Job Titles and Seniority in Scrum Teams

> A set of competencies were devised and objectives set for individuals
> to reach these competencies, such that when achieved that person
> was promoted to that level with title and accompanying pay rise...
...
> Whatever we might want to say about the semantics of job titles,
> the reality is in human nature many people care about them.

Correct, but the level and the title and the money are not necessarily related.

Example: Job titles can be treated like avatars on a Scrum board. In other words, people may be allowed the freedom to make their own up, as long as they aren't indecent or otherwise breach company rules. There was a spate of this about 5 or 10 years ago when people titled themselves "Agile Samurai" and "Value Flow Maven" and other such ridiculous confections. They had that put on their business cards. There's less of that sort of thing these days because it's become trite and worn out, but it's still basically harmless. What matters is that when it comes to working on a Scrum Team, you're fulfilling one of the 3 Scrum Roles, and that's it.

"Title theatre" can therefore be separated from the matter of pay grades. The glib thing to say is that individuals must be paid what they are worth, and the arbitrage of the jobs market will establish the correct level....if you don't pay someone what they are worth they will simply leave. However, that does not necessarily provide transparency over the inequities that will creep into a complex system like an organization. Perhaps the smartest solution is to come up with an open and transparent formula for remuneration which can clearly be applied to all without prejudice. Whatever you come up with won't be perfect...but the better the formula you have, the more the best people will be inclined to stay.

I believe that Job titles and levels are always a part of any organization. This is a simple way for an organization to separate pay grades, skill sets and longevity in the company.

Indirectly, it has nothing to do with Scrum Teams' roles. Inside the Scrum Development Team, everyone is a developer, even though your domain of expertise is in Business Analysis, Testing, QA or Coding.

Directly, the organization job title can help multiple members of the development team achieved their goals. e.g. Pair programming between senior and junior software engineer to tackle complex coding problems, formulating of a better acceptance criteria and test preparations when a business analyst partners with a tester, devops working with developer in automating certain tasks.

This pairing, mix-and-matching of individual team members (with different organizational job title) helps a lot in making the team self-organize, cross functional and empower themselves.

Hello,

i am afraid i dont get a reasoning behind it ... 

Inside the Scrum Development Team, everyone is a developer, even though your domain of expertise is in Business Analysis, Testing, QA or Coding.

so Does it mean senior person with 20y of experience will deliver tasks dedicated for a junior?

Any view on that? Thanks!

He or she would recognize that their commitments are ​​​​jointly held, and would assist less experienced Developers to understand and appreciate the same.

so Does it mean senior person with 20y of experience will deliver tasks dedicated for a junior?

Yes, if that is what the team needs in order to deliver an usable increment of value for the product in a Sprint.  The Developers should self-organize around the work in a way that makes the best use of all of them.  It doesn't mean that anyone has to do everything. It means that anyone needs to do everything that is needed by the team.  

Scrum does not care what job title an individual has been given.  Scrum does not care about how many years of experience an individual has.  Scrum cares that there are three responsibilities (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer) that need to be fulfilled in order for the framework to be successful.  Ideally each of those responsibilities will be fulfilled by unique individuals in different roles.  However, there is nothing that says the individual that is fulfilling the Scrum Master responsibilities could not also provide help in fulfilling the Developer responsibilities.  Scrum cares that the team is cross functional and contains all of the skills and abilities necessary to accomplish the work that they set out to do. 

in that case i dont get a point of scrum its pointless... as no-specialist or someone with Ages of experience... wont be do work from the elementary school... just only because something has to be delivered. Pointless...

I cant imagine some specialist for example doctor/surgeon to be asked to do some trivia which is executed but someone who just graduated from medicine... 

Needles to add, I can accept exception ie someone with extreme high seniority takes over task for a kids... but in special circumstances... not on Daily/Sprint basis. I cant imagine normal individual who does. 

ie. Harvard mathematician solving math problems for a kids (elementary school) instead of working on Nobel price research.

If that's the way all employees think you will quickly find yourself with all kinds of bottlnecks where tasks aren't completed because some level of seniority is under represented. Most jobs require you to also do trivial taks. Your Harvard Mathematician will in fact do math problems for kids, just only after using his training and experience to get from a complex equation to a simple one. He will also do it faster and probably more reliable than the elementary school kids.

If the trivial tasks need to be done too often to the likes of the specialist then maybe he needs to find another job/team because apparently his expertise is not needed as much in his current team. But the fact that the trivial work keeps popping up is an indicator that while trivial it is apparently importent work and its more valuable to the team/product/company to have someone do this work instead of finding harder stuff without value.

If we were to dispense with them (in favour of say "software engineer", how would people likely react? - would it be seen as a demotion (although we wouldn't alter salaries). 

Why would you need to dispense with job titles? That falls outside of the Scrum framework.

Within the Scrum Team the accountability is that of Developer, as in product developer (people accountable for building and delivering the product). People fulfilling the Developer accountability in the Scrum Team may have various job titles, years of experience, pay bands etc.

No hierarchies or sub-teams exist within the Scrum Team. Scrum Team is self-managing which means they internally decide who does what and how it gets done. Experience and skills, more than titles or years will likely come into play with how the team manages themselves.

in that case i dont get a point of scrum its pointless... as no-specialist or someone with Ages of experience... wont be do work from the elementary school... just only because something has to be delivered. Pointless...

The point of Scrum is to leverage Empiricsm to work through complex problems and deliver value for stakeholders and users of a product. A Scrum Team only exists for the purpose of delivering value for a product. "only because something has to be delivered" is the point, or you wouldn't have a product or a business.

I am wondering if this is really a Scrum discussion or if it is more about how your organization is thinking about managing job titles and competencies. Scrum has accountabilities instead of roles or titles. No where does it say that titles need to align to accountabilities.  

Question about delivery of tasks brings us to the question how exactly Scrum team was set up? People were assigned to the Scrum team by management, or was there some level of independence among developers to form a team?

If the team relationship is not healthy and toxic to the point of zero respect(scrum value) the team is dysfunctional any way.

To understand how a team is supposed to work, think about a soccer football team, where people have no hierarchies, and are all responsible for the result.

Their goal is to score more goals, and it is irrelevant if one is a world class star and another is just a beginner selected from an amateur club-they have to assist one another in the best possible way, and cover for one another disregard.

And of course the world class surgeon performing the surgery should help a less experienced colleague if he or she is failing the task, because their job is to actually save the patient, and not play the status game.