4 ms·

Agree to this. Daily standups are the bane of many people's existence.

vorticalbox 5y ago
wasting time hearing about peoples work yesterday/today that I am not involved with nor has any impact on my work is a waste of every ones time.
- jseban 5y ago
  Yeah, and that feeling of someone oversharing something both irrelevant and boring, while you already have an overfull short term memory from your own work, AND being forced to pretend to pay attention, it's just so painful.
rypskar 5y ago
I'm in a distributed team where the daily standups are optional. Almost everyone join every day and say it is good to see the others at least for a short while every day
- odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
  I'm going to be that guy: They say it is good to see others or they say what is expected of them? Is like the conversation yesterday about leaving interviews. You don't say Person was is shit and an asshole but you say a better opportunity came up. Heck, even during job interviews, you don't answer 'why work here' with 'money' but 'looking for a new challenge, or interesting work or whatnot'
  - diatone 5y ago
    As someone who enjoys sharing a similar sense of humour and outlook as the people I work with, I'm personally more than happy to spend 15 minutes goofing around before a day of knuckling down and getting shit done. YMMV
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  I despised daily stands in person, but love them on a remote team. We've decide to drop the status updates from standups to focus solely on discussing things of interest to the team - blockers, processes, issues, announcements, icebreakers, etc.
Consultant32452 5y ago
My current employer's standup is now an hour long. There's only 6 developers on the team. Technically we have two standups. A thirty minute "tech only" standup and then another thirty minutes that includes the rest of the stakeholders.
- balefrost 5y ago
  This is almost certainly due to poor facilitation. That is to say, whoever is facilitating this meeting is either afraid to push back or else thinks that this is how it should be. Convince the 6 developers that they don't need more than 30s each during the "tech only" standup. Get the facilitator to aggressively chop long discussions (clarifying questions can be fine; discussions and debates are not). At least, move long discussions to the end of the standup so that people who aren't relevant and who don't care can leave. Initially, my team's standups (I think 4 devs at the time) would be 15-20 minutes; we're now (6 devs) down to 10-15 minutes, probably 10s more than 15s. I can't imagine there being much value from a daily, 30-minute, whole-team meeting with multiple stakeholders. Developers should perhaps talk to specific stakeholders... but those conversations should be focused on specific stories and probably should be done in much smaller groups. Heck, it would be fine to have 30 minutes of scheduled "office hours" time where specific developers can talk to specific stakeholders about specific stories. Bring this up in retrospective. Point out that (nominally) 12.5% of every day (and likely more than that) is being spent on these meetings. Ask about what value people see in these long meetings and if there's a better way to achieve that value. Brainstorm other approaches and get the team to commit to experimentation. Try, you know, actually standing up. On your feet. That's where the name comes from and it's to encourage people to be brief.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The central evil is letting anyone control the standup that isn't directly participating in the work output of the team. Because then it's easy for that person to forget that stand-ups have no independent value -- their only value is in making the other work go faster. And should be calibrated to maximize that. Which is why you get the "We standup because we have to standup" shops.
jseban 5y ago
Daily standups, weekly retros and weekly 1-on-1:s. Those are the ones that bother me the most, the micromanagement around planning, I can deal with. But the creepiness of these other vague "Hey, I'm your friend, we can just talk" type of meetings are too much for me. And this trap of "giving feedback" and whenever you do, you get punished and marked for no promotion, immediately, it's just loyalty checks masked as something else "this meeting is for you" uhmm, can I just go back to work please?
- mLuby 5y ago
  Stand-ups can be a drag. My last stand-ups were literally 3-5 minutes, which I attribute to everyone working on long-running project where we all either knew what "Today I'll be fooing the bar" meant or knew it wasn't important to know. And we were very good about mentioning but not discussing problems during that meeting; they'd be dealt with "off-line" (so to speak). Retrospectives can also be good when they're focused on how to improve processes (including Agile's). If it's just a venting session, that can become demoralizing, even caustic. There's also value in not having certain people in the room, so they can't get defensive or cause people to clam up.

