Scrum is a cancer

So you are saying that their development became... unSAFE?

Been on both sides of the equation as well over the past three decades. Two observations.

1) As you said, when you have a lot of junior developers (which given developer demographics is a given), you need some structure. Scrum provides that. For better or worse, the structure is helpful to people that are still a bit uncertain about how stuff works. I hate stand-ups as much as any other developer. But as a product focused CTO, I love that it gets the day started and my developers out of bed, awake and cafienated and focused on the job. Scrum's other meetings are a necessary evil. You need a platform to get them aligned with business goals. They don't naturally do this by themselves. Most importantly, a lot of developers kind of expect to this structure at this point. Providing structure to a team is important. Scrum is as good as any other structure. Not ideal with remote teams as meetings get more tricky.

2) Most scrum roles are junior management roles. And as such you get typically not very experienced people filling these roles as part of their entry into the corporate rat race. So, you get corporate politics playing out at the micro level with lots of turf fights about stuff that generally is close to irrelevant. Ranging from the right way to run meetings, the best issue tracker, etc. It's this endless friction that is causing a lot of resentment with more senior developers. Particularly in larger organizations this can get ugly in a hurry.

My strategy for containing this madness:

1) Keep teams small. Small teams are efficient teams that should not need a lot of (micro) management. And they also don't need a lot of formal roles.

2) No scrum masters. It's a bullshit role that doesn't add a whole lot of value. Especially in smaller teams. Instead I prefer to have tech leads calling the shots on their team or topic and stepping up as a leader. Part of that responsibility is leading the team in a direction that makes sense from a technical and business point of view. And the rest is about coaching people around them. It's something that happens naturally even when you don't want it to. So, I mostly just let this happen and encourage it.

3) Product ownership splits into technical and business ownership. While these can be the same person, it's better to have two equally ranked people shooting for consensus covering both business and tech. That ensures the business and tech is actually aligned. Weed out unrealistic requirements and deadlines; make sure that the technically easy yet valuable work actually gets done; ensure that business value is delivered; ensure that work gets prioritized correctly and that POs don't revert back to waterfall.

4) Management by exception. I like giving people enough room to manage themselves. I step in when that doesn't work. And I use positive re-enforcement to encourage them to do more of the right things. I'm not actually a genius; so I need smart people to tell me what the right way is to do things. Especially when those are things I'm not that good at. People closest to the problems, usually are best positioned to come up with good solutions. So let them. Fix it when that isn't working.

5) Use sprints as a predictable, calendar based umbrella for people to structure their activities around. Short enough cycles that it doesn't turn into waterfall. Long enough that we don't drown in meetings. Day to day management is Kanban based. Just generally remove uncertainty about what needs doing, who is doing it, why we're doing it, what's coming next, etc. Using continuous deployment to release stuff means that guarding quality is a constant and not a once a sprint kind of thing. Sprints are not release deadlines. Using Kanban day to day means that any high priority issues jump to the top of the stack right away. Short feedback cycles are key to keeping quality and morale high.

6) Meetings can be synchronization blocks. Any engineer knows those are bad. Business people seem to never grasp the cost of meetings (as this is all they do). It translates 1 to 1 to how teams function as well. That's why day to day work should not be blocked on meetings. We have issue trackers, slack, and other communication tools to sort out any blocking issues. Also, just talking to a person can be surprisingly effective. Scrum meetings are neatly partitioned to be about things like status updates, prioritization, estimation, and reviews. None of those meetings should be on the critical path to delivering working software. The correct way to resolve issues is direct or asynchronous communication (as is convenient).

7) Try to keep the few meetings we have a bit positive, light and friendly. It's bad enough that we have to sit through those. Conflict is what makes scrum so controversial. The constant bickering about everything and anything is just a mental drain on everyone. I try to keep that out of meetings as much as I can. Having tech leads means that they get a first shot at a decision. So, no need to have a lot of meetings about that. I use one on ones to correct a lot of things when they go wrong in meetings. Meetings are for positive re-enforcement. Call out the things that go well, inspire people to do more of the good stuff, etc.

> then take the good from the bad as a source of constant improvement.

I worked as an engineer, PM, and a manager, when I was an engineer and scrum was applied wrongly, I tried to communicate for that “continuous improvement”, but that only works with an actual leaderships that listen, 99% of your middle management are just power hungry folks that are kept in their positions to take the shit instead of senior managements, when I worked as a PM however and tried to customize those agile tools per project and per team personalities too, everyone was happy, projects got delivered and things worked as expected. In 90% those situations you can never blame the engineers, look at the work environment as a workshop, the guy working in that shop is the PM and the tools are your engineers, ultimately that guy is accountable for the success or failure to deliver that work, if you start blaming the tools you have in the workshop, then you are the incompetent one, simply put.

Having been on both sides of this, and having worked closely with "the business" doing requirements analysis, project management, tech-leading and individual development, my conclusion was that your original view is somewhat closer to the right one than the PMs.

One may ask, from where does the tech industry come from? From where tech startups come from? Why is there such a thing as the "tech" industry at all? Don't all companies use tech? We don't talk about the "science industry", do we? If you try and find a definition of tech firm that captures what people mean when they say this, you'll conclude they're basically either computer companies or ordinary firms doing ordinary things, who use computers more effectively than normal. And in the latter case what makes a firm a tech firm is basically unarticulated, people know it when they see it but it's not like there's a set of rules to classify, say, Netflix as a tech firm and Disney as not a tech firm.

So what is it that people see? Mostly it's the distinctive culture that appears when you have (ex-)programmers at the very top of the company, as in CEO and/or board level. This causes companies to differ in all sorts of ways, but one way in which tech firms differ, for example, is that in tech firms you don't get terms like "the business" and "IT". You don't get non-technical project managers. The distinction between the two sides simply doesn't exist.

Non-tech firms live in fear of tech firms and startups. It took me a while to notice this, but go to enough conferences, talk to enough people and you'll see it. The average firm is far more scared of Google or Apple encroaching on their space than they are of an established competitor. This is because tech firm culture is more effective than their own. Such firms have a long history of coming from nowhere to utterly dominate entire industries very fast, and they don't know how to respond to it.

The cultural problems can be seen in the stories you were told. Programmers who understand the business are too expensive. They get ideas. They get passionate, and that's a problem. In a tech firm, experienced devs who understand business end up at director level or higher and firms compete to pay them the best. In non tech firms, they are a problem and get pushed out. This is because the business people are scared of such devs because senior developers end up understanding the business better than the business people do. After all, they implemented the business logic so every rule, regulation and detail is in their mind. And they're used to the rigor demands of programming, so tend to say awkward things in meetings like "that won't work" or "that contradicts the other thing you just said". Tech firms don't mind this because that guy's boss is himself a former developer, and is used to such discussions (from e.g. code or design reviews). "Business people" on the other hand aren't used to this at all, yet feel like their value is their business understanding. They need their devs to be bored and uncaring drones because otherwise what's their own value? You don't want to be competing for a promotion against someone whose understanding of the business is better than yours and who can actually execute change projects effectively!

Underlying all this of course is the uncomfortable fact that programming is much harder than most office jobs. Programmers can and will learn programming and then go on to learn the fine details of finance, accounting or shipping without breaking a sweat, but the reverse is generally not true. It was maybe to some extent in the Visual Basic era but the move to web apps put a stop to gifted amateurs cobbling together business apps and nothing really replaced it (maybe Oracle APEX but it's not as widely used).

My question is - how DO you convince management to let you try Kanban?

We would like to try but we can't, as "everyone else here does Scrum so the problem is in you, not in the process".