Ask HN: Are Scrum-Masters Useful / Worth a Full-Time Salary? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Scrum-Masters Useful / Worth a Full-Time Salary?

49 pointsevo_951 comments

Our company has gone on a spree of hiring Scrum-Masters for virtually every team, and it seems like this role adds little to no value to the teams or company.

The SM's all seem to work a few hours at most a day, most of which is running a 15-minute Daily Standup that typically goes 30 minutes (yeah they're not even running standup right).

Is this common? Am I crazy to think that this is maybe a perfect low-hanging fruit for ChatGPT to essentially replace in the next few years?

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NO. It's a part of the brilliant Scrum scam. Basically, Scrum mandated that every office has its priests (Scrum masters), who make sure the Scrum does die off or gets replaced by something else. These people usually are useless and owe their entire salaries to propagating the Scrum/Agile ideas, so they do it with lots of conviction. In return, they have to get certified with the Scrum organization (paid for by the employers), which brings revenues to the original authors of the scam.

The fact that most companies didn't get a whiff of it yet and are still paying salaries to people who have basically net-negative impact [1] tells you a lot about how much the business world actually cares about efficiency.

[1] Not only they don't contribute, they are also often demoralising to people on the team who have to bust their ass to earn a salary. A scrum master even told me in confidence once that he considered becoming a developer as it'd probably mean more money - but, he went against it, as it'd mean actually having to do work...

> These people usually are useless and owe their entire salaries to propagating the Scrum/Agile ideas, so they do it with lots of conviction.

I like to give the benefit of the doubt but it's still hard for me to say this is overly cynical.

> running a 15-minute Daily Standup that typically goes 30 minutes

Imagine if your most marketable skill is knowledge of a certain process and you don't even get that right. It's not hard to believe someone would insist overmuch on their One True Way.

Sort of.

It is not so much as a scam as a business opportunity that got filled because management tends to be non technical. If you have technical managers who actually can write documents or technical program managers/system engineers who can talk with customers in more detail, you don't need scrum or scrum masters.

Non technical managers are the ones that are actually waste time being essentially human APIs between product managers and developers, and use scrum masters to actually do the "engineering" with getting work planned, done, and tracked.

> nd use scrum masters to actually do the "engineering" with getting work planned, done, and tracked.

I've yet to see scrum masters do that though. In all of the many teams I've worked at, the tasks you list were performed by product manager. Scrum master's only responsibility was organizing the retrospective. Other than that, they just hang on all our calls and contribute nothing at all.

It's like the management consulting scam but with absolutely none of the prestige.

I worked as a scrum master for a while. I worked with multiple teams. Besides the mechanics of stand-ups, estimation, grooming, and retrospectives. I did a lot of work going over stories with product managers clarifying requirements, getting them to put in more details, and helping them prioritize the backlog. I also spent a lot of time tracking down the sources of blockers for team members. Often this was getting other teams to respond on information requests or negotiating for work to be done by other teams. I agree that one scrum master can handle more than one team, but don’t assume that the only work you saw was when they were in meetings with you. Do you expect them to assume you only work during stand-ups?

Everything you describe was part of my job as a team lead. I also wrote code, BTW.

I was getting the sense that that is more than what a Scrum Master (facilitator? showing it's outdatedness) should do. I googled it[0]. Seems only to be responsible for meta/process improvement things. The SM is supposed to have the team doing all those things more effectively rather than doing any themself.

[0] https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-scrum-master

I've done this too. There was no Scrum involved. I was a sort of project manager slash secretary slash developer advocate.

I did not carry a toolbox full of markers and postits, and kept working people out of meetings.

It feels weird to call that being a scrummaster.

Good scrum masters help the team protect themselves and help the team (safely) push themselves.

Where they work well is when there is some disconnect between the product (and the product owner) and the team. If that isn't a problem you have (which is brilliant if not) then this should mean one SM can support multiple teams, as there isn't a lot them to do.

They should also be there to take some management effort from the team, and ensure that high quality stories are coming in, that the team are effectively communicating, and that changes to process are made (where they can add value for the team). The ultimate goal for a good SM, is that the team does not need them, and that they can step away.

I believe Scrum can be useful for teams - but scrum/agile is not a hammer to hit all teams with. You need to know/communicate how you think it will improve the team, how you will measure it and most importantly you need to bring the team along with you on the journey. It sounds like that might be an issue here?

What kind of protection does a team need?

Being bullied into taking too much work, in a short time period, being forced to build things they don't understand, being asked to build things with only a short term view and never building with a plan.

As I say - if a team needs protecting then that is another issue - but where they do need protecting, a great scrum master can really help.

In an ideal team, with great collaboration, you don't need an sm.

I've been on scrum teams that work well. The reason they have worked well is because of the people on the team. Those people would have been a good team regardless of the project methodology used.

I've also been on scrum teams that do not work well. I've had multiple scrum masters on my teams who were essentially useless. As in the OP, they ran the standup wrong. The retro and demo sessions were just box ticking exercises. Ironically it seemed like they understood scrum less than everyone else on the team.

My observations working in a large financial institution who have in the last couple of years adopted SaFE and therefore hired product owners and scrum masters is that the majority of scrum masters including the lead scrum masters come from project management backgrounds.

What they preach and what they practice don't always align (in major ways), and I'm constantly going back to the agile manifesto where I am like 'this ain't right'.

It reminds me of certain organised religions!

Could you replace them with chatgpt?

I'm sure it's possible!

Could you replace the minister of a church with chatgpt? Well I'm sure that's possible too!

