7 ms·

"When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person" This rang true with my current team. It isn't that th

by awjr 9y ago

"When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person" This rang true with my current team. It isn't that the meeting doesn't happen but it is extremely fast. No round robin, just a simple 'has anyone got any issues'. Nope, ok carry on. We still get high value from those discussions. My personal observation is that when this senior person is there, they are using the stand-up as a project management meeting. This should really be 'taken offline' and this person should be working with team leads away from the stand-up. Luckily I'm working closely with one of the team leads in an isolated area and I excuse myself from the meeting and let him talk on my behalf but I shouldn't be at that point where I'm trying to avoid them. The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time.

wojt_eu 9y ago
Half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer hours. This is often enough to give manager a pause.
- bad_user 9y ago
  That's a drop in the ocean compared to hours wasted dicking around on Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc
  - antigirl 9y ago
    SSSHHHHhhhhhhh !!!!!
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    But I'm more productive if I take a 15 minute break every hour, or so some article said so.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  I agree with 'bad_user' here, to some extent. That is enough to give a manager a pause, but not to immediately dismiss it as a bad idea. Most professionals will agree that it's unrealistic to believe that developer-typing-code-time has 100% efficiency. The time spent 'decompressing', which can sometimes manifest itself as spending time reading/doing unrelated stuff, does sometimes produce a solution faster than just banging away coding. Management work is different from coding in that everything is hard and noisy to measure, so to some extent heuristics are relied upon, simply because it's the state of the art in this area. So, even if half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer-hours (which is a rather large number), it does not mean those hours are wasted. If one of those meetings a day stops someone spending one week chasing a dead-end known to others at least once in a while, on average the team moves faster, not slower. BTW, I actually agree that 8 developers is too much, and that half an hour is too long for a daily. Just going off a tangent here.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    The point is not that it is actually bad. Even 8 developers for half an hour could be justified. The point is that it should give a manager sufficient pause to actually think through whether or not that cost is justified by what that meeting provides. Surprisingly few teams account for the cost of the way they spend their time, and one outcome is that it's very easy for time sinks like meetings to go unchallenged because people don't think about how the costs multiply with the number of people involved. It's "only 30 minutes". Costs which would require budget approval if it was scheduled as a project suddenly become ok because no single person spends much time on it per meeting and the time spent never gets recorded and reported on anywhere.
- vidarh 9y ago
  What I started doing after a couple of years of managing teams was to ask for average salaries per work function for my team, which has consistently surprised people when I ask (that this is surprising surprised and shocked me), and then send a weekly report to my boss - whether they wanted it or not - enumerating costs broken down by task. Several times I've had managers that were confused why I'd send them this, or even insist it was a waste of time at first. Never once have I had a boss ask for this kind of breakdown themselves. Then they'd see the result, and inevitably I'd get questions about how it could be right that e.g. (to take a number out of thin air) $5k worth of developer time every week was spent on meetings. Or why that "tiny little change" that someone insisted on adding without proper scoping because it was so minor ended up costing $20k. Pretty quickly those reports they initially didn't care about became mandatory, and it to some degree changed how people thought about resource allocation. It doesn't need to be precise tracking either - you need to get the costs to about the right magnitude, and treat them accordingly depending on how you collect the data.
onion2k 9y ago
The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. It's not necessarily a loss of time though. The mindset "any time spent doing things other than writing code is a waste" rarely produces great products - you need to talk about things. No one knows everything about a project once it gets to a even moderately large size. Working in isolation from the rest of your team means you're not influencing, or being influenced by, the knowledge and discoveries that other people are making as they work. That means you're very likely to be working with an out-of-date model of the problem you're trying to solve. Clearly a meeting where nothing happens is a waste of time, but the solution to that problem shouldn't be "no more meetings", but "better meetings with real outcomes".
- adrianN 9y ago
  Unless those eight people work on very closely related problems, there is little value in having all of them in the same room talking for half an hour. Communication doesn't have to happen with the whole team if different parts of the team work on different parts of the software.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    If their work is that independent then the fact they're all on the same team seems problematic.
    - Scriptor 9y ago
      It's entirely possible to be on the same team as someone and not need to know the details of what they are working on.
      - sidlls 9y ago
        What do you mean by "details"? The level of detail is highly context dependent. I'd argue that if there isn't a level of detail that all members of the team agree they should be interested in, then either the team is not composed properly or there is a misconception about the level of detail that is appropriate.
taneq 9y ago
> The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. But the whole point of a stand-up meeting is to keep it short. If you're talking for more than 5 minutes, the scrum leader or whatever you're calling them needs to reign it in. If you hit 10 minutes you're doing it wrong. Stand-up meetings are dispatch, not processing.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. What i see here is a team that let it happen. A 'scum master' (or whoever) that oversaw the conversation and carried on with it. Developers (or team members) who talked for that long, and other people who _let_ it go on for that long and didn't put their foot down. Man, where I work if a standup started going for half that time, people would just start walking away from it.
- vidarh 9y ago
  When the person who calls the meeting is sufficiently senior, walking away isn't always an option, unless you're prepared to also walk away from the job.