wasting time hearing about peoples work yesterday/today that I am not involved with nor has any impact on my work is a waste of every ones time.

jseban 5y ago
Yeah, and that feeling of someone oversharing something both irrelevant and boring, while you already have an overfull short term memory from your own work, AND being forced to pretend to pay attention, it's just so painful.

rypskar 5y ago

I'm in a distributed team where the daily standups are optional. Almost everyone join every day and say it is good to see the others at least for a short while every day

odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
I'm going to be that guy: They say it is good to see others or they say what is expected of them? Is like the conversation yesterday about leaving interviews. You don't say Person was is shit and an asshole but you say a better opportunity came up. Heck, even during job interviews, you don't answer 'why work here' with 'money' but 'looking for a new challenge, or interesting work or whatnot'
- diatone 5y ago
  As someone who enjoys sharing a similar sense of humour and outlook as the people I work with, I'm personally more than happy to spend 15 minutes goofing around before a day of knuckling down and getting shit done. YMMV
SkyPuncher 5y ago
I despised daily stands in person, but love them on a remote team. We've decide to drop the status updates from standups to focus solely on discussing things of interest to the team - blockers, processes, issues, announcements, icebreakers, etc.

Consultant32452 5y ago

My current employer's standup is now an hour long. There's only 6 developers on the team. Technically we have two standups. A thirty minute "tech only" standup and then another thirty minutes that includes the rest of the stakeholders.

balefrost 5y ago
This is almost certainly due to poor facilitation. That is to say, whoever is facilitating this meeting is either afraid to push back or else thinks that this is how it should be. Convince the 6 developers that they don't need more than 30s each during the "tech only" standup. Get the facilitator to aggressively chop long discussions (clarifying questions can be fine; discussions and debates are not). At least, move long discussions to the end of the standup so that people who aren't relevant and who don't care can leave. Initially, my team's standups (I think 4 devs at the time) would be 15-20 minutes; we're now (6 devs) down to 10-15 minutes, probably 10s more than 15s. I can't imagine there being much value from a daily, 30-minute, whole-team meeting with multiple stakeholders. Developers should perhaps talk to specific stakeholders... but those conversations should be focused on specific stories and probably should be done in much smaller groups. Heck, it would be fine to have 30 minutes of scheduled "office hours" time where specific developers can talk to specific stakeholders about specific stories. Bring this up in retrospective. Point out that (nominally) 12.5% of every day (and likely more than that) is being spent on these meetings. Ask about what value people see in these long meetings and if there's a better way to achieve that value. Brainstorm other approaches and get the team to commit to experimentation. Try, you know, actually standing up. On your feet. That's where the name comes from and it's to encourage people to be brief.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The central evil is letting anyone control the standup that isn't directly participating in the work output of the team. Because then it's easy for that person to forget that stand-ups have no independent value -- their only value is in making the other work go faster. And should be calibrated to maximize that. Which is why you get the "We standup because we have to standup" shops.

jseban 5y ago

Daily standups, weekly retros and weekly 1-on-1:s. Those are the ones that bother me the most, the micromanagement around planning, I can deal with. But the creepiness of these other vague "Hey, I'm your friend, we can just talk" type of meetings are too much for me. And this trap of "giving feedback" and whenever you do, you get punished and marked for no promotion, immediately, it's just loyalty checks masked as something else "this meeting is for you" uhmm, can I just go back to work please?

mLuby 5y ago
Stand-ups can be a drag. My last stand-ups were literally 3-5 minutes, which I attribute to everyone working on long-running project where we all either knew what "Today I'll be fooing the bar" meant or knew it wasn't important to know. And we were very good about mentioning but not discussing problems during that meeting; they'd be dealt with "off-line" (so to speak). Retrospectives can also be good when they're focused on how to improve processes (including Agile's). If it's just a venting session, that can become demoralizing, even caustic. There's also value in not having certain people in the room, so they can't get defensive or cause people to clam up.