14 ms·

We Don't Do Daily Stand-Ups at Supercede

64 points by Melchizedek 5y ago

zqna 5y ago
Nothing saddens me more than a developer who can't provide an engaging 30 secs summary of the achievements from the previous day. IMO, it only displays either a lack of intelect, or disinterest in being part of that team.
- dtx1 5y ago
  or social anxiety, or they haven't learned that skill or they have been stuck on an issue with no progress or they've learned management makes their life harder because they don't accept the level of progress or ... Have some empathy bro edit downvotes for empathy :) HN at it´s best!
  - random_kris 5y ago
    Like you can explain what is making you stuck ?
    - ergocoder 5y ago
      No you can't. It is really too hard to do. Have some empathy bro.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        Just say you are stuck and you are unable to explain, someone then can help you with understanding what's going on. Part of being a professional is to admit it when you don know, so people can help, or not giving you hard work/close deadlines. It's really simple, whatever it is, just say it.
        random_kris 5y ago
        Exactly this
      - random_kris 5y ago
        We are in this to make money for business not in a self help place. There is place for empathy in workspace, but it must be 2 way street. You also should show some empathy and understand that I need to see some progress in my team or I feel bad
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Lets say you did daily stand-up's in school. Every day every kid has to go up and loudly express in front of the whole class what score they got on yesterdays test, what other achievements they did and what goals they have for today. Do you think it would help the kids grow and thrive at school? Grades doesn't depend on what you say there are all, so it isn't like they should feel any anxiety about it, right? It feels like people who don't understand why so many developers hate daily stand-ups doesn't understand social interactions at all.
      - random_kris 5y ago
        well school is a solo effort most of the time, while working in a team is most of the time team effort... Only problem I see is if someone did nothing yesterday, then I imagine having anxiety telling to the team that.. Luckily I work in a team where saying "I was totally unproductive yesterday, today I have plans on working on so and so and so" is totally acceptable. In case you didn't have a unproductive day there is always something to tell on what you were working. If you were stuck on soemthing and debugging it for 6 hours and have nothing to show for it then tell that you spent 6 hours debugging, someone might even offer you help :D
      - nsonha 5y ago
        fantastic we should treat eveyone as school kids and run companies like schools do. I mean people even criticize schools for their ability to educate which is the one thing they do, and you are telling money making organization should learn from them? Learn what? Why does working have to be exactly like social interactions? Btw what definition are you using? Social interaction in a party? Do pilots in the cockpit wilfully not communicate statuses because they hate it and just want to be chill? When will you graduate from school? I wanna send some flower.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    If he is a solo developer sure, if he is part of a team. Social skill is important, without communication we might end up in paradoxes.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    When you interview for the job please state that your social anxiety, or the tendency of using that as an excuse, can get in the way of team communication.
  - pizza234 5y ago
    The following two: > or social anxiety, or they haven't learned that skill or they have been stuck on an issue with no progress > or they've learned management makes their life harder are radically different problems; the former two belong to the developer, the latter to the manager. Actually, standup is the best opportunity to communicate that there is a problem (a dev stuck with an issue) and find out how that can be better approached/solved.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    you go to work taking on tasks that others depend on and for days don't communicate progress, and you talk about empathy. To yourself only I guess. Downvoted for lack of EQ and empathy.
- nsonha 5y ago
  I dont like stand-ups either but it's just me. For the team, especially in a remote and even async work context, frequent updates should be appreciated. Even if you didnt accomplish anything visible that day, for whatever reason, it's just part of being a mortal and just saying so can help normalize it as well as set a realistic expectation for the team.
- Heliosmaster 5y ago
  And why does that need to be synchronous? Why can't it be done with a check-in on slack / basecamp / whatever you use?
- makach 5y ago
  I read the article. The blogpost starts explaining that they don't do daily standup because they are using a distributed team all over the world which makes it hard to gather the team for a daily standup. To me this makes perfect sense. There are many good ways for a team to be communicating and working. Everything doesn't need to be lean. but then author carries on and the article becomes very weird: "If daily stand-ups really are so awful, why do some managers insist on them? Hard truth: it’s because they’re lazy, incompetent managers" My jaw dropped! That is a very bold statement overly generalizing and not conforming to the fact that there are many competent managers that are not lazy. The author of the article just lost a lot of credibility. If this is how you talk about your colleagues I don't want to work for you nor buy your products. "Daily stand-ups are not only a waste of time and make software development more expensive, but they demoralise developers and make them want to change jobs." How can the author generalize like that when you decided against it? What works for me might not necessarily work for you, and vice versa - to indicate otherwise strikes me as unprofessional, unsympathetic and demotivational.
  - Juliate 5y ago
    There are also a lot of competent managers that are lazy (laziness can be good!) And, worse perhaps, there are a lot of incompetent managers that are NOT lazy. Now, the OP is a specific point of view. It's not unprofessional to have a clear cut point of view on some arbitrary practice. It's no unsympathetic neither demotivational: from my pov, it's rather a sign that everything may not be lost in IT if there are still people thinking differently.
    - makach 5y ago
      That is beautifully said, thank you! Thinking differently is progress and definitively what we need. I also agree with you with your statements. I used those words in the context of the article to make a point.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        > they demoralise developers and make them want to change jobs I kind of get what you mean but not because you made a good point. People are demoralised because they are lazy/unmotivated and cannot perform, once they slack off, they cannot communicate out of shame. So even though it seems that they fear the status update, the culprit is the fact that they are not motivated at work or have poor work ethic. In oder to fix this, sometimes getting a new job where you do what they like works. Another comment mentioned things like geekbot which is text-based async stand up, you might want to try that. The key thing here is recording progress so that people can coordinate, it has nothing to do with you reporting to the manager.
- fhd2 5y ago
  Why I downvoted: It sounds like you're talking about a non-toxic organisation. I believe the author is talking about what they've experienced in toxic organisations. I guess the problem is that everyone brings different experiences to the table, and a burned child fears fire. In the context of toxic organisations where stand ups are a top down mandated micro management tool, I find your comment about intellect and disinterest a bit unfair.
fhd2 5y ago