by awjr 9y ago

wojt_eu 9y ago

Half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer hours. This is often enough to give manager a pause.

bad_user 9y ago
That's a drop in the ocean compared to hours wasted dicking around on Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc
- antigirl 9y ago
  SSSHHHHhhhhhhh !!!!!
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  But I'm more productive if I take a 15 minute break every hour, or so some article said so.
ralmeida 9y ago
I agree with 'bad_user' here, to some extent. That is enough to give a manager a pause, but not to immediately dismiss it as a bad idea. Most professionals will agree that it's unrealistic to believe that developer-typing-code-time has 100% efficiency. The time spent 'decompressing', which can sometimes manifest itself as spending time reading/doing unrelated stuff, does sometimes produce a solution faster than just banging away coding. Management work is different from coding in that everything is hard and noisy to measure, so to some extent heuristics are relied upon, simply because it's the state of the art in this area. So, even if half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer-hours (which is a rather large number), it does not mean those hours are wasted. If one of those meetings a day stops someone spending one week chasing a dead-end known to others at least once in a while, on average the team moves faster, not slower. BTW, I actually agree that 8 developers is too much, and that half an hour is too long for a daily. Just going off a tangent here.
- vidarh 9y ago
  The point is not that it is actually bad. Even 8 developers for half an hour could be justified. The point is that it should give a manager sufficient pause to actually think through whether or not that cost is justified by what that meeting provides. Surprisingly few teams account for the cost of the way they spend their time, and one outcome is that it's very easy for time sinks like meetings to go unchallenged because people don't think about how the costs multiply with the number of people involved. It's "only 30 minutes". Costs which would require budget approval if it was scheduled as a project suddenly become ok because no single person spends much time on it per meeting and the time spent never gets recorded and reported on anywhere.
vidarh 9y ago
What I started doing after a couple of years of managing teams was to ask for average salaries per work function for my team, which has consistently surprised people when I ask (that this is surprising surprised and shocked me), and then send a weekly report to my boss - whether they wanted it or not - enumerating costs broken down by task. Several times I've had managers that were confused why I'd send them this, or even insist it was a waste of time at first. Never once have I had a boss ask for this kind of breakdown themselves. Then they'd see the result, and inevitably I'd get questions about how it could be right that e.g. (to take a number out of thin air) $5k worth of developer time every week was spent on meetings. Or why that "tiny little change" that someone insisted on adding without proper scoping because it was so minor ended up costing $20k. Pretty quickly those reports they initially didn't care about became mandatory, and it to some degree changed how people thought about resource allocation. It doesn't need to be precise tracking either - you need to get the costs to about the right magnitude, and treat them accordingly depending on how you collect the data.

onion2k 9y ago

The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. It's not necessarily a loss of time though. The mindset "any time spent doing things other than writing code is a waste" rarely produces great products - you need to talk about things. No one knows everything about a project once it gets to a even moderately large size. Working in isolation from the rest of your team means you're not influencing, or being influenced by, the knowledge and discoveries that other people are making as they work. That means you're very likely to be working with an out-of-date model of the problem you're trying to solve. Clearly a meeting where nothing happens is a waste of time, but the solution to that problem shouldn't be "no more meetings", but "better meetings with real outcomes".

adrianN 9y ago
Unless those eight people work on very closely related problems, there is little value in having all of them in the same room talking for half an hour. Communication doesn't have to happen with the whole team if different parts of the team work on different parts of the software.
- sidlls 9y ago
  If their work is that independent then the fact they're all on the same team seems problematic.
  - Scriptor 9y ago
    It's entirely possible to be on the same team as someone and not need to know the details of what they are working on.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      What do you mean by "details"? The level of detail is highly context dependent. I'd argue that if there isn't a level of detail that all members of the team agree they should be interested in, then either the team is not composed properly or there is a misconception about the level of detail that is appropriate.

taneq 9y ago

> The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. But the whole point of a stand-up meeting is to keep it short. If you're talking for more than 5 minutes, the scrum leader or whatever you're calling them needs to reign it in. If you hit 10 minutes you're doing it wrong. Stand-up meetings are dispatch, not processing.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time. What i see here is a team that let it happen. A 'scum master' (or whoever) that oversaw the conversation and carried on with it. Developers (or team members) who talked for that long, and other people who _let_ it go on for that long and didn't put their foot down. Man, where I work if a standup started going for half that time, people would just start walking away from it.

vidarh 9y ago
When the person who calls the meeting is sufficiently senior, walking away isn't always an option, unless you're prepared to also walk away from the job.