[zeroonetwothree]

For me bad days are entirely about the people side vs the infra side. If some infra is down that hurt productivity but I don’t feel that negative about it. I’ll just do something else.

Meanwhile if I have too many meetings or have to deal with dumb people or get criticised by someone that doesn’t understand what I’m doing that’s actually a bad day and has big negative effects beyond just that one interaction.

[n_ary]

I once got criticised by the scrum coach(master?) that she had numerous complaints about me being not well suited to the team and was probably out of league and would fit a far more junior level. This of course gave me a very bad day and left a mark for almost 6 months.

Needless to say, I later found out from my manager that, the scrum coach thought I was spending too much time on particular tickets and causing bad jira metrics for the whole team, but he later explained to the scrum coach that the tasks were large architectural changes or research duties, hence could not be comparable to regular 10LOC bug fixes or bug triage tickets and some stuff can't always be broken down into smaller tasks either, as research topics need more investigation before figuring out what needs to be done.

From then on, I have learned to safely(with caution) ignore criticism from non-technical people and improved my day quality.

[yobid20]

We got rid of scrum masters. They were useless. We just run it all ourselves now. Ditched the entire scrum process, and just have a task kanban board now run by all engineers. This works SO MUCH BETTER. Our daily "scrum" meetings dropped from 1-2 hours per day to 10-15 min.

[tdeck]

It's amazing to me that someone's whole job could be running the scrum board, and that such a person would be questioning other people's contribution to the team.

[iamthepieman]

I've had a really good scrum master. (Plenty of bad ones too). The really good one I could say something like

"I started work on this item and realized that I'm actually missing a lot of context and information in the requirements. I need your help clarifying them"

The scrum Master knew who to contact to get that information would set up a meeting, have the meeting without me if they thought they could do it or schedule it and include me so I could ask the questions I needed, Mark the ticket for me as blocked, fill out the info after the meeting and communicate the risk and reason for delay to stakeholders.

Basically I could say "There's a problem!" and the scrum Master would get it taken care of or find someone who could. Probably the most valuable person on that team.

[tdeck]

Sounds like a good TPM, I must admit I haven't worked at a company that had a "scrum master" title and didn't realize the role had grown in scope.

[Izkata]

I'm not sure it is a larger scope, I've always understood this to be their role - they lead scrum meetings, but outside meetings they were the one that helped get the team unblocked. Managing the board was just a side-effect of keeping an eye out for any team members who were stuck.

On top of that the one I worked with who was good at this also took on small cases because otherwise he'd regularly have nothing to do.

[mistrial9]

this is an interesting story.. please keep in mind that alternate possibilities can be considered about motivation, communication and results. The specific combination of "you go junior level" and "spend large amounts of time on architectural aspects" are ringing a bell. As in, a cereberal young engineer thinks deep thoughts, impactful or fatuous, and goal-oriented managers steer in a pushy way possibly including remarks of a personal nature. An observation is that much to the friction-coefficient of it all, there is no correct answer about refining architectural aspects versus "get that task done by Tuesday" . more could be said but, what really went on is now water under a bridge, so to speak...

[YZF]

I agree. Bad people interactions are the worst. I can be productive with a piece of paper and a pen if I have to, thinking through some problems. People issues range from small-ish (getting interrupted) to major de-motivation dealing with inter-personal issues.