TLDR: me, another person on this site, ranting about Fidelity’s agile, and my potentially useless prediction.
If they’re cutting agile roles, then I hate to say it but they’re cutting in the right place. Frankly, they should have laid them off last year.
I used to want to position myself into an agile role myself. Frankly, as a tech person, I was lazy, and decided to try to weasel my way into an easier role. Eventually, I fell in love with the art of software engineering, so I’m not gonna transfer into Agile. Plus, I’ve met (countless) scrum masters and agile coaches in and out of Fidelity who told me that it’s not a good time to be in the craft.
Frankly, Agile just isn’t done right in so many roles. There’s not enough actually good scrum masters out there. Fidelity is also not a good place for agilists to grow. The way Fidelity is set up, there are many non scrum masters that play as the scrum master. You have scrum masters in Fidelity who glorify things like “it’s a made up job”, and “I just do this to get the easiest way into management”. That culture is rampant especially in FI. You don’t need a scrum master unless the scrum master is damn good at their job, and we’re gonna need those that operate about higher than Fidelity’s EP standards.
It’s just the way Fidelity is. Fidelity isn’t doing agile. They’re doing their Fidelity Fragile. Which, hasn’t worked. Fidelity in 2025 is about networking to the top. Scrum masters are a program dedicated to networking to the top. Respectfully, the way Fidelity does scrum is to have the scrum masters be the ones that the upper management blame and speak with when things go awry. The scrum masters report to those higher up people. They’re viewed by Fidelity as Fidelity figure heads. It’s disrespectful to those who are actually good at their jobs.
My prediction is that a good chunk of scrum masters will definitely be laid off. Potentially, 1/3. I don’t have someone high in ranking “in the know” like many anonymous people on this website claim they have. I just have my experience in tech and my experience with how Fidelity mucks things up. I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong.
This is the rest of my prediction. A few months after the layoff, remaining scrum masters will be reorganized to manage more teams. Usually, they manage up to 2 teams. That’s just how it’s supposed to be in agile anywhere. But knowing Fidelity, they might try to extend that to 3 or 4. Upper management will realize that many don’t really have any real functionality outside of hanging out all day (not an agile fault, it’s a Fidelity fault), so they’ll pile more teams on the surviving agilists to manage. Job opportunities for agility is scarce, so the remaining scrum masters will stay at Fidelity. The good 1% (not even the good 5%) will leave for better opportunity elsewhere. The remaining will probably not have much hope outside of Fidelity. Unless they want to uproot their lives. Many have been in tech as software engineers in the past, but once you cross that bridge from software engineer to Scrum, you ain’t going back. Which is a shame since some are passionate about code.
I don’t know if I’d be happy to be proven right or wrong by this. If you’re gonna lay off the scrum masters, I mean… majority of them deserve it, many are lazy, have no motive other than themselves, and capitalize off Fidelity. Those scrum masters should be out, rather than other positions that don’t obviously offer no value. But then, you could lay off the good scrum masters that make people realize why they’re useful. And that would be sad. But then again, that’s Fidelity’s culture anyway. And Fidelity will still survive since the company is a historic cash cow.
I’m genuinely sorry to passionate scrum masters at Fidelity that you’re in this position. None of this was meant to disrespect YOU. You don’t deserve to be dealing with these other people who do not appreciate you. When I was researching becoming a scrum master for the wrong reasons, I talked with 10 scrum masters/agile coaches. There were only 2 that were actually passionate about agile. That’s just my personal experience, but you may see something different. As for the scrum masters that don’t add ANY value and are only jaded to get a paycheck, please just add some value. They probably won’t take my request seriously. They’ll sit around being like “hi team, look at this chart I made of your guys work, it has a squiggly line that shows how many stories you finish, so now I can make money, derp”.
Thank you for reading. I’d be happily proven wrong, and like to hear back from other people. Especially people who have seen how agile unfolded at Fidelity over the years, and (good) agilists at Fidelity themselves.