askchapo

I can speak to scrum master, I was one for a while. On a programming team you have a bunch of devs who ideally wouldn't do any work and management (a project manager?, a "product" guy, etc) who wants to get as much work as possible out of the devs. The scrum master is supposed to help them reach a compromise: a limited amount of work, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in when it's done, but on a wider scale it is legible and predictable to management so that they can make business plans. To this end the scrum master runs planning meetings and helps break development work down into sensible tasks, the length/difficulty of which can be roughly estimated. If you don't have a scrum master, management is constantly making impossible requests, asking the team to do 180 degree turns, etc., and also it's really hard to estimate software progress so basically nothing gets done on schedule and everyone is mad all the time. In effect it's a limited-mandate negotiation job on behalf of the developers.

In my opinion this is not an email job, but maybe at large companies with more opaque management it is. /u/chickentendrils is spot-on about why it exists.