To me daily stand ups, and most other rituals, are an OK way to _train_ desirable behaviour. If nobody knows what their team mates are working on and nobody says anything when they're blocked, you probably want to change that one way or another. However, if people already do it, or once they get accustomed to doing it, I can see no good reason to keep up a ritual that's disrupting - at least in a remote team. From what I've seen, a lot of companies don't see it that way however, they rather cargo cult "best practices" :/
sz4kerto 5y ago
Eh. Another misunderstanding of the 'agile' practices like stand-ups, sprints, etc. These are not supposed to make deliveries faster or employees happier. Agile is fundamentally a risk management tool. It makes it less likely that you'll surprise your customers with shipping nothing or the wrong thing after spending $2MM on a project. Of course it's a compromise and it's not a silver bullet. If you can scale your organisation and avoid these risks in some other way (because all of your team members are diligent and competent, managers and leaders have large working memory, good technical and people skills at the same time, or whatever) -- then by any means, do that. But in many cases, daily stand-ups
- baxtr 5y ago
  I like your comment and agree. Unfortunately I think your last sentence got cut in the middle?
  - nickkell 5y ago
    Always leave your audience wanting more
    - baxtr 5y ago
      Brilliant!
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353894
richardanaya 5y ago
I used to be anti standups until I started taking on some leadership roles. 1) it's great for refocusing everyone on monday first thing after a long weekend of hopefully for getting about work 2) it's much easier to follow up with people as a ritual rather than a 1 on 1 interjection, it depersonalizes info gathering that'd be hard for a manager to acquire any other way. Vocal tonality says a lot sometimes. 3) it's a great way to give casual encouragement and recognition occasionally That said, I only think standups are needed maybe 3 days a week and 10 minutes max usually.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  So it sounds good for you, is it felt the same way by everyone? Not saying it's not, it's just your points come across very first person.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  So in your experience they are bad for the general team member but good for leadership ... All three of your points suggest you see benefits for the general team member, but when you were the recipient of the 1) focusing / refocusing, 2) management follow up or 3) encouragement and recognition, you yourself did not like that forum? Is it possible that your team feels the same way as you did when you were in their position?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yeah. I can get 2) and 3), but myself, standup "refocusing" does the exact opposite. I already know what to work on, I've spent the early morning hours thinking about it. All the standup is doing is clearing my mental cache, destroying all the prep work I've already done in my head, forcing me to cold-start my work after the meeting ends. Pretty much the opposite of focus.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      1) yup totally agree - if I am turning up on Monday morning with no goals or objectives, fine. The reality is that Monday morning is when I least want to fuck around and just dive into the stuff that has been knocking around in my head for the last 60 hours. If anything a wrap at the end of the day in the tail end of the week would be more functional to keep everyone on the same page. 3) makes me cringe - the carrot of public praise for doing your job, no thanks. Around the table of peers - everyone knows who has done what. Its up the organasation that the recognition needs to go, and for every manager that is passing it up the org, there is another that is taking credit themselves.
beingflo 5y ago
As a developer, I appreciate dailys simply for having a birds-eye view of what's going on. If I'm demoing our application to some business people and they ask me what the state of development is on some feature I'm not involved in, I'd like to at least have some idea. Without regular exchange even with people I don't need to communicate with for my own work, I'd have no clue what's going on. To me this is well worth the 10 mins out of my day.
- lbreakjai 5y ago
  "some business people and they ask me what the state of development is" To me that's a discussion to be had with the product manager, not a developer. The feature is either done or worked on and that's it. "I'd like to at least have some idea" How far behind can you really get? Are you not involved in code reviews? Unless you're working with people going dark and raising massive pull requests twice a month, I fail to see how you could get to the point where you have no idea of what's going on, or on the opposite side how you could have anything but technical and implementation details to share with business people.
  - beingflo 5y ago
    A team of say 10 people will quickly fragment along e.g. backend / frontend lines in my experience, both in general exchange and code review. Sparing 10 minutes a day to exchange information is well spent in my opinion. If that's not possible due to timezones, fair enough. Otherwise it's a no-brainer for me. Also, in my team we have close contact to business, oftentimes spontaneous 1-on-1 calls that can get off topic. In these situations our clients appreciate if you have the big picture.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > Also, in my team we have close contact to business, oftentimes spontaneous 1-on-1 calls that can get off topic. In these situations our clients appreciate if you have the big picture. I'm wary of such situations because, in my experience, sometimes it's a customer or someone in a different team fishing for information that your PM doesn't want to give them. Your PM may have a good reason to be vague about things, and carelessly delving into details may make your team's job harder.
solmag 5y ago
Most of the project management material, at least in a pure software development team context, seems extremely cargo cultish to me.
tayo42 5y ago
I hated stand ups for all these reasons and more. One thing i struggle with now especially with everyone being remote and distributed is knowing what is going on, ideas people on my team have, what projects are coming up. Ive been surprised by projects and large changes because they just happened in some place of communication i didn't know about. Like 1on1 dms or w/e. It seems like there's a place for daily syncs without the cargo culted process. IDK what it would be though. Seems like a fine line between please collaborate and monotonous status meetings.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  Maybe you want something async like https://geekbot.com/ https://geekbot.com/
rahimnathwani 5y ago
I agree with the main point in the article: that it's not essential to have a synchronous status report meeting each day. In fact, status reports of all types are better delivered in writing, or at least asynchronously. But this misunderstanding caught my eye: "The status of in-progress work is the remit of project/product managers." A product manager's primary responsibility is to make sure the team is prioritizing correctly, i.e. that they're working on the right things and for the right reasons. Secondary to that is doing whatever it takes to unblock people's progress, e.g. when it's hindered by lack of access to resources, lack of coordination with other teams or external parties etc. But who is responsible for the status of work? Obviously, the person doing the work. A product manager isn't an 'engineering doula' monitoring people and telling them to code faster. If you have a proJECt manager, perhaps you're working in an environment where deadlines are very rigid and/or there's a lot of coordination required to release things in sync with other teams (e.g. if you're shipping hardware, or annually-updated tax software).
gregdoesit 5y ago
