I got laid off at a job where this applied, then at another company got rejected because they cancelled the position altogether to use Agentic Coding by Microsoft instead.

Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important.

While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs. Maybe it is to streamline newcomers? Because it took a bit of time to gather all the project info, but after that it was pretty relaxing.

I don't know, the market has shifted so much that I feel like I should probably be contempt with what I have.

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azangru 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs.

Scrum is so woefully misunderstood.

It makes sense for small teams (yes, those 4-5 devs), if — and that's a big if — they work together on a single product. It is intended for developers to coordinate with each other, and also provides feedback loops for reality checks and for improvement of collaboration.

If those 4-5 developers work independently from one another, don't have to coordinate, don't need business to tell them what, out of various options, is the most important thing to work on right now, and don't need feedback from users to correct them along the way, then of course they don't need scrum.

	▲	habinero 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it's basically just formalized rules for communication, and I've been on teams where it worked great I think it's awful when people follow it slavishly -- you chuck out anything that doesn't fit your team. And yeah, in the example you gave, it's a terrible fit lol I have some stakeholders that do not know what they want and can't define it, so in desperation I dragged them thorough making fucking user stories -- user stories --and oh my god they loved it lol They immediately started trying to apply it to everything too. I have regrets.

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mzl 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my view, Scrum is a way to force dysfunctional teams to have some process, it is not useful for a team that is already delivering and working in a samll-a agile manner.

	▲	ap99 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you were to write down a guide on how to avoid team dysfunction, it would get a name or maybe an acronym. If it worked someone would say, hey let's use this in more places. If it worked really well others would say these aren't guidelines they're dogma. Now we have scrum 2.0.

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dormento 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A wise person once said "scrum turns dysfunctional teams into average teams. It also turns highly-motivated teams into average teams".

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jpfromlondon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're right, but you're going to be inundated with

"but real scrum has never been tried" types.

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brailsafe 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Scrum is just one of the early signs for me to start looking for a new job

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AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Scrum is management consulting companies trying to keep their job by turning something that would make them irrelevant (the agile manifesto) into something that requires tons of billable hours and useless qualifications like "scrum master". Seems to be working great for them.