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The worst standup I ever had were where it wasn't a standup at all. It was a role call by the managing director to check up on what you did the day before and t

The worst standup I ever had were where it wasn't a standup at all. It was a role call by the managing director to check up on what you did the day before and to generally berate you for any minor transgression in his idea of what you should have been working on.

mc32 5y ago
I hate places that have stand ups. It mostly amounts to being in a work collective where the apparatchik gets to show you it’s still the boss of you. There are other routines that are actually helpful but don’t feel like the red guard roll call.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  To me, Agile is micromanagement in disguise
  - mc32 5y ago
    Yes, for bad (poor) managers it's a tool for micromanagement. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for the manager to use this tool in order to micromanage antagonistically rather than lubricate the team.
rootusrootus 5y ago
That would certainly suck. The worst in my experience (at least recently) are standups where the PO shows up, then proceeds to get in long-winded discussions about features and implementation, and invariably tries to guide priorities for the day. 90 minutes later... For a time I was managing a team that used this PO, and I quickly banned him outright from standups. Told him to keep his guidance granularity at the sprint level, make sure his stories were written well enough to not require constant elaboration, and otherwise leave the developers alone. He could show up for sprint review & planning. Standups were just to unblock anyone who needed it, and should only last a couple minutes.
handrous 5y ago
Worst ones I've ever had, the dev manager was also still doing some dev work, mostly not on the company's main product, but other crap, but was in on the stand-ups and set the tone for it being a "moan about how hard your work is, to justify why we pay you" fest, by going into way too much detail about every little difficulty he had yesterday. This on top of the fact that there were like 6-7 people on these meetings, no more than two of whom were working on the same thing, so standups weren't even theoretically a good idea to begin with. The meetings existed only for him, and he was ensuring the form they took was terrible, stressful, and took up way too much time. He also liked to take really shitty notes, then treat them like the gospel truth. I read my stand-ups from notes I'd written beforehand—never done that anywhere else, but the amount of crap one was evidently expected to talk about was large enough there, that I did, after the first week or two—so I could tell for a fact when he'd recorded something about mine that was flat-out wrong, and it was often.

mc32 5y ago

I hate places that have stand ups. It mostly amounts to being in a work collective where the apparatchik gets to show you it’s still the boss of you. There are other routines that are actually helpful but don’t feel like the red guard roll call.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
To me, Agile is micromanagement in disguise
- mc32 5y ago
  Yes, for bad (poor) managers it's a tool for micromanagement. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for the manager to use this tool in order to micromanage antagonistically rather than lubricate the team.

rootusrootus 5y ago

That would certainly suck. The worst in my experience (at least recently) are standups where the PO shows up, then proceeds to get in long-winded discussions about features and implementation, and invariably tries to guide priorities for the day. 90 minutes later... For a time I was managing a team that used this PO, and I quickly banned him outright from standups. Told him to keep his guidance granularity at the sprint level, make sure his stories were written well enough to not require constant elaboration, and otherwise leave the developers alone. He could show up for sprint review & planning. Standups were just to unblock anyone who needed it, and should only last a couple minutes.

handrous 5y ago

Worst ones I've ever had, the dev manager was also still doing some dev work, mostly not on the company's main product, but other crap, but was in on the stand-ups and set the tone for it being a "moan about how hard your work is, to justify why we pay you" fest, by going into way too much detail about every little difficulty he had yesterday. This on top of the fact that there were like 6-7 people on these meetings, no more than two of whom were working on the same thing, so standups weren't even theoretically a good idea to begin with. The meetings existed only for him, and he was ensuring the form they took was terrible, stressful, and took up way too much time. He also liked to take really shitty notes, then treat them like the gospel truth. I read my stand-ups from notes I'd written beforehand—never done that anywhere else, but the amount of crap one was evidently expected to talk about was large enough there, that I did, after the first week or two—so I could tell for a fact when he'd recorded something about mine that was flat-out wrong, and it was often.