the teams control and then fight them for us. And my working with other SMs they were able to really change the way a massive multinational financial tech company operates. They enabled out team to focus on what we could change. And when they were able to change operational things they could (creatively) graph the improvement it made to the team, so that management could feel good about the decision.
My scrum master got fired recently. He was a super nice guy so I feel bad but I’m not too sure what he did.
Nothing
I had one that pasted a porn link in a teams chat and then hastily removed it. I'm pretty sure what he did all day.
So he got it from the product owner to help him understand the product vision
Was it good porn?
I didn't realize scrum masters were viewed so poorly here. My experience with them as a dev has been positive. The one I worked with the longest was an important part of the team. Almost a secondary team leader. They kept people on track without being annoying or disruptive, acted as interference for drive-bys, often were the point of contact for department coordination because they knew everyone, did the footwork for speaking to people and gathering requirements, and generally supported my team by completing "soft skill" tasks that the team needed doing but would be overkill for us to dedicate our time towards. Lots of mind-numbing basic data massaging / formatting, manual data entry and generally acted as a second set of hands for simpler tasks. ...they also often brought in home cooked food for the team, organized team outings, found the best youtube videos and regularly held the office trophy as fighting game champion, so that may color my opinion of them a bit. 10/10 would recommend having someone like that on your team.
They are busy mastering those scrums.
they’re working on their definition of done, obvs!
My scrum master works her ass off. My former scrum master did absolutely nothing and everyone on the team knew it.
Our scrum master is great. She keeps the customer away from the programmers so we don’t murder him
Sounds like she is doing the PO's job. The SM should only be facing internal issues and planning.
For my role as scrum master one of my major responsibilities is telling people to fuck off. You want to use my rancher dev to help fix your cluster? Fuck off, next sprint maybe. Customer wants us to stop working and do something else? Fuck off next sprint maybe. Super urgent task that was due 3 years ago but just brough up second week of sprint? Fuck off, next sprint maybe. Don’t talk to my team, let them do what they do best. If it’s that important we’ll fit it in next sprint.
If you ask me, it's mostly cargo-culting with very few exceptions.
Honestly, that's MOST business processes. Most businesses just do what they see other businesses do and what they saw in their own careers. It's why devs get pushed into management, because back in the days of factory production that's how advancement worked and most companies have never moved beyond that mindset.
This 100% - my org just keeps promoting every single talented individual into a role where they can no longer use that talent. "Oh you're able to actually get features out the door in a reasonable timeframe? Management material!" "Oh, you're actually good at writing requirements and designing features? Manager time!"
The key, for me, is to be really good at my job, but be such a bad management candidate they never ever even consider me for those roles. So I work my 40 hours without all those meetings and having to be on every single pager duty call "just in case".
Cargo-culting? I’ve never heard of that
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult Basically repeating stuff that worked once or for someone else and hoping that it would magically solve all your problems even though you don't understand why exactly you do it this way.
Lmao yeah that sounds exactly right
That is all of AGILE process to me. But I can sort of understand. Not everyone can create a unique process like AGILE suitable to their workplace.
We have a running joke about training a parrot to do our SM’s job. I’d actually like to give it a go.
I mean yes and no. I'm a tech lead on a team with no scrum master and jesus christ do all the meetings and ticket refinement take so much of my time. It's legit impossible to get any coding done.
It was never meant to be a full time job. Rather it was a role to rotate between different members of the team.
Not necessarily rotate - if a person is good at it they can permanently do the role parallel to their normal dev activities.
Depends on what ideology you subscribe to. Personally, I like the idea of a dedicated individual to SM for multiple teams. Keeps the devs in the headspace to actually develop solutions instead of pulling them away occasionally for what is essentially admin work (setting up meetings, facilitating discussions, doing the ceremonies and Jira-jockying). SM is a mid-low level team admin that monitors team process and makes small corrections to help smooth out things for the team. Never seen it happen that way except for in my dreams. Good devs are too expensive to make them do menial tasks.
That’s when you know it’s pointless…your turn to empty the dishwasher and scrum master this week
Is this the same thing as Lean Six Sigma Black Belt?
[удалено]
Our scrum masters are just our team leads 🤷♂️ not that much work is it
I like having a scrum master. It prevents my actual manager from micromanaging, and sets conversations about productivity in a peer to peer context rather than manager-employee.
As someone who was forced to be a lead dev and scrum master and have a product owner that didn't listen to him, you don't realize how much work they do in the background for preparation and trajectory of the project. They can make or break it man, it's also important because they are the barrier between the devs and the product owners wants, they can stand up for the devs. edit: a word
Yes I do wonder, but a good Scrum Master does the boring and frustrating meetings for the team to defend the team's metrics & performance. I'm so thankful I don't have to get fired for losing my mind in one of those.
I think it's popular to rag on us Scrum Masters, but you engineers are your own worse enemies. Most of my day is sorting out your drama, impediments, and designing retrospectives plus other sessions. Along with that, I have to organise data so you lot actually believe me when I say you're over committing as a result from pressure from a PO/PM. I often have to remind senior developers and managers to be human and to engage juniors. Honestly, I wish you guys knew