This isn't meant as a troll post. I am a BA and just want to see if others are struggling the same way I am. Especially with the push to adopt Agile/Scrum, it seems like although companies still hire BA's our jobs are getting more and more marginalized. The devs want to meet with the users to get the requirements, and then they don't really need a BA. I've gotten some condescending attitudes from developers, like "you can write whatever you want, I already have what I need, I'm not waiting for you to finish before I start my work".

This post was triggered by a bummer meeting I'm in right now. Hired to work on a federal contract. By contract rules, I'm supposed to analyze and document the software requirments, the client mandates that they sign off on the requirements and prioritize them before our developers start work. This company never had analysts before so it's all new to them. They don't really understand why I'm here. In this awful meeting, the SME is rapid-firing questions at the client people, doing a really good job of getting all the requirements but I can't keep up. She's making sure that the developers are keeping up but everybody is completely ignoring me. They've been going over something like ten change requests at a million miles an hour.

I guess I'm just going to wait for the SME's write up to draft the formal requirements. Effectively, the developers work from her write ups, and my formal requirements documents are only sent to the client for a signature.... generally AFTER the development has already started. I'm not sure why they felt the need to hire business analysts (there are two of us) when the SME's are already doing 98% of our job.