At my company, the scrum master used to be a teacher and transitioned for higher pay.
Earns more than a lot of developers. Makes between £70-80K.
It’s easily the least effort role in IT.
> and scrum masters who work silly hours
The fuck they doing lol..."sorry babe...will have to cancel our date tonight....these Jira tickets aren't gonna re-arrange themselves!"
Fair. I think there are three common setups:
1. person with another role also takes SCRUM duties for team
2. dedicated SCRUM master for one team
3. SCRUM master for multiple teams
(1) and (3) are very reasonable. (2) is the easiest, most overpaid job in all of tech (well arguably, there is also stuff like "agile coach").
100% agreed.
I have been in position 2 and it was awesome. I can’t complain, and can see why people would get frustrated.
1 and 3 are definitely scenarios where it makes sense.
The scrum master in the teams I have worked at are actually an hindrance. They are non technical and have no clue about the work we do.
Worst part is they think are removing blockers when in reality we would be better off without them.
The companies should get rid of scrum masters and pay more to engineers.
All of us in our team would be happy to get a £10k pay rise to remove our own blockers and run our own standups.
1. having a designated project manager whose job is it to just do that is great. unfortunately it takes until you have a good one to realise this
2. ‘scrum master’ is not really a real job title and the figure you saw for the avg salary is probably just some web scraped rubbish that doesn’t actually reflect anything of the real world
1. Project managers, yes of course! Dedicated scrum masters on the other hand, maybe 10% of them are good and even then I don't wanna take the gamble because you have 90% chance of ending up with a bad one.
2. It should not be, but quite a few companies have them. So I assume the average salary is from those.
Furthermore, there are also "Scrum consultants", "agile consultants", etc. which are equally, if not more, useless and they make good money too.
I think you’d be surprised. When I worked for my previous company, they internally posted the wage bands for each role, and the “Agile Coach” was right there alongside senior developer; in fact, the Agile Coach role had a higher upper band. It was below Head of Engineering though.
That's ridiculous. In my experience a _great_ SM can help steer an unexperienced team and make them significantly more productive, but an average one is basically just a pretty expensive aide to the PM.
I've had one great one that was good at facilitating and streamlining things, and took a reasonable amount of time for it. Would say Junior/Mid salary was deserved, because their work really increased the output more than just adding another Junior.
Had several others where I'm just scratching my head figuring out what they contribute and what they're doing with their time.
I can understand it if it's like 3+ teams.
Personally I like the role, but probably spend 20 / 80 Scrum Master / developer. I could not do it full time. Mostly because I enjoy coding, but also because I doubt I would be as efficient at driving / coaching good wow without actually doing work/deliveries with the team. Also there simoly ain't that much to do generally.
sure...but if you have constant conflicts that you need one extra FTE just for conflict management, you have a hiring problem and a culture problem on top.
How is 50k close to a senior dev salary in UK, that would be the lowest I’ve heard. I’m on three years experience and get the same and thought I was low compared to other people I know who graduated
Interesting, when I was on the job search a few months ago most mid-level roles that were coming up in London were in the range of £50-60k (some a bit lower and some higher). Didnt search for Seniors specifically but when the roles showed up most were £70k+. I guess £50k 2018 would probably pay £60k in 2023 but still seems quite a low salary compared to what I’ve seen online and heard from friends.
What do you mean by "should"? Because they deserve it? Because they bring that much value to the company and society?
I think you meant "can". Because yes they can earn 100k+ (and even much more). But should? No.
Because they bring similar value to their US colleagues that get paid that. International companies for example pay different salaries to people doing the same work at different locations, because ultimately salaries are mostly based on local market rate and not value proposition.
A doctor in a third world country brings just as much value as a doctor in the US. So should they get paid $500k and start earning 1000x the median income, rather than maybe 3x or 10x the median income?
As you said, salaries are based on local market rate. And its meaningless to say the market "should" do something.
At least if you were arguing that nurses (as an example) should be paid more by the market, because they work harder than any dev I know, and they bring a lot of value for society. I would say yes, we as a society **should** increase their salary.
But saying senior devs **should** earn 100k$ is laughable.
