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In the Benelux, try to get a job after answering what you really think about Scrum. If the local Scrum Master is present in the interview team you will be "persona non grata" for the rest of your career...

"One Hacker Way Rational alternative of Agile - Erik Meijer"

https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ

Nowadays a Developer has to act a little bit like in this scene from Good Will Hunting.

Make yourself stupid...you will be hired.

https://youtu.be/UpL3ncoK99U




> try to get a job after answering what you really think about Scrum.

That's providing an opinion, a very perilous thing.

Scrum can work, and it can also fail spectacularly. Often it just presses forward as well as any other process. By saying, "Scrum is awful" you're positioning yourself against the current trend in many businesses (similarly saying that about DevOps in many places, or DevSecOps if you go to the US gov't or DoD contractor). And since the value of Scrum is so dependent on the people doing the work and how they actually run things there's no universal statement that can be made about it anyways.

So don't, qualify it: I've seen Scrum at a past employer where they insisted on only code-based stories in each Sprint which led to massive technical debt, and eventually the project came to an incredible slowdown as they paid no attention to refactoring or other cleanup tasks until after they were bit by it. If the stories are a mix of maintenance and development stories then it seems to be more successful.

Such a statement is hard to dispute (it's about personal experience) and is non-confrontational (you're not entirely dismissing Scrum but you're not endorsing it either, only offering insight into what seems to be a problem feature and a potential solution). You aren't making yourself stupid, but you're opening up a potential discussion. If the Scrum Master is present you can get into a discussion about their specific process as implemented in their organization. That can give you more useful insight than saying something negative as if it's a universal truth, when it's not.




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