I just finished up at Uni this past may with a degree in Business Information Systems. I started at a company in July as the SM. Let’s just say this has been a very rocky and unmotivating 3 months. My company is moving towards agile and the top isn’t agile but is still expecting the developers and team to work in an agile fashion so you can imagine the frustration. I feel like I’m a micromanager or a team admin. I don’t have the flexibility or support to perform to my potential since the top who we receive work from isn’t even agile. Although I am trying the best that I can to help the team do the ceremonies but I can tell they are getting tired and just want to complete their work which I dont’t blame them. I almost feel like taking this position is was a mistake and I don’t want to be the joke of the team. I really put 100% into everything I do but the lack of support from my team is really getting to me. I have a big interest in developing but I have only had experience in school with VBA and SQL. How do I move from this role? I don’t want to be stuck in my career because I lack the “technical” skills on paper. #scrummaster #agile #quitjob
Agile doesn't work if support and buy-in from the top is missing. A Scrum Master's role is, to a degree, thankless, as it is. It is also usually not a role for a new team member. My advice would be to look out for full-time/ internship opportunities where you can use SQL and learn other languages/ tech skills.
Technically the role of SM should be rotated within the team. I think some executives who haven’t coded in 20 years said “we need to do agile” but it hasn’t quite reached them what that actually means. That’s how 99% of companies implement scrum.
The best thing about Agile development is that it gives the product owners or ‘the top’ insight into what’s happening on the eng end. 1. The stakeholders stop blaming eng for taking a long time etc, they can see the complexity when it’s broken out into tickets. ‘It’s just adding padding’ becomes ‘to get the padding we have to rebuild all of the core components’ at a level they understand. 2. It buffers the developers - team velocity is known and the sprint has been prioritized and is in progress; dropping an 🚨 8-pointer on the dev team mid sprint is generally fine, as long as it’s understood that a different 8-pointer has to be removed. But yeah in order for it to work everyone has to be on board, otherwise it’s just the product owners throwing in changes last minute and expecting the dev team to ‘be agile’
It’s gonna be painful, all change management is at that scale, but you’ll definitely have some success stories to talk about once everyone truly adopts. Otherwise, if engineering is more your thing there’s tons of courses out there. Maybe start with Code Academy and learn basic html and CSS. From there learn the language the teams value most. Java will likely be a good one.
A good scrum master isn’t a ceremony enforcer. A good scrum master knows the business priorities, networks with other teams, removes obstacles, project manages, communicates ... that’s really hard to do out of school. You need a mentor to teach you what the job is and how to be successful. It can be rewarding if you add value to the team.
And you can only vent in anonymous forum? Discover got help for you. You know where to go
This isn’t a rant about Discover. It’s a rant about how my position doesn’t align with what I was expecting as a first full-time position and how I can switch jobs.
OP any updates? Did you manage to get out of SM?
Lmao VBA and SQL
That’s all I was exposed to in the classroom. It wasn’t a CS degree
Go do a boot camp or just take free courses and learn proper coding