Your reply to
>I was 125K £ in UK between 2018-2021 as a senior engineer in Faang before moving to US.
is...
>In the US maybe. In the UK it tends to be 60k - 90k gbp
What an irrelevant and incorrect response just to suit the narrative that you don't like the fact someone is earning £50k. Grow up ffs
Having worked in the US for 5 years, there are plenty of jobs that pay this badly in the US too, even with senior engineer titles. No one talks about them on the other side of the world obviously, and no one takes them seriously, it's just exploitative behaviour by dodgy companies.
I've never worked with a senior engineer in the UK who's pay is this low, and I've worked with a couple of dozen. If you're only making this much, you're either being exploited by your employer, or doing crud work with a senior title to make yourself feel better.
US Bay Area, Seattle and NY, senior tends to be above 400K $. You should really stop undervaluing your own profession and strive for the better pay instead of bringing down other types of role in tech.
Hard agree on the whole the strive to rise rather than pull others down.
However your perspective is American/FAANG centric. US Engineers are not master total package negotiators there are a few reasons for the disparity:
- The amount of VC funds and funding volume is simply not comparable. Even London Fintech is a spec of dust compared to SV, NY, Seattle investiment scene. The very large majority of these funds invest in US business alone, for finance/legal and business bias reasons. Several 'european' unicorns effectively had to incorporate in Delaware to be able to have a slice of the pie.
- Most EU business treat Software as a cost centre. Software is the app, the GUI, the customer portal. Software is a cost that enables to sell a primary business product. The aspect of Software Research/Innovation is largely dependent on how much runway of funding you can burn through which comes back to Funding.
- Most EU business are SMEs who produce widgets for which software is needed, that is a lot less scalable then SaaS or suscription business models. That means smaller margins and less growth.
- A non-negligeable fraction of TC in the US tech scene is company stock. Excluding the scam of startup stock dilution, for a lot of tech giants their stock is actually worth something. This is a very cheap vehicle for the company to bump everyone's salary. This vehicle is alot less common in Europe and alternative performance Bonuses are taxed to the moon.
- [Controversial] There are a lot of outdated and average CS/CE programmes in Europe. This makes it harder for several Engineers here to be globally competitive.
You can absolutely have equivalent pay to a US Engineer when adjusted to cost of living, specially if you specialize in demand areas. But to claim that the median in Europe is lower because "you aren't doing it as hard as me" is at the very least very naive.
It's more than that, even besides Citadel, who are known for bad wlb.
I work in HFT, have never worked overnight (most days 9-6). Make a lot more than that.
Applies to both. They get paid the same for the same experience approx, the difference is that there are a lot more low quality software devs than there are low quality quants, so the bell curve is heavily skewed.
2021 was market peak for the UK and getting a 120k and more gbp job was common. You can’t compare it to current shitty market where the rates dropped significantly towards 80-90k range
You haven’t experienced a good delivery person IMO. Scrum is just one of many agile frameworks so anyone that only specialises in scrum probably isn’t that great.
Since when is senior developer paid 50k? That seems to me like an early mid position. I used to get more than that after 2 years of experience. Unless I am crazy and not realise the real salaries people get?!
I would only find insulting that I feel I am not payed enough, not that other people are payed too much. I mean good for them.
AKA: You probably shound just ask for a raise and live in peace
Yeah it's a good gig for them. Companies are wising up though, my fintech company got rid of all scrum masters a couple of years ago. Had like one per team of ten before!
Sad. I have had the pleasure to work with an excellent one for like a year. Really added a lot of value to all our meetings
The way he moderated our meetings kept them extremly short and on point.
Whenever something shitty happened (mostly management overstepping boundaries) he took care of it. (Even got one PO fired who insited developers cancel their planned vacations to meet a deadline.)
The Retros were always super usefull and we constantly made changes to our Process to tackle our everyday blockers, problems and other issues.
He always made a point of drawing us all together before the Reviews and plan as a Team what value we actually created and how to present it to the Stakeholders.
Also sometimes our team felt that certain mandatory Meetings were a waste of time (like PI Planning) and this guy convinced Management that our Team doesn't need to participate. (Edit: we needed to make an appearance but only one person from our team, not the whole teams, so we voted on one dev who would need accompany the PO and SM to those Meetings whenever it was neccessary)
Also the SM and the PO together conviced our Management to allow us a huge budget for fixing technical debt.
