What was it like to be an individual contributor before SCRUM?

Not much different, really. Most of the so-called agile features existed before with different names. Waterfall is widely caricatured to contrast with agile, but I rarely saw it work much differently in practice. Having worked with both, and after getting certified as a Scrum Master (for what that’s worth), I think the main difference is how much analysis and planning gets done in advance of coding. Too much and the process gets locked up in analysis paralysis and over-ambitious plans (and schedules). Too little and the team has false starts and can veer too far from requirements, or discover important requirements too late.

The defining bad characteristic of waterfall is getting stuck doing a lot of planning and then the plans and schedule don’t change or take customer feedback into account. This doesn’t have to happen but it can and does.

The defining bad characteristic of agile is getting stuck with a lot of half-baked code programmers have their egos invested in, before requirements are fully understood. This doesn’t have to happen either, but it does.

One thing I like about waterfall is having the goals and roadmap defined, so everyone has the big picture. The goals and map might change but everyone sees the changes. In the agile/scrum projects I’ve worked on many didn’t have clear goals, map, or a shared vision, the “conceptual integrity” Brooks writes about. Cards with user stories doled out in sprints aren’t a big picture.

One thing I like about agile is acknowledging up-front that generating complete and unambiguous requirements in advance is impossible for any non-trivial project. Requirements will evolve from feedback and collaboration and discovery. But without a shared vision of some kind it’s just a jazz odyssey, to paraphrase from Spinal Tap.

Errr.. you dont need to live in the past to avoid scrum. A whole bunch of places dont do scrum right now. If you dont like it, just join some place that doesnt do it.

I started before open spaces... so work life was quite different back then. But yet, it doesnt really matter. In the end there’s what you need to do. And different levels of involvement from managers and co-workers.

People were perhaps more chilled...

I'm sure all of our experiences differ, but in my experience, the senior folks would "own" a piece of the puzzle. Depending on the scale, that could be a feature, an app, or in Enterprises, multiple platforms. You'd often be on a team, with each member being primary owner of some areas, and other people cross-trained to back you up. You owned your area like a Scrum PO would, sometimes with your own team to help, while your manager would be the liason with the business to find out what their new needs were, then hand it off to you to make it happen.

For projects too large to take on yourself, there would a be a project manager would would pull everyone together, talk about what needed done, plan it out, and you'd do your part, with the PM checking in on everyone, coordinating meetings, and making sure everyone was on schedule.

That is really where Agile came from - breaking down those knowledge silos, sharing responsibilities, and trying to deliver progress in small chunks vs. 6-12 month projects that would waste an entire year if you got off-track.

Agile Scrum was created as a response to Waterfall. Waterfall was, generate a giant spec, like 50-100 pages, then set the developers on it.

Before scrum and agile, there was MS Project, Gantt charts, Excel spreadsheets, bugzilla, etc.

Basically, there has always been some (project) management overhead that you need to pay lip service to. The trick is not to take it too seriously, you can play along with it, provide updates here and there... but still just do what you think is right, in the order you think is best.

Scrum doesn't matter. Are you working for someone that can do your job better than you? Are you learning new things? If not, go somewhere else.