What sounds fishy is that the Scrum Trainer has to keep paying money to keep his certification. Certifications are a joke when it comes to programming anyway,

What sounds fishy is that the Scrum Trainer has to keep paying money to keep his certification. Certifications are a joke when it comes to programming anyway, much less when it comes to programming methodologies. What if someone came up to you and told you that they are a certified Ruby Way Master? Yet it seems like certification matters to some people (otherwise there would be no point in paying someone money to retain it). And it's obviously in the interest of the Scrum Alliance to make people believe that it matters because it lets them sell it over and over again to the Scrum Trainers. So it seems like they build their hierarchy to put themselves in a position where they profit from the lie that certification matters. Moreover, they also added another couple of layers of people who also want people to believe that certification matters (Trainers and Masters because they want to make back the money they paid for their cert). While this is not exactly a pyramid scheme, there are some similarities in that money gets passed up and people are trying to convince everyone of a lie. I think certifications might make sense for things where it is impossible for other people to tell whether someone knows their stuff. I don't think Agile is that hard conceptually. I also think re-certification makes sense in an area where the state of the art is constantly advancing, so that if someone is certified you know that they are really up to date with the latest developments. I don't think Agile changes that much.