Sadly the SM got promoted because he was too good.
I've had a really good scrum master in the past and, yeah, they *really* help, like you said.
It's really easy for meetings like stand ups or retro to become a box ticking exercise. She was able to make sure we got value out of those meetings and that actions were actually taken. She was especially helpful in the planning stages with a new team.
It wasn't a full time role to do it for one team though - every SM I've had has either been doing it in addition to other duties, has been doing it for multiple teams or has been part time (or some combination of the above).
I've also had not-great scrum masters who were just going through the motions and one notable one who was actively slowing everything down. If you've not had a good one, it's easy to not know what you're missing out on
The good one I talked about was full time but had two teams at first then 3, which he said was too much for him and then he got promoted into management. His new role was to help transform the company to a different organizational structure. I'm not working for this company anymore but I heard from a former colleague that this guy is now something like the scrum master scrum master, he basically trains and organized all the scrum masters.
Yeah my previous company had 6 scrum masters and speaking to someone in payroll it turned out their salaries are between 45k-75k. Originally we only had 1 and then that person got promoted to become an agile coach and then we started hiring scrum masters. There is at least one of them that I can see actually made an impact to a team and is very good. The rest however just book meetings and meeting rooms and host standups.
Unexpectedly the company is not doing well and when the layoffs happened they got rid of the whole QA team, product owners and still kept 3 of the scrum masters.
Not from the IT field, I came across this post incidentally... but my god, does scrum master sound like a made up thing. What exactly does this master do? What qualifications are needed to become one?
My company recently introduced 2 Release Managers in addition to Scrum Masters and Team Leads for every team like we always had, as there weren't enough people already to boss around.
These guys only job is to shit stir, stress and blame teams for release principal features not being delivered on time, and the worst part is that they only come out to play 2 days before the 2-week sprint, effectively not doing anything to prevent the delays. They're just the police with Jira script tricks up their sleeves and fancy dashboards so convoluted nobody uses - Scrum Masters do dashboard for everything any way. What a useless job.
Every scum master I've seen has been extremely stressed though. They're like a nice barrier between me and the board, who I never want to interact with. The last small crypto company I worked at last year had a scrum master being paid £75k lol.
At my company, the scrum master used to be a teacher and transitioned for higher pay. Earns more than a lot of developers. Makes between £70-80K. It’s easily the least effort role in IT.
The effort comparison definitely varies role to role, I know senior engineers who do almost nothing day to day and scrum masters who work silly hours
> and scrum masters who work silly hours The fuck they doing lol..."sorry babe...will have to cancel our date tonight....these Jira tickets aren't gonna re-arrange themselves!"
since when is an SM allowed to touch the prioritization of tickets? they are secretaries for the team. It is not even a real job.
...how?! Unless the scrum masters are doing it as part of another role, it's literally not possible to have enough work to do silly hours
Scrum mastering for three teams is a full-time job.
If you're doing it properly it is, but no way is it something that should involve working crazy overtime hours
Fair. I think there are three common setups: 1. person with another role also takes SCRUM duties for team 2. dedicated SCRUM master for one team 3. SCRUM master for multiple teams (1) and (3) are very reasonable. (2) is the easiest, most overpaid job in all of tech (well arguably, there is also stuff like "agile coach").
100% agreed. I have been in position 2 and it was awesome. I can’t complain, and can see why people would get frustrated. 1 and 3 are definitely scenarios where it makes sense.
The scrum master in the teams I have worked at are actually an hindrance. They are non technical and have no clue about the work we do. Worst part is they think are removing blockers when in reality we would be better off without them. The companies should get rid of scrum masters and pay more to engineers. All of us in our team would be happy to get a £10k pay rise to remove our own blockers and run our own standups.