“ If daily stand-ups really are so awful, why do some managers insist on them? Hard truth: it’s because they’re lazy, incompetent managers.” I must have been a “lazy, incompetent manager” by the words of this author. We had few-times-a-week stand ups because: 1. I suggested we do daily standups when COVID (and with it, WFH) started and review how it goes. A month or so later, checked with the team, and we decided to reduce it to 3x/week. We reviewed this later every now and then and the team decided it still works, so we kept it. 2. It was the very few times a week when everyone from the team got a sense of what everyone else is doing - and how they can help. We cheered on successes, cracked jokes, and shared information. Call me old-fashioned, but I really liked these occasions, as it gave me a sense of belonging to a group of people. And no, this was not about me, as a manager wanting to micromanage. We were a team in one location/timezone, and this standup was one of the few things that helped feel connected. We also had multiple recent joiners with less industry experience who found the standups far more important/engaging than most others: this is also a dynamic worth noting (that will not apply to every team). I’m not arguing that this works for everyone, not that it’s the way to go for a distributed team across 6+ time zones, like the company of the author is set up. But assuming the world is black-and-white (“daily standups: bad, managers insisting on daily standups: incompetent”) is ignorant thinking at best; deliberately wanting to spark attention so people like me to grab a keyboard to type this out at worst. I’m happy this team figured out what works for them: I’d encourage all teams to find your jam. And don’t assume everything else must be bad.
- karimmaassen 5y ago
  Asking a team what they want or prefer doesn't always equate to what it actually is they need or prefer. Often it's either peer pressure or a false believe something has value while in reality it doesn't. Not saying this is the case with your team, but be aware this can happen.
  - mszcz 5y ago
    It can also be the Abilene Paradox [1]. No one likes the stand-ups but no one wants to rock the boat so everyone says they do like the stand-ups. Not saying that it's happening here, just that you need to be aware of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
jackvezkovic 5y ago
We also have a remote team in different timezones. What we do instead is just the slack version of a "stand-up". Everyone writes whenever they start what they did yesterday as bullet points, what they will do today and if there are any blockers or important reminders. Doesn't take 5min of each ones time, keeps everyone in the loop and helps managers intervene if some other sprint task needs to be prioritized instead. Cost-benefit seems to be fine for us. Sure, you will still get the example mentioned, but that is still low cost after all. You can always reply in threads if something needs more detail.
- jackvezkovic 5y ago
  Bonus point: everything gets documented for future references if needed. Also, when I am on holidays but still have that itch to check how the team is doing, I just check that channel.
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    Neither of those are good things.
MrGilbert 5y ago
> If you read the literature, it is argued that for this to work it is absolutely forbidden for project managers to join these meetings. This is, however, a utopian view. No, it's not. It works for our team. We don't have the PO in our daily. If he likes, he can join as a guest, but he is not part of it. We, as engineers, use the daily to discuss the work for the next 24 hours - if there is anything to discuss. It works pretty well for us.
havkom 5y ago
As an engineering manager I tried to replace daily stand up meetings with a “drop a couple of lines in the team chat daily”. I think it worked great and a lot of more relevant information was brought forward and lead to more productive co-operation between team members. However, some team members thought this was “wrong” and “not how agile should work” so eventually after continuing complaining I had to reinstate/allow these stand-ups again…
- fhd2 5y ago
  Did you try telling them that that is _absolutely_ how "agile" works? Even Scrum, the way most companies adopt it meticulously, is just a list of recommendations. The key is that the team finds a process that works for them and keeps evolving it. I guess in your case it may have called for a compromise. Unfortunately, if those guys had gone up the management chain saying how you're "not agile", they probably would have won...
karimmaassen 5y ago
In today's world of online work, I feel the stand-up is losing it's value. As Jason Fried (37signals, Basecamp) quite well stated many years ago: to embrace a fully decentralized online way of working, is to embrace asynchronous communication. The idea we need to "come together" to "talk about what we're doing" is invalidated if we can do this much better and more effectively when allowing for a decentralized and documentend working environment. Why I prefer collaborating with designers who use tools such as Figma, is the fact I can annotate their work, not expecting an immediate response, but allowing them to handle my comment in an appropriate manner, when they seem fit, how they seem fit. Almost nothing these days need an acute response.
- spratzt 5y ago
  I agree. Modern collaborative tooling has made stand-ups obsolete.
Juliate 5y ago
Find the root cause. Solve it as it suits you. Stand-ups as such are a band-aid to fix an easy to spot issue, that you may as well resolve in other, non-prescripted way by some methodology: miscommunication within the team. If your team is able to communicate naturally (morning checks, informal or formal reviews, lunch, coffee stop, walk, whatever...) you don't _need_ stand ups. The problem is people joining well-functioning teams and saying "what? you're not doing stand ups? let's fix that"
mrunkel 5y ago
Man, it's amazing how simple things get twisted unrecognizably over time. I introduced Scrum/Agile to my current company after having used it successfully at my previous job. It was a little tough at first to get the project managers to understand that the daily stand-up was not for their benefit, but simply for the team to understand what everyone was working on and as a place to raise any issues. There was much gnashing of teeth as the stand-up replaced a daily check in call they had where devs had to report their status to the PM. But, a few sprints in and the PMs were happy to see results without having to be in daily status calls. (They are still invited to the stand-ups, but only as chickens) For me, the biggest benefit of the agile/scrum process is the sanctity of the sprint. PMs don't interfere inside the sprint by changing goals or micromanaging, and devs promise to deliver the work from the sprint on time. At the previous job, we had a dev team spanning 10 time zones. So I continued the practice of having the stand-up as a quick note in a slack channel, but the new team really wanted a daily meeting (via video conference). At the new job, we're all in the same timezone, but across multiple locations. So in some cases devs really like the "face to face" meeting. I get that it's hard for some people to participate in social situations (I'm one of them), but if you can't muster up the strength to get three sentences out (I did this yesterday, I'm doing this today, I'm (not) blocked) then you might have larger issues. :)
jstx1 5y ago
A good stand-up is a loop over items/tickets in progress, not a loop over team members. And it doesn't need to happen every day.
m0zg 5y ago
What I don't get is why these "standups" need to be in-person as well as every day. One of my current clients insists on doing them, wasting about 6% of my (very expensive) billable time on this. I don't mind, of course, I still get paid, but someone needs to run the numbers on this. 10 people, 15 minutes (sometimes longer if there's something to discuss), that 150 person-minutes _per day_, or 1.56 person-days per 5-day week if my math is right, just to share information that would be much more efficient to share over Slack. Most of the time it's stuff nobody even needs to know: "I worked on X, I will continue working on X". This is just dumb cargo cult, IMO. When I managed teams I just kept an eye on things and encouraged efficient, peer-to-peer communication. We'd also have a short planning meeting once a week. That was it. It worked great.
megamix 5y ago
Sounds like passive aggressive programmers you got
vasergen 5y ago
I didn't work with a setup like this without daily at all, but on my current job we have daily 3 times per week and it feels way better than having a daily every day. I can remember how boring it was on my previous job to have it 5 times per week.
kmarc 5y ago
