Thread regarding U.S. Bank layoffs

"Fire them all immediately"

The bank loves loves loves the reorgs. I'd think the scrum crowd would be a 2025 RIF and Re-org candidate.

Speaking of digital transformation, what is the real reason Punim and the diminutive MrTieMcRichardFace left? Lots of agilists separated (layoffs) shortly after those two "left"

Fire them all immediately

A grade 17 scrum master. Wow... Must have been a nepo hire.

Scrum Masters take credit for the work of others and blame others when deadlines are missed or problems occur.

All you have to do is look at the leaders in digital and agile. The hypocrisy of do what I say and not what I do. Work remote is for me not thee. Bunch of tools running the departments.

I always enjoy the comments around Agile that it's been around since 2000. Like every other industry idea, the bank jumped on it 20+ years after everyone else.

I have no problem with hiring former teachers, coaches, moms, etc…. We’re all former somethings and good people are good people regardless of where they come from. I’m even willing to admit agile and the cult that’s grown up around it might be an improvement in some cases. My problem is that agile and agilists are being shoehorned into situations where they’re simply not needed. This of course leads to them looking completely useless and honestly being completely useless through no fault of their own. I like our agilist. He’s a good guy and in the one or two opportunities he’s had to actually do something he’s been helpful. The problem is that we had a very high functioning process that worked very well and took a long time to create. We threw it away for a stupidly complicated process that takes way more time, is less centralized and requires replication of multiple steps and we’re expected to applaud it because it’s “agile” when in fact it’s actually the opposite of agility.
Then, they refuse to refine the process to make it better for the d-mbest reasons. IMO while some agilists may be useless I think the bigger issue is leadership not really understanding the tools and how/where they can be best applied. One size truly doesn’t fit all and one tool doesn’t work for every situation.

There was a grade 17 hired as a scrum master/agile so they do go hire. Ended up being a very bad hire.

I have seen no evidence that agile has increased velocity, quantity, quality or decreased costs of any development. Seems like additional layers on top of the existing layers.

"Does no one here remember how projects used to be run at the bank 6-8 years ago?"

Yes, and now it's about the same but with an additional secretary/micromanager on the team.

In response to the fact Scrum Masters are nowhere to be found during Go Lives on weekends: I am a Scrum Master. Two weeks ago I worked a 17 hour day on Friday, followed by Saturday evening through 5:30am while we tried to deploy and it was a big challenge. I’ll work this upcoming weekend for deployment for another team. I pitched in to do testing; I do a lot. I’m also a former teacher And a mom. What terrible things to say about an entire group of people.

I work with people that professionally attend scrum/agile ceremonies, they produce nothing, just attend those ceremonies. And yes they call them ceremonies.

Overpaid? What are you referring to, exactly? I don’t know a single Sr. SM position that’s been posted in the last 5 years that was anything above a GL 14 or 15. Even then the SMs are expected to have 2-3 teams. That includes doing sprint planning, refinement, demo, review and retro every two weeks, as well as quarterly product planning across EACH team they serve. There is little to no career growth beyond this role, and promotions and recognition (in the form of Legends award) almost always goes to agile middle managers, and never to individual contributors.

Also, what’s wrong with hiring moms? Yikes. How shameful it must be to be your mom.

Our Scrum Master talks and talks and says nothing. Devs are worked to death and the middle management, scrums PO’s are overcome with joy and pat each other on the back when something goes live. They are no where to be found on the weekends when it goes live or when a hotfix needs to be done. They are biggest bunch of brown nosers! They will kiss the ar-e of senior leadership and not care that engineers work horrific hours and weekends just so they can kiss up to leadership and have the nice M-F hours.

@3bte+1vK1nCUj are you implying that scrum masters / agilists (is that even a word?) resolved those issues? If so, you're the deluded one.

Does no one here remember how projects used to be run at the bank 6-8 years ago? Everyone worked in a silo, product and business line never, ever interacted with engineers. Software used to be built with over 100 engineers assigned to projects and 7-10 people (usually onsite) did the actual work. We worked out of a single business and technical requirement document that was housed somewhere on a sharepoint site with over 200 pages in length. Software was almost always incorrectly implemented, with a slew of defects, and incredibly late to the market (like 18 months late). Then, after poor and late implementation, those people would move on to other teams and divisions, leaving behind no one to support or enhance digital products.

I think people, especially those that are new-er, are completely unaware of how far the organization has come.

In my area, scrum masters were created from a list of people who should have been RIFd but were management favorites. They failed up. Most have absolutely zero knowledge of their product areas. The comments of Shield Agile are spot on. It would be fascinating to see statistics on how this version of Agile has sped development. It hasn't.

I agree that there is a relatively large team with a fake agile leader made up of mostly professionals that endorse SAFe. This agile leader creates a red zone for people and treats people unfairly, to the point where she will ruin people’s careers at the Bank. I’ve seen it happen. This person has left a bitter taste in people’s mouth and I can see why people don’t trust agile - because they don’t trust her and her team.

The scrum masters and coaches I’ve worked with that endorse a product mindset have been a tremendous help.

True product success lies in the synergy of deep domain knowledge, anticipation of future needs, a pulse on emerging trends, and unwavering customer obsession - ensuring every decision and action adds tangible value and aligns with the core mission.