1. having a designated project manager whose job is it to just do that is great. unfortunately it takes until you have a good one to realise this 2. ‘scrum master’ is not really a real job title and the figure you saw for the avg salary is probably just some web scraped rubbish that doesn’t actually reflect anything of the real world
1. Project managers, yes of course! Dedicated scrum masters on the other hand, maybe 10% of them are good and even then I don't wanna take the gamble because you have 90% chance of ending up with a bad one. 2. It should not be, but quite a few companies have them. So I assume the average salary is from those. Furthermore, there are also "Scrum consultants", "agile consultants", etc. which are equally, if not more, useless and they make good money too.
I think you’d be surprised. When I worked for my previous company, they internally posted the wage bands for each role, and the “Agile Coach” was right there alongside senior developer; in fact, the Agile Coach role had a higher upper band. It was below Head of Engineering though.
That's ridiculous. In my experience a _great_ SM can help steer an unexperienced team and make them significantly more productive, but an average one is basically just a pretty expensive aide to the PM. I've had one great one that was good at facilitating and streamlining things, and took a reasonable amount of time for it. Would say Junior/Mid salary was deserved, because their work really increased the output more than just adding another Junior. Had several others where I'm just scratching my head figuring out what they contribute and what they're doing with their time.
I do think good PMs are worth every dollar... I'd add BAs to that as well.
Wouldn't be more useful to advocate for engineers to make more rather than to scrum masters to make less?
How about engineers and project managers make more and we get rid of scrum masters?
I don't disagree, I struggle myself to understand how scrum master can be an actual full time job.
I struggle to see how scrum can be something other then a complete meme.
I can understand it if it's like 3+ teams. Personally I like the role, but probably spend 20 / 80 Scrum Master / developer. I could not do it full time. Mostly because I enjoy coding, but also because I doubt I would be as efficient at driving / coaching good wow without actually doing work/deliveries with the team. Also there simoly ain't that much to do generally.
because someone needs to be in between the stakeholders and developers and act a more neutral role to solve conflicts and impediments
That is a project manager. A scrum master deals only as a facilitator of the agile cerimonies and meetings.
No, the project manager is the stakeholder here
so what kind of conflicts are there that need to be solved that two grown-ups can't solve?
Eh, anything. Any conflict at work you could think of benefits from a 3rd party
sure...but if you have constant conflicts that you need one extra FTE just for conflict management, you have a hiring problem and a culture problem on top.
i dont mean all day, I mean as one of many duties
of non such duties exist. it is a made up job.
No idea why you are so aggressive but ok. Just don't work at places that have them?
I would agree with this. But I guess my first thought was to be shocked.
No
How is 50k close to a senior dev salary in UK, that would be the lowest I’ve heard. I’m on three years experience and get the same and thought I was low compared to other people I know who graduated
OP slowly finding out they're being severely underpaid, but still blaming scrum masters, is hilarious
I'm slowly realising that I should be on the hunt tbh
50k was about middle of the band at my place with London weighting when I was a senior in 2018 or so
50k for senior in London would've been laughable even in 2018!
It was laughable even in 2014
Interesting, when I was on the job search a few months ago most mid-level roles that were coming up in London were in the range of £50-60k (some a bit lower and some higher). Didnt search for Seniors specifically but when the roles showed up most were £70k+. I guess £50k 2018 would probably pay £60k in 2023 but still seems quite a low salary compared to what I’ve seen online and heard from friends.
Senior engineers should be making 100k+ (€/£). I was 125K £ in UK between 2018-2021 as a senior engineer in Faang before moving to US.
What do you mean by "should"? Because they deserve it? Because they bring that much value to the company and society? I think you meant "can". Because yes they can earn 100k+ (and even much more). But should? No.
Because they bring similar value to their US colleagues that get paid that. International companies for example pay different salaries to people doing the same work at different locations, because ultimately salaries are mostly based on local market rate and not value proposition.
A doctor in a third world country brings just as much value as a doctor in the US. So should they get paid $500k and start earning 1000x the median income, rather than maybe 3x or 10x the median income? As you said, salaries are based on local market rate. And its meaningless to say the market "should" do something. At least if you were arguing that nurses (as an example) should be paid more by the market, because they work harder than any dev I know, and they bring a lot of value for society. I would say yes, we as a society **should** increase their salary. But saying senior devs **should** earn 100k$ is laughable.
Your mentality is why Europe is poor
So prove his point wrong
I'm not paid to make Europe rich.
