Scrum was effective at my old workplace, but maybe for a bad reason. Almost every software engineer had a time split between at least two teams, usually 50-50 b

Scrum was effective at my old workplace, but maybe for a bad reason. Almost every software engineer had a time split between at least two teams, usually 50-50 but sometimes imbalanced or split further. Since teams tended to ask as much of you as they could -- much like the proverbial professor who doesn't particularly care that you have other classes, theirs is the important one -- engineers were incentivized to stay shallow and get stuff done quickly rather than well. In that context, the longer something could be put off, the less stressed you would be. Scrum was (mostly) effective at setting sprint-sized deadlines to hold people accountable to. Personally, I'd much rather have used a lighter Kanban system, but the issues caused by the time splitting culture were very real; I don't think we could have moved off of Scrum without addressing the deeper issue. I don't think this is the point Scrum wanted to win, but there you go: it's a decent backstop against bad policies elsewhere. Unfortunately, that's a pretty mediocre bar to set.