How can so-called "scrum masters" unblock or coach anything for devs?

Jun 24, 2019 24 Comments

they advertise themselves the ability to "speed up team delivery", "eliminate technical roadblocks", "coach developers".

Now with the exception of SWEs who act as SM, how can a dude with a business degree and past experience as QA/BA/photographer/front desk reception can help, or even understand, anything technical?

My team has had 3 SMs in the past year. The only technical word they know is "C plus plus". They spend their time watching cat videos on youtube all day, and write bs motivational "leadership thoughts" blog posts in the internal Confluence.

What exactly do they "coach" devs? Dynamic programming or Haskell?

It's amazing that this Snake Oil charlatan as a profession has proliferated our industry and people just accept them just as the world accepted AIDS 50 years ago.

comments

Want to comment? LOG IN or SIGN UP
TOP 24 Comments
  • Microsoft
    Tier 1

    Go to company page Microsoft

    BIO
    #1 in Prestige
    Tier 1
    A scrum master is meant to be a dev who happened to take a two day course
    Jun 24, 2019 3
  • New
    User_name_1

    New

    User_name_1
    Introduce deadlines, and then tell you that you have to meet them. Thats all.
    Jun 24, 2019 2
    • Apple
      Snut Ella

      Go to company page Apple

      Snut Ella
      The this is. This is important. Really important. If they do this it’s worth more than an additional Dev or two on a project. It takes a specific personality type. Zero fucks to give and a maniacal focus on process. But it can work.

      Don’t get me wrong, it usually doesn’t work. But when it does it works well.
      Jun 24, 2019
    • Why can’t your manager do that?
      Jun 24, 2019
  • H1B Scrum Masters? You've gotta be shitting me. If that's true, I'm voting Trump. This is too far.
    Jun 24, 2019 5
    • OP
      F5 I think you got it backwards. Waiter has a lot of accountability like making sure the food gets to the customer, drinks are refilled, entertain and make sure customers have a good time.

      Scrum master? They own nothing and are responsible for nothing. As long as they fill up their buzzword quota for the day, they just spend the rest of their time on reddit youtube. The guy in my team even shares funny cat videos on our team chat 🤣🤣
      Jun 24, 2019
    • Sorry. You're right. Meant to say that waiters have accountability and SMs don't. That was posted pre coffee.
      Jun 24, 2019
  • E*Trade / Finance
    cbEV72

    Go to company page E*Trade Finance

    cbEV72
    Scrum is a scam, but it’s a best hidden secret. It’s the same crop of people who were six sigma black belts, plus a bunch of PM who got the certificate from scrum.

    Scrum is not the only scam going on. There’s new breed emerging, kanban. There’ll be more. It’s always like that. These people are not in tech only, they’re everywhere in business
    Jun 24, 2019 0
  • Uber / Eng
    @w@

    Go to company page Uber Eng

    PRE
    Capital One
    @w@
    I've worked in a company with dedicated scrum masters before and they've been wholly useless. Most were, like OP mentioned, former receptionists "retrained" to "do scrum", which really just meant adding more useless meetings to continue justifying their existences. Really disgusting, I'm glad I don't have to deal with useless people in my new company and team.
    Jun 24, 2019 1