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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Scrum has the particularly noxious side effect of driving underground any sort of drive to improve and to learn new things. An engineer in a Scrum team is an engineer, has his or her lane, and is largely expected to stay in it. Learning? Branching out? No, get your promised tickets done this week. That concerns me; while it's possible for a Scrum-based shop to invest in its people, it's not part of Scrum to really do so. And the people are what matter, at the end of the day, so I find it rather dehumanizing.

(This is a big part of why I'm moving towards consulting--so I can invest in me more often.)

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We use Scrum and I disagree with everything you said. It is not reflected in my experiences at all.

But that's the problem of arguing from anecdote.

why is this "Scrum" specific? Sounds like working a 9-5 at most companies regardless of their development process.

> why is this "Scrum" specific?

Scrum's pre-committed units of work across the team promotes this; its one of the reasons that many groups prefer flow-based methods (which can support regularly-timed releases simply by shipping the features that are ready at the time of the release cutoff) rather than Scrum's cycle-based method.

I don't see how this is true. If you're building slack into your cycle there should be regular investment time available that a pure flow-based system wouldn't have.

If there's no slack in your sprint schedule, well there's your problem.

In my experience, Scrum's work-unit factorization encourages thinking of developers as spherical cows that need no personal development, with slack as a concession to reality that patches the damage Scrum itself causes. And Slack is generally considered to be for technical investment, though, not personal investment.

A good manager could think past that, for sure, but I've never encountered a good manager that felt Scrum was good or necessary for their teams.

"If you're building slack into your cycle"

Then management comes over and asks why you're slacking off.

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