The more I work with Scrum, the more I hate it. Its so-called “ceremonies” cannibalize so much of my programming time that I sometimes forget I’m not a manager but a programmer. That is especially true since I started working part-time.
A few months ago, I switched from a 40-hour week to a 30-hour week. I now only work six hours a day, five days a week. As far as I’ve seen and read, Scrum isn’t equipped to handle part-time employees. In fact, I haven’t really been able to find any resources at all that address this topic.
As such, the two hours a day I work less cut exclusively into my programming time which means one thing: proportionally the amount of time I waste in Scrum meetings got significantly higher.
Sure, I’m the only part-time employee on the team, but that doesn’t change the fact that I often have to inform them that I won’t be getting my tasks done on time because I was stuck in Scrum meetings for four hours a day instead of coding.
I am not exaggerating when I say I can spend four hours a day in meetings assigned some sort of Scrum-name like “refinement” or “retrospective”. I have at least one of those days every week, if not two or three of them. On the days I have fewer meetings, I still spend at least an hour in one or two Scrum meetings.
The end result is that I don’t get much time to program. That is especially true when the meetings are spread out throughout the day and I have no ability to “get in the zone”.
Since going part-time, my productivity has disproportionately suffered since I now spend comparatively more time in meetings than I used to. It’s a huge motivation-killer.
I recently read an interesting article titled “What happens with part-time Scrum Team members?” and I can relate to most of what the author writes about, although she writes about the topic on a more interpersonal level whereas my main problem stems from the lack of consideration and flexibility inherent in Scrum for part-time employees.
I’m convinced that Scrum is a broken system that requires more overhead for programmers than without it. It puts silly labels on meetings to make them feel more joyful, but in the end, it’s just a bait-and-switch: silly names for more of a programmer’s precious development time.
