This is a very opinionated post. More opinionated than some of my previous posts. This post is not about roles in a team (scrum master, product owner, developer, tester) or supporting structures (product management, architecture, DevOps) or in/outsourcing members. This post is also not about the skill homogeneity (homogenous, heterogenous) of an agile team. This post is about the inequality (experience and salaries) of team members within an agile team.
It’s common sense that the team should be composed of skills required to do the job and roles to perform functions. These two are necessary ingredients for a good scrum team.
If you are building a data lake, you need data engineers (competencies/skills). But, data engineer experience ranges from 1-year experience to 20 years of experience. The salary ranges from 5L INR/USD to 45L INR/USD. So, how do we compose teams?
Some unwritten industry rules:
Rule A: The more experienced you are, the expectation moves from being hands-on on a single project to a mentor/coach for multiple projects. A mentor/coach competency is different from engineering a product (hands-on) competency. Adding to the irony, nobody respects a coach who is not hands-on (unlike a sports coach). Salary expectations from experienced individuals also drive this.
Rule B: The more experienced you are, the expectation moves from being a developer/tester to a scrum master, lead engineer, or architect. Many engineers hop jobs to seek out these opportunities. It’s a crime to be a developer/tester for life. The industry critically judges life-long developers/testers (there is nothing wrong with it if your passion is to build). All engineers face the dilemma of salary growth driven by opportunities in contrast to their core skills and passions. That’s life.
Rule C: The less experienced you are, the industry wants to pay you less than your experienced counterparts, irrespective of your skills and credentials. The expectation is that you are a worker bee and not a leader bee, regardless of your leadership credentials. There are exceptions, but the norm is to classify you into developer/tester class. The manager says: “Work your way up.” It’s like the harry potter sorting hat @ work automatically sorting you first by experience and then by credentials.
Agile (with its egalitarian view) challenges this status-quo. Treat everybody equally says agile. How?
In reality, a pay disparity within a team auto-magically drives a command-control structure. Salaries are usually an open secret. This new agile egalitarian structure drives people to respect each other as equals on the surface, but not in spirit.
“Who wins? Capitalist or Socialist? The capitalist, of course,” is the shout-out from the management coach. “That’s the only thing that has worked for humanity.”
With this in-spirit inequality, the agile coach commands: “Self-organize yourself.” The two-year-old experienced software engineer is scared to take the (tie-suit) role of product owner, and the (tie-suit) product owner cannot massage her ego enough to do the developer role. This structure is the new corporate caste system.
Critics of agile target this egalitarian view. Committees cannot make decisions. You need an escalation and decision structure with “one” accountable neck to chop.
An example that works: The five founders of a company working with agile principles to self-organize themselves for the company’s success. There is an in-built expectation that the scale of investment (money, time) drives eventual profits.
Counter Example: A software development team with an experience pyramid working with agile principles to self-organize themselves for the group’s success. People will stick to their roles and view team success from the specific role lens that they own. Scrum masters to drive agile values (huh! no they are just trackers), Product owners to bring requirement clarity, architecture owners to bring design clarity, and engineers to build. Agile purists say that self-organizing means pulling and sharing work and has nothing to do with roles. I disagree; there is more to it! Roles define work types. It’s a culture change that is hard to achieve with in-built in-equality.
It’s human nature to accept the new corporate caste system and reject the religious ones.
Somewhere the capitalist is laughing: “Want to make more money? Take risks and Lead. I will invest, and you will still serve me. Ha ha ha. Money makes more money. So, make more money to make more and more money. Structures exist to control, and deliberately unequal. Welcome to my caste system. Do or die”
Finally, after all that rant, My opinion: A purist agile egalitarian approach is not practical in our current world-view. A team must be composed of people with an experience pyramid with a minimum expectation of mutual respect. In a mature team composed of members (not driven by salaries and opportunity, but by a shared vision), self-organization is more practical, but it’s not the norm. A shared vision is not a norm; the expectation of a shared vision is. The leader drives the vision, and teams share the responsibility to deliver the vision. Capitalistic values drive new world order where in-built in-equality is tolerated as an acceptable tradeoff.
Some day we will grow out of this one too; or become a capitalist.
Digital Journey 