I was discussing the implementation of scrum at a certain organization with a fellow employee today and we talked about the chicken versus the pig storyline. Of course the idea there is that a chicken is only involved while the pig is committed. We argued about the analogy for a little bit and my comment was that "Well a chicken can see a project to fail or succeed and either way will still have a job" and my years-wisened compatriot said with unwavering tone, "Well the developer won't have a job after they succeed or fail either".

Maybe i'm naive in my youth in the industry, but I find it disheartening to believe that my co-worker would think that a successful project also means the end of his current worth to the organization, but does he have a point?

I've previously been working at a staffing agency, and i see the daily ebb and flow of software development contract work that comes and goes, the miles long line of software developers and engineers who goes through the revolving door of contract placement. Juval Lowy says in one of his webcasts about SOA and project management that it's best to hire an architect and use a customer or proxy to design the system and the services that it will need then figure out a dependency graph of all of these services. Each service will be assigned a developer and should you only have one service that has no other dependencies then you hire just one developer. This means that for maybe months of design there will be no developers... then it would maybe start with 1 or 2 then ramp up to more depending on the number of services. Obviously as services finishes and dependencies are in place those workers can move on to another task. However, once all of the 'services' (which juval uses the term lightly to mean any component up to and including the UI) are implemented it sure sounds like you would discard the whole team.

I think this is one giant reason that  Scrum is becoming more and more popular among developers, because scrum teams are always working on a product backlog for their project until funding is gone then they move on to the next product backlog until there is either:

no more company

no more scrum

no more products to make