God is ChatGPT! LOL

You made my day!

No, they are a joke and actively harmful. Shows how little some organizations respect software engineers. There's no 2-day course you can take and get a job micro-managing doctors, lawyers or finance workers.

I worked at a company with dedicated scrum masters. They did little to nothing. One of them didn't even want to run the retrospective. He tried delegating it to a senior dev, who told him we should just skip it, and not even bother filling out the "mandatory" end-of-sprint feedback form. This, of course, would not be acceptable to the scrum master's boss so he was forced to actually do some work.

That this question gets asked every second in every office in the world should tell you the answer. Young people don't realize this Jira shit is a very recent phenomenon. If you look at the history, it's obvious the whole thing was made up to give people jobs.

Are you sure Jira is the actual problem here?

Jira itself doesn’t require a lots of process. It has support for Kanban, for example. But companies can choose to bake in a lot of process in their use of Jira. And some do.

I’m not defending Scrum/SAFe here, but I’m not convinced that Jira itself is the culprit.

You don’t need a scrum master to use JIRA. In fact, it tends to work better without one.

Ha yeah my developer manager used to lead them along with the lead business analyst. Went smooth and effective. Kanban board is useful, along with a short stand up.

Now we are in 2 different scrums with 2 scrum masters and it's legit the biggest waste of time ever. They don't even know what half the jiras mean, let alone the context.

Honestly have to agree a sticky note and swim lanes in an office was the most productive strategy I've ever worked in. No BA, no scrum and only a TE that managed e2e and integration test. No, Jira no sprint, no breakdowns. Just do what you need on the priority.

Large orgs pay a communication tax, and it's heavy for a lot.

Recent, as in since 2005 thereabouts.

You should be worried about this company. These "scrumbags" are useless political roadblocks. They detest every developer and make them look like idiots so that they can never be considered for management, why, they cannot beat a manager who can also code.

no. team members can take turns being scrum master if they want scrum.

these are fake jobs.

became prevalent with zero interest rate and cheap lending..especially at small companies when they have massive evaluations stamped on by investor class.

with high and rising rates expect to see this kind roles evaporate. mostly a grift

Scam masters are the most useless position I've seen in my life.

It works well under the original intent, as someone who handles things that are orthogonal to development, like gathering information from different departments to answer a question, getting things through approvals, managing feature requests, preparing reports, fending off last minute changes, etc. it doesn’t work when it’s just someone doing business-school project management with story points and 30 minute daily sit-downs

Is there a separate person who does your project management, or is this a project manager with a different name? As your team grows and especially as you need to coordinate with many other teams, you eventually need someone to take care of all that process.

We have separate Project Managers, and Product Owners.

It's a corporate thing. I'm guessing your company paid some consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to help them with their efficiency or innovation.

The consultants to prove their worth have to give some BS suggestions and one of those was probably a rigid interruption of scrum and the requirement for your company to hire scrum masters.

Coming from the startup world it never ceases to amaze me how inefficient the average corporation is with development teams, especially given how much they like to restructure and discuss the "corporate structure". BS roles literally everywhere. Typically only about 3 people in any team of 10 seems to do anything productive.

Yes. I've installed Geekbot on my team to run a bot run automated standup every day. We also have a weekly product org wide meeting to make sure people have a place to touch base on what everyone is working on, as well as cross functional standups for specific initatives.

I don't see the point of scrum masters unless they are customer facing, at which point they're a program manager. The whole point of scrum was to not have dedicated people running the process but rather to make it a process that any member or division in the org could apply.

Isn't scrum a thing of the past now. Are their seriously some parts of the world still practicing this foolery?

All teams and companies I'm aware of in my region abandoned scrum many years ago and now run a process that works for their teams, products and industries. Often these processes pull things from many methodologies to create something that works. And she things have been absorbed from scrum. But to still run scrum.... Wow and eww

It's incredibly common

Those poor people

Yes, but it depends on how they are utilized and if they actually do the job as intended [by Scrum]. In my company the Scrum-Master also manages the team members as well as all of the normal Scrum-Master duties. I find that this gives the position enough power and responsibility to enact change. If you are saying "No" then I feel that you have not had a good Scrum-Master and/or the company didn't fully embrace Scrum.

That's much much worse. You need that separation

True, under the theory that a scrum master protects the sprint and the process and that managers wont

Scrum masters are overpaid cheerleaders for dysfunctional teams.

Most SM I worked with are people who just changed career, looking for the current easy money that come with the title in big organizations. More experienced scrum masters truly try to improve team members and processes, but at its heart, we should not need this for a team to be functional.

Everyone is hungry to find that role (that isn’t their own) that could be replaced (because it is easy, unlike their own) by ChatGPT (because then they get rich and can stop working that difficult role) in the next few years.

Who’s coming for yours?

In an efficient economy, language models would definitely replace the bullshitters first.

Where can I find one of those?

Bootstrapped startups? Not so many agile coaches in them

Efficient economy.

These are relax roles for friends and family of the rich. When you get a hard working PM they get replaced with someone who gets paid to just relax. Has happened to be 11 times now.

You're a PM who's been replaced by scrum masters 11 times? Please don't read into tone here, I'm not in the industry so this sounds mindblowing to me.

I've seen 11 PMs come into a new role and some being pushed out.

Edit: PM is a cheaper scrum master

You can probably get a fresh grad to do it for cheap.

I've been saying that you could hire an astute middle schooler (probably a well-organized girl) to be a scrum master and it would be the same.

And then they decide to add SAFe…

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