You want to know who isn't needed at USAA?
Release Train Engineers
Agile Coaches
and name your favorite SAFe Agile role
Story Pointing, Sprint Velocity, Comment Alignment, Backlog Grooming...these are all garbage activities to make talentless people think that they actually matter.
@OP Agree. After earning many certifications in Agile, Now we feel its total waste. I see some People listing many certifications in their Profile and working under a boss who is Bachelors of Arts with Zero Certifications ( Dir , ED ) . LOL . Good for nothing.
Hate will cause cancer - and there are a lot of haters here. Some people want middle
Managers to go, others Agile rules, others developers, others contractors and some want the EMG to go ….lol …. I guess we had needed up recruiting some looser haters - hope they get a change of heart with the excellent culture we have
This is such rage bait. I bet you haters all used AI to formulate your feedback didn’t you.
Would love to see y'all run around with your hair on fire every day without the structure and organization of your work like agile brings. You want to work in the wild west like a start up? Work at a smaller company without tight regulations and consent orders.
Agile as applied at USAA is another animal altogether. They call it a lion, but we all know it's just a shaggy dog.
Their agile rewards you for mowing your front yard with elementary school scissors instead of a lawn mower, because it has more iterations, more points and a deliverable everyone can't wait to see.
I will say that I have had some really great scrum masters and Product Owners who were engaged and supporting their teams. These were usually the people who had strong technical understanding. However I can see where it gets a bad rap, I was once on a team where there was no A/C defined on the story . Like the person who should have called that out should have been the Scrum Master or Product Owner
Engineers at USAA have an extremely cushy job with “work life balance”
Is this supposed to be some sort of "gotcha"? Engineers also work nights and weekends, release code at 10pm or midnight, have on call shifts where they get woken up at 3am and have to jump online at a moment's notice, have their holidays interrupted, etc.
Work-life balance is a pendulum. Sometimes it swings in the direction of life, other times it swings in the direction of work. I've had on call shifts where I literally worked 24 hours straight because most of my team was OOO and I was the only person who was familiar enough with my team's application to support the major incident call.
And I'm not even complaining about that. Some weeks are cushy. Other weeks are straight out of he-l. It just comes with the territory. RTEs and Scrum Masters aren't the ones who get called at 3am when there's an outage, engineers are.
I don't necessarily agree with the OP that RTEs, product owners/managers, or Scrum Masters need to go, because some of them are amazing and truly do keep the train moving so to speak. Many of them deal with the business/leadership politics so the engineers can actually get work done. But USAA would cease to function if there were no engineers to fix production when it goes down, build/implement new apps, handle security incidents, you name it. The same can't be said for Agile-specific roles.
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones
Ive seen internal reports on ECIO wfh and activity
Engineers at USAA have an extremely cushy job with “work life balance”
We have good people and a mission worth believing in, held back by a culture that rewards busyness over results. Workforce planning ran through both directors and Scrum masters, when one owner would do. Too often, meeting adherence counted for more than the quality of work. Want real progress? Ground reviews in outcomes, and make sure technical work is judged by those who actually understand it. It’s not about box-checking or showing up; it’s about impact.
Idk, I kinda like my RTE :)
There was a societal need to create employment opportunities in "tech" for communications and psych graduates. The bonus perk in all this was that not only did it create BS jobs for them at the analyst and manager levels, it created a pathway to senior management in the actual tech orgs for well spoken ignoramuses who could never hack a STEM degree or write a line of code. The political reasons for this manufactured "need" are obvious and don't have to be repeated out loud. IYKYK
My favorite is that they make you a PO when that's not your job and it takes hours away from your actual work serving the Members. You ask to not be a PO and they take it out on your end of year rating and still keep you as PO.
Show me on the doll where the agilist hurt you op
We refer to them as paper shufflers. Additionally, we should include product owner in this category.
If you ever see a scrum master tell them scrum is short for scrumdiddlyumptious
Remembering pre-agile, we typically had few meetings: project, team, 1:1's. There were project managers, leads, analysts. Heck nooo I don't want to go back to that thing.
Strange. I looked up Scrum Master in my thesaurus and found Assistant Waffle House Manger.
I looked up Scrum Master in my thesaurus and found Middle School Substitute Teacher.
If you ever need to find a failed software engineer, just look for a SAFe Agile Scrum Master Micromanager.