I was working on a project once where the daily stand-up became the tem leads 15-minute "this company is bullshit!"-infused rant. The daily quarter hour predication coming from him was terrible for tracking where the team was, but established his gatekeeper role pretty well. In another project we followed the 3-question rule (what did yesterday, what do today, what blockers) verbatimly. Meaning, answering these three questions to a slack bot. I'm not sure the answers were ever assessed, so not sure about how well tracking our team performance was. These two examples showed me that taking daily standups to the extremes and never reflecting on this ceremony at all is the bad thing, not the daily stand-up per se. That's why I also find this article a bit...extreme, and therefore not necessarily applicable to every team.
namelosw 5y ago
> If you read the literature, it is argued that for this to work it is absolutely forbidden for project managers to join these meetings. This is, however, a utopian view. It's nothing utopian, we don't have project managers join stand-ups. > Given that our team are distributed across several time zones, it is logistically infeasible to hold a daily synchronous meeting. I understand that stand-ups are terrible for global distributed remote teams because people need to adjust their time. But there's no need to ditch it as a whole. For onsite teams, it can be good: A team that only uses WIPs, no deadlines. The stand-ups are just a very short and informal meeting to let people: 1. Synchronize what other people are doing, in order to avoid conflicts and reworks. 2: See if anybody needs help. And that's it. We also do some funny gestures that do not hold, or do heavy-lifting when speaking just to make it quicker and more informal. It's just when the culture is bad, the stand-ups would be one of the whips that bad managers could leverage. If there are no stand-ups, they could still reach for other tools. To practice stand-ups properly the key idea is to have a no accusing or shaming team culture. Strive for it even if you have a little bit of power to practice; Protest it if you don't; Leave if you can do nothing about it.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > See if anybody needs help. This reason has always struck me as weird. Surely (as the article points out), people are asking for help as soon as they need it, not waiting until the next standup.
  - namelosw 5y ago
    Well, you're right if there are explicit blockers. In practice, it's more of in-betweens like "I can figure it out slowly" or "I didn't realize Jerry could help me just like that". When people encounter obvious blockers or they have no clue they will ask for help, but not so much for those "in-between". Another scenario that often happens to us is one task is being pretty much depended on, and if there's an "in-between" like I just said, it's likely to make the team run out of task for a while. People on the task may not be paying enough attention to each other's progress, leaving them in blind spots compared to the team lead. Stand-ups are great for spotting those problems and tackle them early.
tofukid 5y ago
I prefer end-of-day reports of what was accomplished to morning standup. Blockers shouldn’t wait until the next day, and predictions of what is to be done that day are rarely accurate. End-of-day reports keep everyone in the loop without meetings, focus on accomplishments, and doesn’t require a blocking meeting.
hrbf 5y ago
It’s good to hear that stand-up culture appears to work for some. Personally, I have never worked anywhere where I extracted even the least bit of useful information from one. Every single one has been a complete waste of my time. The worst ones actually cost me motivation and concentration. Every single one happened because the project manager wanted it or the lead programmer (who, for all intents and purposes, was a manager at that point) used it as a daily status meeting. At its most absurd, at one company, it took 30 minutes or more, on a daily basis, to listen to inconsequential (to me) stuff. To say my line took less than a minute on most days and the others almost always used this meeting to start discussions that needed to be shut down. Which of course lead to more meetings.
- zerocount 5y ago
  This has been my experience as well.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Calling a meeting a "daily stand-up" does not make it so. That's the problem with using buzz words. Many complaints, and this article is no exception, are not about canonical "daily stand-ups" but about the meetings people experience in their team or their lack of understanding what the aim of "daily stand-ups" are and what problems they propose to solve. Agile favours face-to-face communication because it's the most effective for quick discussions. The format of the "daily stand-up" is also specifically designed to focus attention of the participants and to make it quick. It is not meant to be a project or status meeting. Ultimately organizations decide what's best for them but it useful to gather a good understanding of those rituals before trying them out and criticising them.
  - hrbf 5y ago
    I agree. I used to subscribe to the “agile” way of doing things —- only to discover that in reality, just some rituals are implemented, like stand-ups that are meetings and retrospectives that lead to zero change because the pain points are institutional. This is just a hollow, pointless waste of time for the sake of appearing “modern” on the very surface. Doing things properly would require far too much change to the status quo. Hence my point: it seems like a good idea, appears to work given the proper circumstances but simply does not most of the time, given the reality of many workplaces.
nudpiedo 5y ago
Standups also help oneself to remember where he was yesterday, and get back to work. It works in a context of a local small team of people who come to work by the same time. It also helps where are your peers and in case there is shared code between people or teams blockers are a big issue. Perhaps OP missused this tool and poorly communicates his own frustration assuming everyone else must be incompetent to use a tool he doesn’t understand. A sad but common story of Junior staff.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  Alternatively, perhaps the author has substantial experience and is trying to articulate [among other things] the disparity between how daily stand-ups are supposed to work in theory vs how they seem to almost inevitably and invariably work in practice.
nine_zeros 5y ago
Ask managers - they love standup. Counts as productive work for them Ask Product Managers - they love standup. Counts as productive work for them Ask engineers - they hate standup. Because these meetings actually get in the way of real work for engineers. Engineers don't need a standup to get in touch with other engineers. If something blocks them, they can reach out to each other immediately. Stand-ups are clearly something to satisfy a manager's curiosity about their reports. But management really needs to take a hard look at introducing overhead to the actual producers. More bureaucracy == less productivity
rich_sasha 5y ago
I had a different system. Once a week everyone would write their updates on a shared wiki page (append-only). There was a cutoff time for it. If anything was controversial, we’d have a short meeting. Not only did it save everyone reading out their updates while looking at their feet, or people saying things for the sake of saying things, but there was a detailed time log of what happened when (not just code, but also the bought process etc).
jacknews 5y ago
If the standup is just a status meeting it's worse than pointless. It should be more like a get-together just to take the general temperature, discuss any unforeseen problems or worries, etc, and perhaps notify any more detailed short calls, eg "hey Andy, I don't understand this part of your API, mind if I call you after this to discuss, as I';; be working on it later today", etc. ie part water-cooler, part play-plan. PMs etc, should not be invited, unless they are required to help with something, this meeting is for the team.
wsostt 5y ago
“ Are you asleep yet? The developers are. You promise them an intellectually stimulating work environment and what they end up with is drudgery.” A 15-minute standup does not nullify a stimulating work environment.

