Scrum is a cancer

there's a very strong selection bias. we don't really hear about the cases where a team does so-so sprints, it's not great agile/scrum/paganism, but the product evolves, development goes in an okay-ish manner, and there's just not much to talk about.

the whole structure gives enough support, retros surface problems and give sufficient pushback against "features only, no bugs" management style, sprints gave some sane cadence to both devs and product, daily status checks help to detect folks who are stuck, "refinement" forces both sides to actually commit to some kind of written stuff, and "grooming" provides much needed priorization and black comedy relief as the team tries to come up with a non-pedo expression for the activity.

of course, there are valid criticisms of scrum/agile. mostly that it fails to teach developers to realize their need to set boundaries with regards to interaction with "the client", aaand that most managers and projects are non-ideal, underfunded, and devs should leave it, and look for better ones (even with possibly lower pay).

the problem is, it's hard to prove that someone is not a true "_____". Because the definitions are not well defined.

I feel very sorry for Santiago.

His pain seems to be real, even if it is not even connected with scrum.

What makes it really sad: all of this can be fixed very easy - the company "just" need to hire somebody who is able to address the underlaying root cause of this anti-pattern.

1) "1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game." Planing poker has nothing to do with scrum. It is an estimation technique. Just do "no estimation" and if it works for the team, everything is fine. Also it is a planning tool - if you didn´t understand how it works, maybe a quick google search could be helpful.

2) Scrum does not have "ceremonies". They are called "events" and can be extremely efficient - so if you spend more times in those meetings than actually working, something is very very wrong. Maybe get some outside help, have a retrospective that is done properly and understand the root cause?

2) "Scrum of Scrums" is not part of scrum - this is some scaled approach. Based on what he described it is most likely the anti-agile SAFe frankenstein of frameworks.

3) "We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention." -> WEIRD. People should pay attention to the actual meeting? Also none of this is part of scrum.

4) "We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit in a sprint." -> this is not scrum. This is whatever the team came up with.

5) "I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software." -> this is not scrum. It is estimation techniques.

6+7 "story points" are not a part of scrum. Agile contracts are a common practices however, but contracts based on story points are weird, because story points are a relative measurement that cannot be compared (same as velocity)

8. "Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously." - Scrum does not have the role of "manager" or "tech lead". So obviously you are not doing scrum.