Scrum Mastery & Other Bullsh** Jobs

I was talking recently with some colleagues about what a Scrum Master does and whether or not it’s a ‘bullshit job’. I’d recently come across anthropologist David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), which contends that a great deal of the work many people do on a daily basis is ultimately pointless, and that doing meaningless work is psychologically destructive to the people doing it. He argues that contemporary working life has generated a range of jobs that are more about being perpetually busy and keeping up appearances than actually doing anything of true value. As we get our sense of self-worth from our work, no matter how well remunerated we may be, when we do work that we know is meaningless, we suffer.

Keep in mind that I was joking when I suggested that Scrum Mastery was a bullshit job, but nonetheless it was heartening to hear one of my colleagues come to my defence. He assured me that I played a valuable role: that I helped the team organise daily life, plan more effectively, and just generally kept things operating smoothly. It’s always nice to be validated by your peers, especially when as with many jokes, they reveal an underlying anxiety. Thinking about it afterwards, I had to acknowledge that the joke was rooted in real doubts about the value of my work to the team, to the overall organisation, and even to the world at large. Indeed, looked at in the overall context of my life, the joke was just one instance in a fairly regular series of Dunning-Kruger-like moments where I vacillate, sometimes wildly, between total confidence and almost absolute despair in my own abilities. I don’t think this anxiety is just imposter syndrome, but rather as Graeber suggests, a deeper anxiety about how work relates to living a meaningful life and a sense of self-worth.

Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs

1. Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important;
2. Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer;
3. Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently;
4. Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not;
5. Taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who do not need it.

I’m very happy to say that I don’t think Scrum Mastery fits into any of these categories. In fact, quite the opposite: being a Scrum Master is all about being anti-bullshit. One of our primary purposes is to try and stop those types of busywork from happening altogether. Given that I believe this, and have helped teams eliminate these types of nonsense behaviours, why did this idea strike such a chord with me? Was the anxiety related specifically to my work as Scrum Master, or just a more general symptom of existential crisis?

Tobias Mayer’s article Is Scrum a Rigid Process? has a critical insight on this point. He uses the easily relatable example of a garden renovation to illustrate the essential nature of the Product Owner and Development Team roles, and the inessential nature of Scrum Mastery:

The scrum master role is a workaround for dysfunctional organisations. And let's face it, almost all IT organisations are dysfunctional. This is why they turn to Scrum or other Agile ideas in the first place: their traditional way of doing things is failing them....

In its early days a new Scrum implementation needs a scrum master. If the scrum master does their job well, they can quietly go away and few will notice. The structure will stand, and the process—developed in context and constrained by the Scrum boundaries—will continue to evolve and improve.

This gets to the heart of the matter for me: Scrum Masters only exist because of the dysfunctional nature of the world of work and the bullshit behaviours that present themselves as routine, common sense and necessary. Our job exists to make work less arduous and more meaningful, and yet our impact manifests most potently in things that didn’t happen and work that wasn’t done. If Tobias is right, when Scrum Masters succeed in transforming dysfunctional situations into functional ones, we make our own roles redundant. In which case, in the absence of other metrics, a niggling anxiety about your value to the team might just be a signal that it’s time to move on.