64 points by Melchizedek 5y ago

zqna 5y ago

Nothing saddens me more than a developer who can't provide an engaging 30 secs summary of the achievements from the previous day. IMO, it only displays either a lack of intelect, or disinterest in being part of that team.

dtx1 5y ago
or social anxiety, or they haven't learned that skill or they have been stuck on an issue with no progress or they've learned management makes their life harder because they don't accept the level of progress or ... Have some empathy bro edit downvotes for empathy :) HN at it´s best!
- random_kris 5y ago
  Like you can explain what is making you stuck ?
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    No you can't. It is really too hard to do. Have some empathy bro.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      Just say you are stuck and you are unable to explain, someone then can help you with understanding what's going on. Part of being a professional is to admit it when you don know, so people can help, or not giving you hard work/close deadlines. It's really simple, whatever it is, just say it.
      - random_kris 5y ago
        Exactly this
    - random_kris 5y ago
      We are in this to make money for business not in a self help place. There is place for empathy in workspace, but it must be 2 way street. You also should show some empathy and understand that I need to see some progress in my team or I feel bad
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Lets say you did daily stand-up's in school. Every day every kid has to go up and loudly express in front of the whole class what score they got on yesterdays test, what other achievements they did and what goals they have for today. Do you think it would help the kids grow and thrive at school? Grades doesn't depend on what you say there are all, so it isn't like they should feel any anxiety about it, right? It feels like people who don't understand why so many developers hate daily stand-ups doesn't understand social interactions at all.
    - random_kris 5y ago
      well school is a solo effort most of the time, while working in a team is most of the time team effort... Only problem I see is if someone did nothing yesterday, then I imagine having anxiety telling to the team that.. Luckily I work in a team where saying "I was totally unproductive yesterday, today I have plans on working on so and so and so" is totally acceptable. In case you didn't have a unproductive day there is always something to tell on what you were working. If you were stuck on soemthing and debugging it for 6 hours and have nothing to show for it then tell that you spent 6 hours debugging, someone might even offer you help :D
    - nsonha 5y ago
      fantastic we should treat eveyone as school kids and run companies like schools do. I mean people even criticize schools for their ability to educate which is the one thing they do, and you are telling money making organization should learn from them? Learn what? Why does working have to be exactly like social interactions? Btw what definition are you using? Social interaction in a party? Do pilots in the cockpit wilfully not communicate statuses because they hate it and just want to be chill? When will you graduate from school? I wanna send some flower.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  If he is a solo developer sure, if he is part of a team. Social skill is important, without communication we might end up in paradoxes.
- nsonha 5y ago
  When you interview for the job please state that your social anxiety, or the tendency of using that as an excuse, can get in the way of team communication.
- pizza234 5y ago
  The following two: > or social anxiety, or they haven't learned that skill or they have been stuck on an issue with no progress > or they've learned management makes their life harder are radically different problems; the former two belong to the developer, the latter to the manager. Actually, standup is the best opportunity to communicate that there is a problem (a dev stuck with an issue) and find out how that can be better approached/solved.
- nsonha 5y ago
  you go to work taking on tasks that others depend on and for days don't communicate progress, and you talk about empathy. To yourself only I guess. Downvoted for lack of EQ and empathy.
nsonha 5y ago
I dont like stand-ups either but it's just me. For the team, especially in a remote and even async work context, frequent updates should be appreciated. Even if you didnt accomplish anything visible that day, for whatever reason, it's just part of being a mortal and just saying so can help normalize it as well as set a realistic expectation for the team.
Heliosmaster 5y ago
And why does that need to be synchronous? Why can't it be done with a check-in on slack / basecamp / whatever you use?
makach 5y ago
I read the article. The blogpost starts explaining that they don't do daily standup because they are using a distributed team all over the world which makes it hard to gather the team for a daily standup. To me this makes perfect sense. There are many good ways for a team to be communicating and working. Everything doesn't need to be lean. but then author carries on and the article becomes very weird: "If daily stand-ups really are so awful, why do some managers insist on them? Hard truth: it’s because they’re lazy, incompetent managers" My jaw dropped! That is a very bold statement overly generalizing and not conforming to the fact that there are many competent managers that are not lazy. The author of the article just lost a lot of credibility. If this is how you talk about your colleagues I don't want to work for you nor buy your products. "Daily stand-ups are not only a waste of time and make software development more expensive, but they demoralise developers and make them want to change jobs." How can the author generalize like that when you decided against it? What works for me might not necessarily work for you, and vice versa - to indicate otherwise strikes me as unprofessional, unsympathetic and demotivational.
- Juliate 5y ago
  There are also a lot of competent managers that are lazy (laziness can be good!) And, worse perhaps, there are a lot of incompetent managers that are NOT lazy. Now, the OP is a specific point of view. It's not unprofessional to have a clear cut point of view on some arbitrary practice. It's no unsympathetic neither demotivational: from my pov, it's rather a sign that everything may not be lost in IT if there are still people thinking differently.
  - makach 5y ago
    That is beautifully said, thank you! Thinking differently is progress and definitively what we need. I also agree with you with your statements. I used those words in the context of the article to make a point.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      > they demoralise developers and make them want to change jobs I kind of get what you mean but not because you made a good point. People are demoralised because they are lazy/unmotivated and cannot perform, once they slack off, they cannot communicate out of shame. So even though it seems that they fear the status update, the culprit is the fact that they are not motivated at work or have poor work ethic. In oder to fix this, sometimes getting a new job where you do what they like works. Another comment mentioned things like geekbot which is text-based async stand up, you might want to try that. The key thing here is recording progress so that people can coordinate, it has nothing to do with you reporting to the manager.
fhd2 5y ago
Why I downvoted: It sounds like you're talking about a non-toxic organisation. I believe the author is talking about what they've experienced in toxic organisations. I guess the problem is that everyone brings different experiences to the table, and a burned child fears fire. In the context of toxic organisations where stand ups are a top down mandated micro management tool, I find your comment about intellect and disinterest a bit unfair.

fhd2 5y ago

To me daily stand ups, and most other rituals, are an OK way to _train_ desirable behaviour. If nobody knows what their team mates are working on and nobody says anything when they're blocked, you probably want to change that one way or another. However, if people already do it, or once they get accustomed to doing it, I can see no good reason to keep up a ritual that's disrupting - at least in a remote team. From what I've seen, a lot of companies don't see it that way however, they rather cargo cult "best practices" :/

sz4kerto 5y ago

Eh. Another misunderstanding of the 'agile' practices like stand-ups, sprints, etc. These are not supposed to make deliveries faster or employees happier. Agile is fundamentally a risk management tool. It makes it less likely that you'll surprise your customers with shipping nothing or the wrong thing after spending $2MM on a project. Of course it's a compromise and it's not a silver bullet. If you can scale your organisation and avoid these risks in some other way (because all of your team members are diligent and competent, managers and leaders have large working memory, good technical and people skills at the same time, or whatever) -- then by any means, do that. But in many cases, daily stand-ups

baxtr 5y ago
I like your comment and agree. Unfortunately I think your last sentence got cut in the middle?
- nickkell 5y ago
  Always leave your audience wanting more
  - baxtr 5y ago
    Brilliant!

