"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

The "scrum masters" at my last place didn't interact with customers at all. That was the PO's job.

I highly recommend this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

Eh, I didn't actually care for it. It hit a little too close to home.

If "scrum master" is a dedicated job, and they aren't in scrum meetings all day, they are probably really a project manager by a different name.

I've never seen a dedicated scrum master, they've always coded features on the same team. Is this really a thing?

It's absolutely a thing. We have a guy with no technical or product management responsibilities who is the "scrum master." He doesn't know how to use Jira, and seemingly delegates everything to one of his direct reports. Last meeting he literally phoned it in from a soccer game.

I did actually complain about him to my own manager. It didn't go well.

Yes. We had a team of 20 with 2 scrum masters, because they wanted to grow the team, and they had 2 scrum masters available. It was ridiculous. But don't worry, they will manage to fill their time with meetings. Just try to avoid them.

There were three dedicated scrum masters at a previous job - two seemed to watch Youtube all day and eventually left and the other one read about tech all day and got made redundant. The scrum masters that survived did dev work as well.

It is definitely a thing. And for big projects it can be helpful. But in most cases I think a scrum master should probably handle multiple projects if that is going to be their dedicated role.

Oh lord, yes. The scrum masters at my last gig had no technical knowledge at all. All kinds of certifications for scrum, had no idea about actual software development.

I have the feeling that this is almost exactly the opposite of what these methodologies and principles were originally about.

I find it amusing that Agile and Scrum have been around for literally decades now, and we still have substantial disagreement in the industry over what exactly they are. IMO, it hints strongly at the lack of substance.

Considering that the main purpose was to sell consulting services and certifications, it's "mission accomplished".

I know. When your thing is a process and not tangible work output then you need to be fired.

Absolutely a thing. Our dedicated agile lead establishes and "runs" a 15-person standup, story refinements three days a week, a short S2 standup three days a week, sprint planning, product increment (three-sprint groupings) planning and pre-planning meetings, a demo and a retrospective and a standing "team lead AMA" every sprint, and handles setting up inter- and intra-team discussions when that need is expressed in standup or via slack. Also, they maintain "Program" section on our team wiki, set up story boards and pull team velocity metrics, and generally work full time doing all the things that I would be doing for these teams as a team lead, if they weren't there.

Having been without an agile lead for a couple months this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much they do, because they're often doing things that I was just letting drop on the floor as non-emergency.

Most of those things are busy work, and provide no actual benefit to a team being productive. I've worked on a lot of teams, and the teams with this amount of planning structure tend to be the ones that perform the worst, while also having the most unhappy members. It sounds like you're spending a pretty considerable amount of time in meetings!

If you need an agile lead, there's something seriously messed up in the management of your org.

15 person standup...speaks volumes

Well, it's three teams (hence three of some things), but things have gone more smoothly so far when we operate as a megateam. :)

Good ones spend most of their time in meetings or preparing for them. Bad ones tend to have a lot of free time or waste the teams time with pointless crap.

To be a full time position generally involves a lot of administrative work or covering multiple teams. Talking to management is kind of a catch all but generally it’s interfacing with the rest of the world outside of clients. Legwork on security clearances, making sure all the boxes on contracts are checked, and or enduring the team has all the hardware software they need etc.

It tends to be more important in less software oriented companies.

Filling your time with meetings, pretending you are being productive.