I'm honestly surprised to see a post with a vitriol-to-insight ratio so bent in favor of vitriol getting such a positive response. I think the poster here is way, way off mark.
It's incredibly frustrating, because so many of the things he says suggest that he or his organizations truly don't understand scrum, yet he proactively goes on the offensive against anyone who suggests he's wrong and won't listen to any evidence that he is. (And yes, I get that this post is just a 'vent', but 'just venting' content is not usually the sort of thing I expect to see make the front page of HN.)
I have been on multiple teams, including my current one, where Scrum has been a massive success (as measured by products shipping on time and in-spec with positive reception by customers, as measured by the company making money off my work, as measured by my own and my team's performance assessments relative to my org). Absolutely none of the following happen on my team, or on any team I've been on where things were working in those terms:
> We spent more time talking than doing.
> We spent more time estimating story points than writing software.
> We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points."
> We paid people who told us whether we were "burning down points" fast enough.
> We brought professional Scrum trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified.
> We spent years [continuing to try things that didn't work].
Absolutely none of this happens on my current team and absolutely none of this is required to do Scrum "right" or at all. I've been on three teams in my current organization and five+ teams overall that used Scrum over a period of more than eight years and while all of them had issues, none of them did any of the above. I'm sorry this person has had so many bad experiences, but at a certain point, you've got to ask whether your attitude and approach are part of the problem. I see a lot of things in this person's attitude that make me think they could be.
For example, he makes comments where he just whines about not liking terminology, like:
> 1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game.
> 5. I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software.
He also phrases sentences which are not arguments (or at least, are not really relevant without some explanation) as though anyone should understand why he's mad:
> 3. We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention.
and then finally, spends lots of time asserting (with no evidence) things like:
> [Scrum] fails everywhere, every time, but they tell you “you aren’t doing it right.”
while simultaneously talking down anyone who tries to suggest he's maybe, legitimately not understanding Scrum.
If this is the approach he took with the people who were trying to help him implement Scrum, no wonder it didn't work. It was probably never going to.
By the way, this person offers a service where you can pay him to present "learnings" about your content on Twitter, or wherever. Without disclosing that the content is sponsored. Pretty scummy. See https://www.svpino.com/