Scrum Master/ Agilist isn’t a valid career path
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.
comments
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.