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After all, to be a level II SCRUM master, you don't even have to know how to program
Indeed. I've noticed that folks who strongly pursue the Scrum Master role as a career either cannot program at all or are mediocre programmers. Which I'm fine with, BTW, because I like to see talented programmers writing code, not running stand-up meetings. The Scrum Master role is essentially a management/co-ordination/facilitation role requiring organizational and people skills, not technical ability. It can be a tough gig too, based on this excerpt from a Ken Schwaber talk:

You will have, if you use Scrum, someone on each team whose name is, it's called the ScrumMaster, also known as "The Prick". And this person's job is to make sure that you don't cut quality. D'oh. And they have no authority but they, what they can do is if we've defined that an increment has a certain level of quality for it to be demonstrated to our product management, their job is to make sure that quality's there. And if the quality isn't, not to let you demonstrate it, but instead to say to the product manager, "Hmph, we lost our heads, we're not done, it's gonna take us another month to finish this".

This person is probably the least loved person in the world because they stand right at the nexus between product management believing that any amount of stuff can be done and our willingness to help them cut quality to support that belief.

The burnout rate on these people is usually, like, 13 to 14 months. Throw 'em away. We often get them from hopeless, professional areas like QA. People in QA are used to doing incredible things with no authority, no respect, and no hope of success, so that's where we take these people.

-- Ken Schwaber, Google tech talk on Scrum, Sep 5, 2006 (46:34)

The Scrum Master role reminds me of the Political commissar, commonly attached to military units during WWII. The political commissar role was not created to do any actual fighting, rather to teach ideology and exercise social and political control over the soldiers, to guard against anti-revolutionary thought and action.

On the subject of non-programmers making big bucks in the software industry, I'm reminded of this little piece from Joel Spolsky:

The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. The best part is that most management consultants, the stunningly good-looking, bright, earnest chipmunks with 4.0s in Russian Lit from Harvard who work for these companies, have absolutely no way of knowing this, so they can go through this whole exercise without even knowing that they're doing it! They get all the way through the 2-year associate program on their way to MBA school without even realizing that they haven't done a goddamn thing about productivity, all they've done is caused a fairly pointless transfer of wealth from ExxonMobilConoco to BainMcKinseyGartner's senior partners. And it's a lot of fun! First class flights to Houston and Oslo! Helping the world be more productive! Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.


In reply to Re^2: Selling swimsuits to a drowning man by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Selling swimsuits to a drowning man by sundialsvc4

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