How do you do, fellow employed people?

A recent-members only episode of ATP was about John’s experience working on Marco’s codebase for the show’s CMS. It was a truly great conversation about coming in and contributing to an existing codebase, why it’s better to refrain from immediately refactoring, and the sordid history of PHP. Before the hosts got to all of that though, they threw some shade at Scrum Masters and those with Scrum certification.

Marco: So that’s actually a real title that people aspire to, is Certified Scrum Master?

Casey: Can confirm.

John: They put it on their resumes.

Marco: That’s amazing.

Casey: No, I mean, that is true that once upon a time, I dunno, it was probably like ten-plush years ago, that I did go through the training. I did receive my certificate. It was as much a joke as you would expect.

I trust that the hosts were having fun with some playful teasing, but the undercurrent was very much dismissive of an aspect of work that many, if not most, employed engineers experience daily.

When John went independent, the last host to do so, I joked somewhere¹ that they would become like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. While the thought of them waxing poetic about how far they’ve made it and exaggerating the hardships they had to overcome along the way was unrealistic enough to joke about, the inevitable and natural loss of perspective was not. Gradually losing the perspective of being an employed engineer isn’t bad, especially for a show mostly about Apple, but it does affect how the hosts should talk about the decisions and experiences of employed engineers. With that in mind, I wanted to address their remarks individually, based on my own experience.

Marco: So that’s actually a real title that people aspire to, is Certified Scrum Master?

Yes. People aspire to be Certified Scrum Masters, because project management is a real need that involves real jobs that pay real money. Getting certified helps them get hired. Furthermore and while I prefer “Scrum Coach”, I have personally worked with a few Scrum Masters who are really good at their job. I don’t know about you, but engineers sometimes aren’t the best collaborators. They aren’t always the best planners either. A good Scrum Master can help an already good team perform better. They can also identify and help the team overcome issues like dysfunction and burnout.

John: They put it on their resumes.

People put all sorts of dumb stuff on their resume. You know why? Because it helps them get hired. Having a Scrum or some other certification isn’t even all that dumb. Many companies use one of a handful of project management methodologies. Advertising that you are already familiar with a methodology tells a prospective employer “this person already has an idea of how work happens here”. It’s really no different than saying you are familiar with whatever programming language the company is hiring for.

Casey: No, I mean, that is true that once upon a time, I dunno, it was probably like ten-plush years ago, that I did go through the training. I did receive my certificate. It was as much a joke as you would expect.

Like Casey, I too was forced to take Scrum training by an employer. While I am sure many have had terrible experiences, my training was actually quite good and the process it kicked off solved real problems. It gave our product and engineering a boilerplate for basic stuff like…

• When should planning happen?
• How should we prioritize as a group?
• What happens if one team needs work from another team?
• How should we balance planned and emergent work?

Having a process in place made it so we didn’t have to constantly invent new ways to answer these questions ad hoc every time they came up. It wasn’t perfect and there were times when I had to work around it, but having a defined and agreed upon process was way better than having no process.

Losing perspective after leaving a certain cohort is natural. It doesn’t take long after graduating high school to realize you can’t really relate to high schoolers anymore. I don’t think Marco, John, and Casey believes they’re better than employed engineers, but they should better recognize they aren’t employed engineers anymore, especially before poking fun at employed engineers.