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353894

richardanaya 5y ago

I used to be anti standups until I started taking on some leadership roles. 1) it's great for refocusing everyone on monday first thing after a long weekend of hopefully for getting about work 2) it's much easier to follow up with people as a ritual rather than a 1 on 1 interjection, it depersonalizes info gathering that'd be hard for a manager to acquire any other way. Vocal tonality says a lot sometimes. 3) it's a great way to give casual encouragement and recognition occasionally That said, I only think standups are needed maybe 3 days a week and 10 minutes max usually.

bamboozled 5y ago
So it sounds good for you, is it felt the same way by everyone? Not saying it's not, it's just your points come across very first person.
shapefrog 5y ago
So in your experience they are bad for the general team member but good for leadership ... All three of your points suggest you see benefits for the general team member, but when you were the recipient of the 1) focusing / refocusing, 2) management follow up or 3) encouragement and recognition, you yourself did not like that forum? Is it possible that your team feels the same way as you did when you were in their position?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yeah. I can get 2) and 3), but myself, standup "refocusing" does the exact opposite. I already know what to work on, I've spent the early morning hours thinking about it. All the standup is doing is clearing my mental cache, destroying all the prep work I've already done in my head, forcing me to cold-start my work after the meeting ends. Pretty much the opposite of focus.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    1) yup totally agree - if I am turning up on Monday morning with no goals or objectives, fine. The reality is that Monday morning is when I least want to fuck around and just dive into the stuff that has been knocking around in my head for the last 60 hours. If anything a wrap at the end of the day in the tail end of the week would be more functional to keep everyone on the same page. 3) makes me cringe - the carrot of public praise for doing your job, no thanks. Around the table of peers - everyone knows who has done what. Its up the organasation that the recognition needs to go, and for every manager that is passing it up the org, there is another that is taking credit themselves.

beingflo 5y ago

As a developer, I appreciate dailys simply for having a birds-eye view of what's going on. If I'm demoing our application to some business people and they ask me what the state of development is on some feature I'm not involved in, I'd like to at least have some idea. Without regular exchange even with people I don't need to communicate with for my own work, I'd have no clue what's going on. To me this is well worth the 10 mins out of my day.

lbreakjai 5y ago
"some business people and they ask me what the state of development is" To me that's a discussion to be had with the product manager, not a developer. The feature is either done or worked on and that's it. "I'd like to at least have some idea" How far behind can you really get? Are you not involved in code reviews? Unless you're working with people going dark and raising massive pull requests twice a month, I fail to see how you could get to the point where you have no idea of what's going on, or on the opposite side how you could have anything but technical and implementation details to share with business people.
- beingflo 5y ago
  A team of say 10 people will quickly fragment along e.g. backend / frontend lines in my experience, both in general exchange and code review. Sparing 10 minutes a day to exchange information is well spent in my opinion. If that's not possible due to timezones, fair enough. Otherwise it's a no-brainer for me. Also, in my team we have close contact to business, oftentimes spontaneous 1-on-1 calls that can get off topic. In these situations our clients appreciate if you have the big picture.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Also, in my team we have close contact to business, oftentimes spontaneous 1-on-1 calls that can get off topic. In these situations our clients appreciate if you have the big picture. I'm wary of such situations because, in my experience, sometimes it's a customer or someone in a different team fishing for information that your PM doesn't want to give them. Your PM may have a good reason to be vague about things, and carelessly delving into details may make your team's job harder.

solmag 5y ago

Most of the project management material, at least in a pure software development team context, seems extremely cargo cultish to me.

tayo42 5y ago

I hated stand ups for all these reasons and more. One thing i struggle with now especially with everyone being remote and distributed is knowing what is going on, ideas people on my team have, what projects are coming up. Ive been surprised by projects and large changes because they just happened in some place of communication i didn't know about. Like 1on1 dms or w/e. It seems like there's a place for daily syncs without the cargo culted process. IDK what it would be though. Seems like a fine line between please collaborate and monotonous status meetings.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
Maybe you want something async like https://geekbot.com/ https://geekbot.com/

rahimnathwani 5y ago

I agree with the main point in the article: that it's not essential to have a synchronous status report meeting each day. In fact, status reports of all types are better delivered in writing, or at least asynchronously. But this misunderstanding caught my eye: "The status of in-progress work is the remit of project/product managers." A product manager's primary responsibility is to make sure the team is prioritizing correctly, i.e. that they're working on the right things and for the right reasons. Secondary to that is doing whatever it takes to unblock people's progress, e.g. when it's hindered by lack of access to resources, lack of coordination with other teams or external parties etc. But who is responsible for the status of work? Obviously, the person doing the work. A product manager isn't an 'engineering doula' monitoring people and telling them to code faster. If you have a proJECt manager, perhaps you're working in an environment where deadlines are very rigid and/or there's a lot of coordination required to release things in sync with other teams (e.g. if you're shipping hardware, or annually-updated tax software).

gregdoesit 5y ago

“ If daily stand-ups really are so awful, why do some managers insist on them? Hard truth: it’s because they’re lazy, incompetent managers.” I must have been a “lazy, incompetent manager” by the words of this author. We had few-times-a-week stand ups because: 1. I suggested we do daily standups when COVID (and with it, WFH) started and review how it goes. A month or so later, checked with the team, and we decided to reduce it to 3x/week. We reviewed this later every now and then and the team decided it still works, so we kept it. 2. It was the very few times a week when everyone from the team got a sense of what everyone else is doing - and how they can help. We cheered on successes, cracked jokes, and shared information. Call me old-fashioned, but I really liked these occasions, as it gave me a sense of belonging to a group of people. And no, this was not about me, as a manager wanting to micromanage. We were a team in one location/timezone, and this standup was one of the few things that helped feel connected. We also had multiple recent joiners with less industry experience who found the standups far more important/engaging than most others: this is also a dynamic worth noting (that will not apply to every team). I’m not arguing that this works for everyone, not that it’s the way to go for a distributed team across 6+ time zones, like the company of the author is set up. But assuming the world is black-and-white (“daily standups: bad, managers insisting on daily standups: incompetent”) is ignorant thinking at best; deliberately wanting to spark attention so people like me to grab a keyboard to type this out at worst. I’m happy this team figured out what works for them: I’d encourage all teams to find your jam. And don’t assume everything else must be bad.

