Scrum Is a Cancer

It's not just Scrum. Putting unqualified people in decision making positions is cancer. Scrum masters, product owners, team leads are the only ones that make decisions, a lot of times technical ones or that have impact on the technical side (like what to build first). But CEOs decided that these people can be non-programmers aka cheaper employees. So they created this setup in which the blind leads the herd. Scrum is just one way to "accomplish" this.

I don’t think Scrum was the basis of the problem.

Sounds like too much process. At the same time I've seen teams where the problem was too little process and they would have had great improvements from things like sitting people down and agreeing on what the short-term priorities are, agreeing on deadlines and scope, having clear requirements and a person in the business to continuously check that the requirements are being met.

So I would be careful about throwing out all process, you can't just tell people to do the work and leave them alone - that doesn't scale as teams and companies grow. There's an art in hitting the right amount of process.

Indeed. It’s an industry. It may be more apt to say “cancer is a scrum.”