Is Scrum the ultimate corporate job creation program for bean counters, narks and snitches whose job is to weaponize sprint completion to cook up stories (often false) about developers to get them booted during layoffs?

Uh no. Scrum is a thankless glorified project manager just like all the other variations of program/project manager. They have to do a job nobody wants, with little job security since their job is a luxury, not a necessity, and they have little to no actual power.

But sure, blame them for the layoffs.

That’s a pretty strong take! I’ve seen how Scrum can be misused, but it’s also helped teams stay focused and deliver value faster when managed properly. It's all about the execution and culture—if it's turning toxic, that’s a sign of bigger management issues, not the framework itself. IMHO

Scrum in its intended form is just the opposite of corporate job. Scrum masters challenge standard project management practices to make software development more in sync with what it is - frequent do and improve cycle. One of basic ideas of scrum is, that you have this time boxes - sprints, during which team is not to be bothered from outside and scope is unchanged. They are created to shield the team from outside interference. The scope of the sprint has to be set in consensus with the team based on experience with how much can a team do in certain time.
It's not SM's role to push more than it is accepted by the team in sprint scope.
Of course, scrum master must also balance requirements form other stakeholders as well to make everyone happy. That is not a simple job and requires a lot of skill and balls and other positive personality traits to be successful. Rest assured that scrum masters that make a habit of making any of project stakeholders unhappy (including developers) don't last very long.

That's a shame that you experience scrum in this way. I love scrum, either as software engineer or as a freelance consultant, or as CEO. Probably a bad batch. My team was the first in the world to use Scrum-in-the-Scrum and remote Scrum long time ago and we had an impressive results. Unfortunately, there are plenty of human not fully understanding Agile and Scrum, but really enjoying calling themselfs

PMP is a far superior weapon.

In all seriousness, no. Unless of course Scrum is (or has devolved to) a branding exercise, in which case your only hope for survival is to attend the meetings, show enthusiasm, and, no matter how pointless it feels, do at least one thing every week your program manager calls "important."

It's totally understandable that people feel this way and there are definitely good and bad PO's just like any position. There is an element of "punching in numbers" and "making graphs" that just look important but a lot of people feel isn't actually doing any real work, in a way that makes progress. Personally, I actually have seen some persons that use Scrum in this way.

But I think a good Scrum, is executed with a really good marriage of technical knowledge, admin skills, UX competence and human skills. It's asking a lot and I think its no wonder that its hard to find persons that can think of a 'good' project manager they've had. But it is not useless and a good scrum manager, will know how to bend Scrum to fit the team, not the other way around.

I don’t hate scrum, but Scrum Master is an inherently problematic role, since their entire goal is to get a dev team to the self sufficiency point where they no longer need a scrum master. Who in their right mind would be actively trying to eliminate their own job? I think this is why you see so many busy body scrum masters doing what you said… they seem to always try to justify their own job which morphs them into a jr project manager. I got certified as a scrum master - it involved taking the world’s easiest class followed by the world’s easiest exam. They had a good run, but I think everyone has caught on to the scam.

Scrum is the biggest time waster I've seen in my 20+ years of project management. If you need to micromanage the team, then they probably don't understand what features and stories you are delivering. It's a good way to destroy a high performing team since there is no trust in scrum, unless the team themselves are running it (without the Project Manager).

Agile/SCRUM is supposed to form a bubble from the chaos of the business for Dev. It is more of a journey than a destination if you have a real goal of continuous improvement/value. The estimating techniques help to understand what your capacity is over time if you are practicing it correctly and honestly tracking work from ideation to release. That understanding of capacity helps the business plan for success. If your real problem is accountability to the people who fund your efforts, I don't know what to say. I am not saying the comments toward manipulators who don’t get it are wrong. But the problem is not in the framework. Perhaps AI is going to take over here, but for the time being, the people doing the heavy lifting are the Devs. They make something out of nothing so we can have a job. Businesses should not tolerate an adversarial relationship between DevOps and the rest of the business. IMO, we should always have the backs of the devs. That said, some of the devs might need to go if you want to build a great team.

In short, yes.

Strongly disagree with you, It may to some extent depend on how Scrum was implemented and run in your organization, but I feel that your comments regarding narks and snitches indicate that there is far more than a dissatisfaction with the style. Compared to an arcane waterfall, agile scrum is a breath of fresh air for developers. The whole idea is to have a better feedback loop on the development and to be able to quicker respond to changes. To me it just sounds as a personnel conflict than anything else.

I have worked at or with over 10 companies that claimed to be "agile." Guess what? They were all different in processes, metrics, Roles & Responsibilities, etc. My biggest regret in working in IT is that the IT culture is always looking for the "next shiny object." Squirrel!!!

Not in my experience, though I could see how it could be twisted that way in some environments. At my company, scrum is usually no more than 15 minutes and prior to the current manager, it was just "What did you do yesterday? What are you working on today?" and occasionally, "Are you going to be able to complete your tasks?"

The current manager has abstracted it more to, "What are you working on? Do you have any blockers?"

The product manager CAN ask questions or interject sometimes, but just to clarify details or make sure you are going in the right direction. Nobody in the room is documenting individual performance or micromanaging.

If an individual engineer/developer is underperforming, it will show at the end of the sprint when they are left with a pile of incomplete or poorly-completed tasks. I think it is reasonable to expect more from your team.

Scrum, like every other group project where a small number of people do all the work, except with daily meetings!

Our SE professor once told us that Scrum was basically because of a very good marketing campaign and it is t as useful/effective. Companies use is track work. It maybe used as a sort of a ledger to keep track of what you have done.