karimmaassen 5y ago
Asking a team what they want or prefer doesn't always equate to what it actually is they need or prefer. Often it's either peer pressure or a false believe something has value while in reality it doesn't. Not saying this is the case with your team, but be aware this can happen.
- mszcz 5y ago
  It can also be the Abilene Paradox [1]. No one likes the stand-ups but no one wants to rock the boat so everyone says they do like the stand-ups. Not saying that it's happening here, just that you need to be aware of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

jackvezkovic 5y ago

We also have a remote team in different timezones. What we do instead is just the slack version of a "stand-up". Everyone writes whenever they start what they did yesterday as bullet points, what they will do today and if there are any blockers or important reminders. Doesn't take 5min of each ones time, keeps everyone in the loop and helps managers intervene if some other sprint task needs to be prioritized instead. Cost-benefit seems to be fine for us. Sure, you will still get the example mentioned, but that is still low cost after all. You can always reply in threads if something needs more detail.

jackvezkovic 5y ago
Bonus point: everything gets documented for future references if needed. Also, when I am on holidays but still have that itch to check how the team is doing, I just check that channel.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  Neither of those are good things.

MrGilbert 5y ago

> If you read the literature, it is argued that for this to work it is absolutely forbidden for project managers to join these meetings. This is, however, a utopian view. No, it's not. It works for our team. We don't have the PO in our daily. If he likes, he can join as a guest, but he is not part of it. We, as engineers, use the daily to discuss the work for the next 24 hours - if there is anything to discuss. It works pretty well for us.

havkom 5y ago

As an engineering manager I tried to replace daily stand up meetings with a “drop a couple of lines in the team chat daily”. I think it worked great and a lot of more relevant information was brought forward and lead to more productive co-operation between team members. However, some team members thought this was “wrong” and “not how agile should work” so eventually after continuing complaining I had to reinstate/allow these stand-ups again…

fhd2 5y ago
Did you try telling them that that is _absolutely_ how "agile" works? Even Scrum, the way most companies adopt it meticulously, is just a list of recommendations. The key is that the team finds a process that works for them and keeps evolving it. I guess in your case it may have called for a compromise. Unfortunately, if those guys had gone up the management chain saying how you're "not agile", they probably would have won...

karimmaassen 5y ago

In today's world of online work, I feel the stand-up is losing it's value. As Jason Fried (37signals, Basecamp) quite well stated many years ago: to embrace a fully decentralized online way of working, is to embrace asynchronous communication. The idea we need to "come together" to "talk about what we're doing" is invalidated if we can do this much better and more effectively when allowing for a decentralized and documentend working environment. Why I prefer collaborating with designers who use tools such as Figma, is the fact I can annotate their work, not expecting an immediate response, but allowing them to handle my comment in an appropriate manner, when they seem fit, how they seem fit. Almost nothing these days need an acute response.

spratzt 5y ago
I agree. Modern collaborative tooling has made stand-ups obsolete.

Juliate 5y ago

Find the root cause. Solve it as it suits you. Stand-ups as such are a band-aid to fix an easy to spot issue, that you may as well resolve in other, non-prescripted way by some methodology: miscommunication within the team. If your team is able to communicate naturally (morning checks, informal or formal reviews, lunch, coffee stop, walk, whatever...) you don't _need_ stand ups. The problem is people joining well-functioning teams and saying "what? you're not doing stand ups? let's fix that"

mrunkel 5y ago

Man, it's amazing how simple things get twisted unrecognizably over time. I introduced Scrum/Agile to my current company after having used it successfully at my previous job. It was a little tough at first to get the project managers to understand that the daily stand-up was not for their benefit, but simply for the team to understand what everyone was working on and as a place to raise any issues. There was much gnashing of teeth as the stand-up replaced a daily check in call they had where devs had to report their status to the PM. But, a few sprints in and the PMs were happy to see results without having to be in daily status calls. (They are still invited to the stand-ups, but only as chickens) For me, the biggest benefit of the agile/scrum process is the sanctity of the sprint. PMs don't interfere inside the sprint by changing goals or micromanaging, and devs promise to deliver the work from the sprint on time. At the previous job, we had a dev team spanning 10 time zones. So I continued the practice of having the stand-up as a quick note in a slack channel, but the new team really wanted a daily meeting (via video conference). At the new job, we're all in the same timezone, but across multiple locations. So in some cases devs really like the "face to face" meeting. I get that it's hard for some people to participate in social situations (I'm one of them), but if you can't muster up the strength to get three sentences out (I did this yesterday, I'm doing this today, I'm (not) blocked) then you might have larger issues. :)

jstx1 5y ago

A good stand-up is a loop over items/tickets in progress, not a loop over team members. And it doesn't need to happen every day.

m0zg 5y ago

What I don't get is why these "standups" need to be in-person as well as every day. One of my current clients insists on doing them, wasting about 6% of my (very expensive) billable time on this. I don't mind, of course, I still get paid, but someone needs to run the numbers on this. 10 people, 15 minutes (sometimes longer if there's something to discuss), that 150 person-minutes _per day_, or 1.56 person-days per 5-day week if my math is right, just to share information that would be much more efficient to share over Slack. Most of the time it's stuff nobody even needs to know: "I worked on X, I will continue working on X". This is just dumb cargo cult, IMO. When I managed teams I just kept an eye on things and encouraged efficient, peer-to-peer communication. We'd also have a short planning meeting once a week. That was it. It worked great.

megamix 5y ago

Sounds like passive aggressive programmers you got

vasergen 5y ago

I didn't work with a setup like this without daily at all, but on my current job we have daily 3 times per week and it feels way better than having a daily every day. I can remember how boring it was on my previous job to have it 5 times per week.

