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Comment by tupac_speedrap | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it.

The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial tasks, if you don't might dealing with the Agile bullshit full time it's a doss.

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> I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week.

Same here! Scrum masters are secretaries on managers' salaries. They're the true winners of the corporate game.

I think they get a bad rap. Good scrum masters are worth their weight in gold at scale. The solve all inter-team comms, the bat away distractions, and they generally find the answers, or the people with the answers and get them solved and batted out.

Bad scrum masters take up space with reporting meetings that aren't reporting - but who are we kidding. I've been privileged to work with both.

For 19 years of career I've never met this unicorn scrum master you are describing.

Not a counter-argument, just sharing an anecdote.

That's the problem with anecdotes. Over my (longer, not that it matters) career I've had both. I've only had 2 of the unicorns however.

Anecdote -- in the last 15 years I've had exactly one unicorn. They do exist, but they are very rare. And worth their weight in gold, I was really sad to lose ours in a layoff. Scrum masters, project managers, and marketing folks all seemed to be first out the door when money got tight

I thought the same of Project Managers, until I had the pleasure with work with the MissionCloud people in a project that included a Project Manager (in their side). I was amazed at her project management skills, and I really wished I could have her in my team.

They are project managers then, really.

If the scrum master has enough rank or credibility + technical experience, they can get tickets routed and convince team leads that "yes this ticket is your problem until you prove otherwise".

This probably falls under your "solves all inter-team communication problems" catch-all.

Another vote for Scrum Master here. It's only in the past 5 years or so that I've personally seen it as a job in itself - previously, I'd seen Scrum Master as part of the role of one of the developers or similar.

But now in large corps, Scrum Master exists as a distinct job, which appears to require doing very, very little - chairing most of the regular scrum-related meetings (daily standup, planning, demo, and the much loathed retrospective), sending out meeting invites, occasionally futiley butting heads with the Project Manager, and... actually, I think that's it?!

I've worked with some good people in the Scrum Master role, but beyond being good people to work with, they are glorified secretaries, and really don't have anything to do all day.

Why on earth would you have a Scrum Master AND a Project Manager? Makes sense to have a dedicated less-technical person to manage schedules, coordinate with clients and keep people honest on commitments... but dear god why would you ever start splitting that role up into multiple people

Because sometimes projects are complicated and require lots of business knowledge, and the project manager may be managing multiple projects.

The idea of a "secretary" is not a bad one for high performing teams.

I've been tech lead on projects with as many as 30 team members, and still the full-time Scrum Master had very little to do.

Scrum Masters are basically secretaries with more steps

100% Scrum Masters!

If you are actually a good developer and you get a pure Scrum Master role then it's almost impossible to not get endlessly promoted and praised and possibly paid better than a developer role itself whilst actually still doing fuck all work. Imagine, you do a standup, ask in the end if anyone has any blockers, some developer or QA will say something stupid about the CI/CD pipeline or merging a PR and you'll schedule a meeting with the people who need to follow this up and you could actually throw in some suggestions which only a great developer would normally do and the team will look at you as if you're some bloody hero for DeNiro and praise you as "the best Scrum Master they ever had who actually helps the team and lives up to their role". LOL. Then you know you can go to sleep for the rest of the day and nobody will even notice.

The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.

> The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.

Laughed out loud at this hahaha. There is one dedicated manual QA guy in my team that perfectly fits this description. And he probably earns more than I do.

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