Why the Scrum Scorn?

Question

On another submission I made a joke about Scrum Masters and got 60+ upvotes in a matter of minutes. I has personal experience reasons for that joke. But in general I have experienced that Scrum Masters have surplanted SEO Managers and Marketeers as the laughing stock of the dev world? Why is this the case, and how do we fix it?

uberman · Accepted Answer

I think that many (at least I) go through the same or similar checkboxes every standup and often devolve into the minutia making the entire process a waste of time.
In a standup, I want to know that the team and individual members are working on the right task(s) and if so, are we/they blocked by anything and if so, how can resources be reallocated to remove the block. That is it.
I'm not interested in a pep-talk.
New and existing tickets should be triaged in a different forum and the critical results raised in the standup. I don't want to review trivial tickets and I definitely don't want to wordsmith anything in the standup.
I think many "scrum masters" let standups devolve into "time reserved for preparing for the standup".

legitster · Answer

The whole driving mantra of being "agile" is less process and overhead. Scrum is presumably a method of achieving it.
A scrum master is a full-time person dedicated to managing a process designed to eliminate process.
Regardless of how effective or ineffective scrum or a scrum master can be in reality, the fact that the position even exists is ironic. And a good signal that most formal agile implementations are cargo cults.