Can Scrum Be Salvaged?
trevorlasn.com
trevorlasn.com
The first paragraph is from a different world than mine. «I’ve been in countless Scrum meetings that felt like a waste of time. You might relate - watching engineers zone out during standups, sprint planning meetings that drag on forever, and retrospectives that never lead to real change.» I've never even experienced any of those.
My standups tended to last either 10-15 minutes or up to half an hour (different teams different customs). I don't think I've had a sprint planning meeting lasting more than, say, an hour and five minutes, with the typical duration being maybe three quarters of an hour and people getting antsy as the top of the hour approached. Retrospectives typically around the same range, except when we did a postmortem as part of the retrospective.
I'm not saying that I've experienced good scrum too. I'm saying that the above paragraphs describes the entire range of my experience since the late nineties. What a vastly different experience.
I don't think my teams "broke free from rigid scrum", rather the opposite. We took scrum seriously, and did standups where people stand up and the meetings are short, and so on. I think if a standup lasts long enough for anyone to zone out, you've lost track of what a standup is, and you've lost sight of one of the core parts of scrum. If you don't learn from retrospectives, you've lost sight of another. If you don't adapt based on what you learn, you've lost track of a third.
If you're in a bad org, where communication is poor, talent is too diverse, and you're following leadership instead of users: scrum can feel a lot like what OP suggests.
Context switching, engineers 1-deep in critical systems, having to pay attention to everyone else's BS during the many ceremonies: scrum can feel a lot like what OP describes.
I'm not sure how common the latter is, but I suspect it's more common than your experience with scrum and your organization.
I have also seen some delusional engineers that love to talk about their great work and welcome all the ceremony and chances to 'lead by example' while leaving their entire teams behind: unable to catch up and help with workload. The delusional person thinks scrum is amazing and the rest are grinding through ceremony.
I've been in one where the daily standup lasted anything from five to thirty minutes, unpredictably, with the blockers being the chief source of variation. Another that stuck fairly closely to… let's say 12 minutes. But none where people didn't learn from experience. None where people would tolerate shit like standups long enough to zone out, or calling such a thing scrum.
All of those are my most common experiences with scrum in the workplace.
The reality of the big picture is you get a lot of quick-trained Scrum Masters with a process recipe facing skeptical devs. It's hard to turn that situation into a well oiled machine.