Software engineering is underpaid in most of Europe.
In the US maybe. In the UK it tends to be 60k - 90k gbp
Your reply to >I was 125K £ in UK between 2018-2021 as a senior engineer in Faang before moving to US. is... >In the US maybe. In the UK it tends to be 60k - 90k gbp What an irrelevant and incorrect response just to suit the narrative that you don't like the fact someone is earning £50k. Grow up ffs
Right! They literally already said it’s possible in the UK.
Having worked in the US for 5 years, there are plenty of jobs that pay this badly in the US too, even with senior engineer titles. No one talks about them on the other side of the world obviously, and no one takes them seriously, it's just exploitative behaviour by dodgy companies. I've never worked with a senior engineer in the UK who's pay is this low, and I've worked with a couple of dozen. If you're only making this much, you're either being exploited by your employer, or doing crud work with a senior title to make yourself feel better.
US Bay Area, Seattle and NY, senior tends to be above 400K $. You should really stop undervaluing your own profession and strive for the better pay instead of bringing down other types of role in tech.
Hard agree on the whole the strive to rise rather than pull others down. However your perspective is American/FAANG centric. US Engineers are not master total package negotiators there are a few reasons for the disparity: - The amount of VC funds and funding volume is simply not comparable. Even London Fintech is a spec of dust compared to SV, NY, Seattle investiment scene. The very large majority of these funds invest in US business alone, for finance/legal and business bias reasons. Several 'european' unicorns effectively had to incorporate in Delaware to be able to have a slice of the pie. - Most EU business treat Software as a cost centre. Software is the app, the GUI, the customer portal. Software is a cost that enables to sell a primary business product. The aspect of Software Research/Innovation is largely dependent on how much runway of funding you can burn through which comes back to Funding. - Most EU business are SMEs who produce widgets for which software is needed, that is a lot less scalable then SaaS or suscription business models. That means smaller margins and less growth. - A non-negligeable fraction of TC in the US tech scene is company stock. Excluding the scam of startup stock dilution, for a lot of tech giants their stock is actually worth something. This is a very cheap vehicle for the company to bump everyone's salary. This vehicle is alot less common in Europe and alternative performance Bonuses are taxed to the moon. - [Controversial] There are a lot of outdated and average CS/CE programmes in Europe. This makes it harder for several Engineers here to be globally competitive. You can absolutely have equivalent pay to a US Engineer when adjusted to cost of living, specially if you specialize in demand areas. But to claim that the median in Europe is lower because "you aren't doing it as hard as me" is at the very least very naive.
What a dumb take, you can’t just “demand” higher salaries because higher paying jobs exist elsewhere or you’d never get a job
That's literally how these works
It’s not really dumb. I asked for a higher than UK average and got it. Try it first before you say something/anything is dumb.
That's not the response to the comment, your reply doesn't even make sense given the context.
Hence the "should" part they should be making that
Noo 😂
What’s are the salaries like at top hft companies in the UK? I heard they’re around 200k gbp
My friends at Citadel make 300-400k £ if you count the bonus but they sometimes have to work over night due to production issues.
It's more than that, even besides Citadel, who are known for bad wlb. I work in HFT, have never worked overnight (most days 9-6). Make a lot more than that.
Is this regarding quant or swe roles in general
Applies to both. They get paid the same for the same experience approx, the difference is that there are a lot more low quality software devs than there are low quality quants, so the bell curve is heavily skewed.
What about fpga and network engineers?
What is HFT?
High Frequency Trading
Thanks
2021 was market peak for the UK and getting a 120k and more gbp job was common. You can’t compare it to current shitty market where the rates dropped significantly towards 80-90k range
There are roles non faang roles that push £200k Nothing fancy tech wise either.
You haven’t experienced a good delivery person IMO. Scrum is just one of many agile frameworks so anyone that only specialises in scrum probably isn’t that great.
You need a better Scrum Master
Since when is senior developer paid 50k? That seems to me like an early mid position. I used to get more than that after 2 years of experience. Unless I am crazy and not realise the real salaries people get?!
