Scrum Master/ Agilist isn’t a valid career path

Dec 13, 2021 10 Comments

My 2cents - you can get a scrum master cert by attending a 2 day course. It’s not a valid career path. I, a software developer, have worn the scrum master hat for my team before. It can be a rotating position.

I see people all the time advertising themselves as “scrum master, agilist, team coach,etc”. I honestly don’t view this as a valid career path and would prefer to train someone who already had other relevant skills to do this role. I feel that trying to tackle this role without any insight into the SDLC that you’d typically gain from working in another relevant role ( dev, design, data engineering, *real* qa) is virtually impossible and you’ll cause more problems that you solve. Likewise, if you’d built a skill set in one of those areas, you wouldn’t just give it up.

In my personal experience, “low quality” scrum masters do way more harm than good. A bad dev is unproductive, and can’t get code through PR. A really bad dev gets a little bit of tech debt into the codebase. A mediocre scrum master leads to organizational confusion, wasted time, money, massive gaps between the features expected and delivered and poor projections that do more harm than good.

Honestly, I feel as though the way Agile is sold is a lie to all stakeholders. Leadership feels that it will demystify software development ( it won’t). Tech teams feel it will give them a seat at the table in making decisions (it won’t).

I’d love to hear differing opinions. Also- if you are at a FAANG company, prestigious unicorn (Uber, lyft, Airbnb, etc), or impressive quant fund (citadel, Jane street, 2Sigma), and you hire “Scrum Masters” based on their agile-scrum process knowledge and organizational skills alone, I’d love to hear your input.

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TOP 10 Comments
  • It's not a valid career but neither is being a social media influencer yet people make a career out of all sort of useless and crazy things. At the end of the day money talks. Whatever pays the bill is a "career" regardless of how useless anyone think it might be.
    Dec 13, 2021 3
  • Snap
    fdnfc

    Go to company page Snap

    fdnfc
    Snap infra doesn’t even have any type of PM and only like 2 TPMs. Sure the hell doesn’t have a dedicated JIRA updater, I mean Scrum Master. An EM should be doing all that.
    Dec 13, 2021 0
  • Amazon
    99cents

    Go to company page Amazon

    99cents
    Honestly, a pure scrum master position seems kinda pointless. Can easily be substituted with once-a-quarter or once-a-year specialized training.

    As for the actual scrum master work daily, honestly this is what project leads / managers should be doing. Or it can be rotating among engineers in the team.
    Dec 13, 2021 0
  • Cummins
    lundburger

    Go to company page Cummins

    lundburger
    Work for a fortune 500 which is well oiled money machine, have an entire org of scrum Masters and scrum excellence brewing here..
    Dec 13, 2021 0
  • The thing you’re missing here is that these team coach roles are there to make everyone work together and therefore their best. I’ve been on a handful of teams that work very little together and someone who’s job is exclusively the support role would have been helpful
    Dec 13, 2021 1