I read 20+ books on management and leadership[1], and none of them mentioned anything like Scrum. I agree it's BS.
A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value.
Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.
This problem exists at big tech and startup, in companies that spend fractional multipliers of the average salary on engineers as well as those who pay poorly.
In this environment, if your solution is "hire better people', you can't- there isn't any
Big tech or startup status are not correlated with top talent. I've seen the whole spectrum of low to high talent from both places.
> in companies that spend fractional multipliers of the average salary on engineers as well as those who pay poorly
Pay and top skill are only slightly correlated, unfortunately.
> Top talent does not exist.
It does exist. I've seen it, but most managers don't know how to find it, identify it, and retain it.
Also, please at least acknowledge that your numbers are completely made up and may have no basis in reality. It might be a $1000 team only if they deliver on time, but the overages might push that to $5000. Or whatever. See, I can completely make up numbers to support my point too.
You are 100% right that legacy management falls for the SCRUM sales pitch.
At one company I worked at the scrum salesman basically bullied the executive team by saying "You don't want to be the last company to adopt scrum do you?!!??!"
Have you _tried_ hiring good people?
Even better is top talent who can also interface directly with the client when necessary (not necessarily all the time) and doesn't need everything first filtered through a manager.
I've worked with teams like this in the past and it was always a pleasure. Most of them were fairly experienced devs and knew the value of email, phone calls, and water cooler talk (serendipitous discussions which led to valuable information being exchanged). Despite the lack of "modern" productivity tools like text messages, chat apps, and Slack, we were able to get stuff done efficiently.
We had weekly meetings which were productive and useful, and actually helped identify if anything was falling through the cracks. Nobody got bored because the meetings were actually helpful.
So it would have to be both: the devs are good and don't need hand-holding, and the manager is able to deal with the lack of transparency that "it'll be done when it's done" comes with.
Some people just have a very hard time letting go and trusting a team. Who they are managing just needs to follow.
My takeaway then was that Scrum fosters a modular team management style, which diminishes the dependence on highly skilled individuals.
This approach seemed to offer management a sense of oversight in the software development process, but I didn't stay long enough to determine whether this was actual control and predictability or merely an illusion of it.