It's a thankless role made exponentially worse by leaders who support doing agile, but are uninterested in doing the hard work of setting up ways of working that enable being agile. Add in managers that don't/won't onboard an endless stream of new employees and contractors that come and go from teams regularly, managers that don't/won't performance manage their employees on product teams, lack of support from senior leadership to make meaningful adjustments to be more efficient and effective, huge teams spread their across multiple continents - and all the complications that come with this setup, product managers that don't /won't manage backlogs in Jira, the mess that is Jira, the mess that is Dragonboat, and the overall poor implementation of Shield Agile in a company culture that prefers the status quo - good luck stepping up to take on this work when they are laid off. Please don't come here to complain about taking this "easy cheerleading" on when it is added to your workload - it should be no sweat for you. I don't even work in this role, but I pay attention.

The Scrum Masters are some of the happiest, most fun and authentic people at this bank.

Notice the pronounced "Us against Them" posting indicative of bigots. So, since you know your racist rants get deleted you've chose to target a group of professionals, most of whom are working hard to put food on their tables, pay mortgage, rent, kid's schooling and so on, just like anyone else. I'm pretty sure they feel the pressures of their job and the changes going on around them as well. If you're going to target someone, go after the enterprise and the culture its promoting. Don't generalize by calling out entire professions because you've had a bad experience with a few individuals. Why do you seek to hurt people? Do you get some kind of thrill out of it? Same for those who voted this up or placed a supporting reply.

As an FYI, yes, I have served as a Scrum Master, Project Manager and several other related positions both at USB and elsewhere. In most cases it's been a positive experience. The "hybrid" agile/scrum/shield/safe version at the bank is a mess and no doubt contributes at least in part to the ineffectiveness of some project participants. I'm actually not a fan of Agile, but we do the best with what we are given each day, right?

Scrum Masters are as successful as the buy in from leadership and the team they work with. I lost an amazing one this year due to this.

We have a Scrum Master on our team and she actually helps us out a lot. I think it depends on which one you get.

As someone that has a PSM I certification, I can tell you right now the fact that the bank even has Scrum Master positions is laughable. The bank uses "Shield Agile" - which is an even worse version of SAFe - which is nothing more than Waterfall with added complexities and risk. Most of the "Agilists" at the bank have absolutely zero concept of Agile and wouldn't know what Agile was if it sat on their face. Shield Agile violates the main principles of Agile and just allow the bank to continue to operate as they always have, while throwing in a mix of Agile terms (have you heard of the "Scrum of Scrums" meetings - that's not even a real Scrum event) without changing how they operate and being able to claim they are "Agile". In true Agile, management is pretty much left out of the process - and since there's so much levels of management, that'll never happen at the bank.

Teams used to have multiple project managers and program managers in TOS, along with business analysts AND scrum masters. Most of those roles, with the exception of the SM, were laid off and the responsibilities have been rolled up under the SM umbrella. The organization had a difficult time finding quality SMs willing to pick up those responsibilities (go figure). So, the organization retitled the SM role into “agilist”. In my experience, half of the agilists are redundant and cause more harm than good, and the other half literally keep the team together and moving.

It depends on the Scrum Master. Ours contributes to the success of the team.

Passing trend? We have been around since 2001. Long “trend” huh?

Wow. I’m a Scrum Master at the bank- thanks for informing me of the little value I bring each and every day- when I am giving 500% effort to my job and my teams.

Defending DEI indicates you can’t see the present. We all oppose hatred and bigotry here, but DEI programs aren’t the solution. At best, they’re empty gestures for PR purposes. But typically, they worsen the problems they’re ostensibly established to address. If our goal is a colorblind world, we shouldn’t have programs that make us hyperaware and hypersensitive to skin color in every situation. We want people to be treated fairly and equally, so we shouldn’t have programs that slice and categorize us every which way and treat us differently because of the boxes we fall in.

This is a bank that has had a career development mentorship program that explicitly excluded certain people based on race and s-x. That’s DEI.

A balance is essential, hiring and promotions should prioritize skills, qualifications, and proven abilities while fostering an inclusive workplace. This ensures both fairness and high performance.

Attacking DEI is a low rent move, and indicates you can’t see the future. Until we live in a color blind world, we will always need some form of DEI and/or affirmative action to ensure those on the margins don’t get sc--wed economically and politically, and are also able to have their voices, ideas, and contributions attributed to where they should be. There is no place for racism, s-xism, homophobia, or any other form of bigotry in this world.

I hope our leaders are reading these post and comments! 😁

In my city, the bank has such a horrible reputation as a place to work, quality and creative developers would never be attracted. Only the useless and unwanted apply and even those are looking for something better.

You don't know what cheerleaders do?

DEI is on its way out too....studies show it's problematic and divisive. Keep in mind U.S. Bank is slow to act in general but eventually they will trend in the direction most companies are already doing.

Give it some time. Headquarters is located in a very liberal part of the country so it will take additional time for the company to follow suit.

This says more about you than it does about them

Had one on my team, that person was the worst coworker I ever had in my career. That’s person

1. created more problems
2. made everyone feel bad
3. slowed down work

Awful! Huge ego problems and no knowledge of the part of the business they try to “help”

Say you have a budget of 1 million dollars. You have a software product to build and integrate within the bank. The E/SVP has 2 options

• Option 1 is hire a team of 3 extremely talented software developers at about $333K each
• Option 2 is build two teams of 5 including mid to low level talent of 3 software developers, a product manager and a scrum master with the million dollar spend across them.

Being a bank the E/SVP is most likely non-technical so the latter option of 10 new hires under their umbrella is a no-brainer as it makes them look more important leading a larger team. That is of course until they realize the insanely large gap between the extremely talented developer and the mid/low level one, not to mention the imaginary roadblocks and tasks that a PM and SM bring along with them slowing down everything.

Very good suggestion.