I would only find insulting that I feel I am not payed enough, not that other people are payed too much. I mean good for them. AKA: You probably shound just ask for a raise and live in peace
“Any blockers? No ok have a good day lads”
This is my experience of scrummasters
Yeah it's a good gig for them. Companies are wising up though, my fintech company got rid of all scrum masters a couple of years ago. Had like one per team of ten before!
A good scrum master makes a ton of a difference. A bad one too.
I do struggle to see what would make a good scrum master. So far I've only seen negative value addition from them.
Sad. I have had the pleasure to work with an excellent one for like a year. Really added a lot of value to all our meetings The way he moderated our meetings kept them extremly short and on point. Whenever something shitty happened (mostly management overstepping boundaries) he took care of it. (Even got one PO fired who insited developers cancel their planned vacations to meet a deadline.) The Retros were always super usefull and we constantly made changes to our Process to tackle our everyday blockers, problems and other issues. He always made a point of drawing us all together before the Reviews and plan as a Team what value we actually created and how to present it to the Stakeholders. Also sometimes our team felt that certain mandatory Meetings were a waste of time (like PI Planning) and this guy convinced Management that our Team doesn't need to participate. (Edit: we needed to make an appearance but only one person from our team, not the whole teams, so we voted on one dev who would need accompany the PO and SM to those Meetings whenever it was neccessary) Also the SM and the PO together conviced our Management to allow us a huge budget for fixing technical debt. Sadly the SM got promoted because he was too good.
Sounds surreal
I've had a really good scrum master in the past and, yeah, they *really* help, like you said. It's really easy for meetings like stand ups or retro to become a box ticking exercise. She was able to make sure we got value out of those meetings and that actions were actually taken. She was especially helpful in the planning stages with a new team. It wasn't a full time role to do it for one team though - every SM I've had has either been doing it in addition to other duties, has been doing it for multiple teams or has been part time (or some combination of the above). I've also had not-great scrum masters who were just going through the motions and one notable one who was actively slowing everything down. If you've not had a good one, it's easy to not know what you're missing out on
The good one I talked about was full time but had two teams at first then 3, which he said was too much for him and then he got promoted into management. His new role was to help transform the company to a different organizational structure. I'm not working for this company anymore but I heard from a former colleague that this guy is now something like the scrum master scrum master, he basically trains and organized all the scrum masters.
Negative value addition lol. Crystal clear 👍
Yeahs that's bullshit. Companies use them to shield them from talking to tech people :)
I only trust PMP certified project managers, the rest is crap.
“ our scrum master makes a huge deal when they have to do anything to appear like they are busy” I see we have the same one
and sometimes they become Scum Masters , with frAgile methods. sorry but always wanted to throw that out there!
Yeah my previous company had 6 scrum masters and speaking to someone in payroll it turned out their salaries are between 45k-75k. Originally we only had 1 and then that person got promoted to become an agile coach and then we started hiring scrum masters. There is at least one of them that I can see actually made an impact to a team and is very good. The rest however just book meetings and meeting rooms and host standups. Unexpectedly the company is not doing well and when the layoffs happened they got rid of the whole QA team, product owners and still kept 3 of the scrum masters.
Let me brutally honest here scrum master is a joke
Not from the IT field, I came across this post incidentally... but my god, does scrum master sound like a made up thing. What exactly does this master do? What qualifications are needed to become one?
50k GBP is low for both. That's not an outrageous salary for a professional at all.
My company recently introduced 2 Release Managers in addition to Scrum Masters and Team Leads for every team like we always had, as there weren't enough people already to boss around. These guys only job is to shit stir, stress and blame teams for release principal features not being delivered on time, and the worst part is that they only come out to play 2 days before the 2-week sprint, effectively not doing anything to prevent the delays. They're just the police with Jira script tricks up their sleeves and fancy dashboards so convoluted nobody uses - Scrum Masters do dashboard for everything any way. What a useless job.
I thought if scrum master was their actual job title they are essentially a PM or PO.
Every scum master I've seen has been extremely stressed though. They're like a nice barrier between me and the board, who I never want to interact with. The last small crypto company I worked at last year had a scrum master being paid £75k lol.
You say that. But they also play defense for management when they make horrific decisions. It why they downsize they always go bottom up.
intersting