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Is there any reason to believe that a process that interrupts an entire team every day to make everyone listen to non-critical updates would be necessary? Stan
by iEchoic 8y ago
Is there any reason to believe that a process that interrupts an entire team every day to make everyone listen to non-critical updates would be necessary?
Standups are (in my experience) usually a symptom of a low-trust environment, where there's an underlying belief that engineers will do less work or let things slip without the fear of being behind at the next standup. In some companies, this is actually true - so in some cases, standups are certainly effective - but I can't think of any argument for why they'd be necessary at all companies.
Our team is distributed and has been going ~eight months without standups or work hours, and I'm extremely happy with the quality and pace of our engineering. This requires a high-trust environment where every person is given large feature areas that they are able (and incentivized) to drive autonomously, but I think this ends up being better both for productivity and for quality-of-life.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago> Standups are (in my experience) usually a symptom of a low-trust environment and or a high volatility process and or poor information flow. All of these things occur at different times throughout any company. Standups mitigate these issues and are not supposed to be these hour marathons that I see everywhere.
- iEchoic 8y agoAgreed that those are other common causes. I think that keeping standups short does very little to mitigate the damage they cause, though. The biggest cost isn't the time they take, it's the act of forcing your entire engineering team out of a flow state (or worse, forcing them to wait until after standup to even start) on a daily basis. That happens regardless of if they're 10 minutes or 30 minutes.