I've never seen a scrum master code. Sometimes the daily scrum meeting is run by ICs when the scrum master is busy or not around.

We do it. Usually agile comes from above and the team only have to tick a box, say they re agile and show a shadow org around it. We even rotate the scrum master sometimes to spread the joy.

End of the day, we fill the client's need, as efficiently as we can without letting them run wild in expectations and keeping cost in line with budget: it's common sense and I dont get what the agile religions bring really. Turn idiots into mediocre people, maybe ?

It just seems to me that "agile as directed by management" is pretty much an oxymoron.

We have scrum master as a rotating hat with all the other senior developers on the team. 99% of my day is code or meetings on what I'm coding. The only burden is once a week I look at jira with some managers and help them click boxes. I'm not sure what a full time scrum master would really do.

I have. Half of the time, I’m glad it’s not their primary responsibility in this case.

i have seen a scrum master code.

     ScrumMaster = NULL;

there you go !

The original idea was that the ICs would take turns as the scrum master. I'm sure someone somewhere has actually done that, but it's unusual.

It seems pretty popular in big software-centric companies like the FAANGs. IME the turnover is usually every couple of months, as the sacrificial lamb gets tired of it and other team members start to feel like it might be time to take a turn in the bilges.

I can understand why the idea of hiring someone to handle that role would be appealing, but it really isn't a full-time job.

Plus, the last thing that BigCo engineering teams need is more politics; they have more than enough of that between the overlapping layers of engineering, project, and product managers.

No, they are not. In some cases, if an individual contributor is not good at contributing, if one has political capital, that one can become a scrum master. And you see this in mega tech companies all the time.

I've heard that is the theory- that it should be a role on the team, not a title, and (optionally) that it should rotate. Everyone on the team at some point contributes to leading the team, so everyone gets accustomed to communicating well.

That said, I've never actually seen it in practice.

At best, it has been a role someone in product takes on so they can act as a shit shield from above and let us know if there is something urgent, but otherwise stays out of the way.

At worst, it is a frivolous salary that takes the book-keeping notes from stand-ups and puts them in a report noone reads.

You can get a scrum master certification in about an hour and the test isn't even proctored.