Agreed (though maybe not "two years"), and that was what I was getting at. Scrum is not a system for investing in people--and we need to do that. It's a fairly exploitative mode of organization and this industry's largely uncritical adoption of it is something we don't look at particularly often or with much real gusto.
You're right – Scrum is a process framework for developing software.
That is totally, absolutely, 100% orthogonal to professional development. I work in a mostly-Scrum environment as I described; that doesn't preclude research, or conference attendance, or any other form of professional development.
Bad culture is bad culture, regardless of development methodology.
What you're essentially telling your engineers is that A) doing their job has nothing to do with getting better at their job, and B) if they want to advance beyond the junior engineer level, they will have to do so on their own time. I've seen this referred to as "terminal juniority."
Having a development process that does not produce senior engineers is a problem, even if you try to make up for it by providing a conference attendance budget and a Safari books membership. At the very least, such a process unfairly penalizes those with large personal time commitments.
Fantastic post, and I agree. I've always been in a weird place professionally because I came out of school at a somewhat-above-junior level and so I've been in an interesting position to watch companies try to mold developers. There's that "five years of experience"/"one year of experience, five times" thing people sometimes refer to, and Scrum seems tailored to doing the latter.
Terminal juniority is an amazing term for that. Thanks.
If you want to keep coding, you're expected to leave within two years.