kmarc 5y ago

I was working on a project once where the daily stand-up became the tem leads 15-minute "this company is bullshit!"-infused rant. The daily quarter hour predication coming from him was terrible for tracking where the team was, but established his gatekeeper role pretty well. In another project we followed the 3-question rule (what did yesterday, what do today, what blockers) verbatimly. Meaning, answering these three questions to a slack bot. I'm not sure the answers were ever assessed, so not sure about how well tracking our team performance was. These two examples showed me that taking daily standups to the extremes and never reflecting on this ceremony at all is the bad thing, not the daily stand-up per se. That's why I also find this article a bit...extreme, and therefore not necessarily applicable to every team.

namelosw 5y ago

> If you read the literature, it is argued that for this to work it is absolutely forbidden for project managers to join these meetings. This is, however, a utopian view. It's nothing utopian, we don't have project managers join stand-ups. > Given that our team are distributed across several time zones, it is logistically infeasible to hold a daily synchronous meeting. I understand that stand-ups are terrible for global distributed remote teams because people need to adjust their time. But there's no need to ditch it as a whole. For onsite teams, it can be good: A team that only uses WIPs, no deadlines. The stand-ups are just a very short and informal meeting to let people: 1. Synchronize what other people are doing, in order to avoid conflicts and reworks. 2: See if anybody needs help. And that's it. We also do some funny gestures that do not hold, or do heavy-lifting when speaking just to make it quicker and more informal. It's just when the culture is bad, the stand-ups would be one of the whips that bad managers could leverage. If there are no stand-ups, they could still reach for other tools. To practice stand-ups properly the key idea is to have a no accusing or shaming team culture. Strive for it even if you have a little bit of power to practice; Protest it if you don't; Leave if you can do nothing about it.

JohnFen 5y ago
> See if anybody needs help. This reason has always struck me as weird. Surely (as the article points out), people are asking for help as soon as they need it, not waiting until the next standup.
- namelosw 5y ago
  Well, you're right if there are explicit blockers. In practice, it's more of in-betweens like "I can figure it out slowly" or "I didn't realize Jerry could help me just like that". When people encounter obvious blockers or they have no clue they will ask for help, but not so much for those "in-between". Another scenario that often happens to us is one task is being pretty much depended on, and if there's an "in-between" like I just said, it's likely to make the team run out of task for a while. People on the task may not be paying enough attention to each other's progress, leaving them in blind spots compared to the team lead. Stand-ups are great for spotting those problems and tackle them early.

tofukid 5y ago

I prefer end-of-day reports of what was accomplished to morning standup. Blockers shouldn’t wait until the next day, and predictions of what is to be done that day are rarely accurate. End-of-day reports keep everyone in the loop without meetings, focus on accomplishments, and doesn’t require a blocking meeting.

hrbf 5y ago

It’s good to hear that stand-up culture appears to work for some. Personally, I have never worked anywhere where I extracted even the least bit of useful information from one. Every single one has been a complete waste of my time. The worst ones actually cost me motivation and concentration. Every single one happened because the project manager wanted it or the lead programmer (who, for all intents and purposes, was a manager at that point) used it as a daily status meeting. At its most absurd, at one company, it took 30 minutes or more, on a daily basis, to listen to inconsequential (to me) stuff. To say my line took less than a minute on most days and the others almost always used this meeting to start discussions that needed to be shut down. Which of course lead to more meetings.

zerocount 5y ago
This has been my experience as well.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Calling a meeting a "daily stand-up" does not make it so. That's the problem with using buzz words. Many complaints, and this article is no exception, are not about canonical "daily stand-ups" but about the meetings people experience in their team or their lack of understanding what the aim of "daily stand-ups" are and what problems they propose to solve. Agile favours face-to-face communication because it's the most effective for quick discussions. The format of the "daily stand-up" is also specifically designed to focus attention of the participants and to make it quick. It is not meant to be a project or status meeting. Ultimately organizations decide what's best for them but it useful to gather a good understanding of those rituals before trying them out and criticising them.
- hrbf 5y ago
  I agree. I used to subscribe to the “agile” way of doing things —- only to discover that in reality, just some rituals are implemented, like stand-ups that are meetings and retrospectives that lead to zero change because the pain points are institutional. This is just a hollow, pointless waste of time for the sake of appearing “modern” on the very surface. Doing things properly would require far too much change to the status quo. Hence my point: it seems like a good idea, appears to work given the proper circumstances but simply does not most of the time, given the reality of many workplaces.

nudpiedo 5y ago

Standups also help oneself to remember where he was yesterday, and get back to work. It works in a context of a local small team of people who come to work by the same time. It also helps where are your peers and in case there is shared code between people or teams blockers are a big issue. Perhaps OP missused this tool and poorly communicates his own frustration assuming everyone else must be incompetent to use a tool he doesn’t understand. A sad but common story of Junior staff.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
Alternatively, perhaps the author has substantial experience and is trying to articulate [among other things] the disparity between how daily stand-ups are supposed to work in theory vs how they seem to almost inevitably and invariably work in practice.

nine_zeros 5y ago

Ask managers - they love standup. Counts as productive work for them Ask Product Managers - they love standup. Counts as productive work for them Ask engineers - they hate standup. Because these meetings actually get in the way of real work for engineers. Engineers don't need a standup to get in touch with other engineers. If something blocks them, they can reach out to each other immediately. Stand-ups are clearly something to satisfy a manager's curiosity about their reports. But management really needs to take a hard look at introducing overhead to the actual producers. More bureaucracy == less productivity

rich_sasha 5y ago

I had a different system. Once a week everyone would write their updates on a shared wiki page (append-only). There was a cutoff time for it. If anything was controversial, we’d have a short meeting. Not only did it save everyone reading out their updates while looking at their feet, or people saying things for the sake of saying things, but there was a detailed time log of what happened when (not just code, but also the bought process etc).

jacknews 5y ago

If the standup is just a status meeting it's worse than pointless. It should be more like a get-together just to take the general temperature, discuss any unforeseen problems or worries, etc, and perhaps notify any more detailed short calls, eg "hey Andy, I don't understand this part of your API, mind if I call you after this to discuss, as I';; be working on it later today", etc. ie part water-cooler, part play-plan. PMs etc, should not be invited, unless they are required to help with something, this meeting is for the team.

wsostt 5y ago

“ Are you asleep yet? The developers are. You promise them an intellectually stimulating work environment and what they end up with is drudgery.” A 15-minute standup does not nullify a stimulating work environment.