I was recently looking at the state of the contractor market and was shocked by the prevalence of Scrum, the lack of distinction between Scrum and Agile, and the number of places that apparently think Scrum is a modern development process that will appeal to good engineers. Perhaps they'd like people to go through a four stage process lasting about a month and including a weekend-long take home test and a LeetCode panel interview as well? At least it makes it easy for anyone who is better to stand out!

Exactly - I’ve definitely seen a surprising number of companies here in Europe where they talk about using Scrum as if it’s proof of them being an innovative and modern company, and really make it a big selling point in their hiring materials. It comes across (at least to me) as a bit old fashioned and out of touch.

I suspect one problem is that the people who are high enough to be bringing in senior+ contractors have often been at the same company for a while themselves and may not realise how quickly their impression of the rest of the industry can become outdated. I had a discussion with someone not so long ago who was very senior, basically running all of software development in a tech business well past the early startup rush phase, who told me quite sincerely that everywhere did daily standups and worked off a Scrum-based process these days. This was someone who I respected for being smart and open-minded about most things, yet they had this intense blind spot about how tired Scrum and all the rituals that come with it are looking to a lot of good developers now.