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> ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still w

> ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still working on something. When you are done working on it, I'll know because the tooling will let me know of the changes. There is no time where vocalizing this provides value, unless you have no tools at all, which seems pretty silly if you are not working with a team of prehistoric cavemen. If you have a fun story about what you did last night, a recap of last night's reality TV show, whatever floats your boat – that's much more valuable use of the time. I can get behind that, although don't be upset if I don't always show up.

Buttons840 5y ago
No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to say.
- randomdata 5y ago
  Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it[0]. And I still don't care. What am I going to do with the information? [0] https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    What am I going to do with the information? The purpose of a functioning standup is contextualization. If you know your teammate is still working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work is related and you can design some shared data structure that speeds up both of you. If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more productive individually and as a team, though, the interconnectedness of the team is just as important as what any one member is working on.
    - Salgat 5y ago
      Isn't this a very basic function of a kanban board?
    - randomdata 5y ago
      If I know when the teammate starts working on X and stops working on X, why am I not able to infer that he is working on X during the period in between? In reality, I already know that he is working on X and anything that is relevant to that already applies. I'm still not clear on what information ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” gives me.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Tone of voice, body language, hesitation, etc. Non-verbal clues that maybe you can help your teammember, or that they can help you. It gets better if there's some detail about the task, like "Still working on X, runtime is too slow but I found a paper linked from Wikipedia with a promising algorithm." Lots of inferred and implied knowledge transfer can happen through intetactions that seem simple on the surface. E.g. in my example here, ideas of how to approach research for a task, what kinds of obstacles are normal, etc. If you're not building camaraderie, then maybe your standup isn't set up right or at the right time, but that doesn't mean the concept or the information is useless. And as a last resort, if you can't change something, then put in your own effort to make the best of it instead of just wasting the time entirely.
        randomdata 5y ago
        > if you can't change something Oh, but I can change something. If you remember having this discussion last year, it was ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today. No blockers.” To which I pointed out that the "No blockers" part serves no purpose as if anyone had a known blocker, they would have already let the team know when it became a blocker, not wait for a fixed time of day. It is not coincidence that the last part isn't said today. Today, I am here to share that the rest of the canned response is also useless. Build camaraderie. Actually talk about the work you are doing with your teammates. These things can be beneficial and you'll still get the same non-verbal cues if there is something afoot. Don't waste valuable time on nothingness.
  - ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
    You lose two hours of productivity if someone interrupts you with random information? I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I was, but I think 30 minutes would be my max lost productivity.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      One hour to build up the universe, only to have it shattered. One more hour to get you back to where you were. I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it accounts for the additional friction involved. You might be the exception, but humans in general are known to avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for the mind to accept that the time is right. And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      There has been research in this area. It's shocking (in both the literal and figurative sense) how much time is wasted by interruptions for people who do "thought work" like software development. If you have a daily standup around 10am, like the last place I had them, it's possible that you have instantly reduced the effective productivity of your entire team by 20% or even more. Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is one of the top perks for many developers and some developers are also much more productive working at non-traditional times. The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition, particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest of the day. If anyone reading this does use daily standups and everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every team is different and doing what works for your team is what matters. But personally I have found that while sometimes useful points do arise during standups the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not least because IME the same information would probably have been passed on some other way and often faster in any moderately functional development team anyway.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Standup has a known time that you can plan around, and makes a spot to put all those short bits of info in one time, so you can avoid being interrupted and context switching when it's not standup
  - sdevonoes 5y ago
    Usually standup meetings are scheduled at a given time in the day (usually, it's the very first thing in the morning). You know when it's coming; it's not like people randomly poking at you and making you do a context switch.
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      I moved my team's standup to just before most people take there lunch. Initially it was an accomodation for someone who was temporarily working in a different time zone but after they returned home no one on the team wanted to change it. I like it for two reasons, I go for lunch straight after so don't have two context switches. And it sometimes works as an effective midday target for me to try to get a ticket progressed before the standup.
      - randomdata 5y ago
        In practice, lunch does not bring a context switch as you just don't go to lunch until you reach a natural stopping point. Standups cause a context switch because they are scheduled by the clock, not by the work. Asynchronous standups avoid that problem, but I've never seen an async standup bring any engagement and ends up being nothing more than "I'm working on X again. Duh." which is completely pointless.
        VBprogrammer 5y ago
        Maybe for you, lots of us go for lunch with colleagues, play sports or boardgames and so that tends to happen on a schedule. At least we did until we all started working from home.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Like another commenter said, you can always say "Hey guys, give me 15 minutes while I wrap this up" and you don't enter context switch mode. Unless you work with completely unreasonable people, they'll wait. In fairness, as you are forcing a context switch for a standup, it is likely that you do work with unreasonable people.
  - Nimitz14 5y ago
    > Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it What a gem. Whenever the next "silicon valley" is made I'm waiting for a character to say this. Simply hilarious. Get off your high horse. You can afford an interruption or two per day.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      I don’t think it’s the interruption. I work from home and I got interrupted all day, from family asking me something to teammate asking for my help and sometime joining a call. It’s the context switch that is bad. You can hold off most interruption to try to complete your current train of thought (like give me 15 minutes to complete this and I’ll get back to you). But when you have something that is mandatory, you avoid going into any deep work like a debugging session or architecting a new feature. And most of the time the standup does not really help, because productive teammates will reach out to each other during the day anyway if something impact them. And manager should reach out to developer anytime something pop up that impacts their work, not just wait for next day to let people know. Standup can be great if the responsibility across the team are spread out, but only at a lower frequency (once a week?).
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    If it takes you two hours to get back on track I think that whatever you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
- handrous 5y ago
  Meanwhile, I'm constantly realizing that something I remembered didn't happen in Slack or Email or the issue tracker, but on a call, so now I have to hope I thought to take notes, in the moment, and then go find them, when calls are basically the only thing I ever have to take those sorts of notes for, and they're infrequent enough that I'm not so great at consistently remembering to do that (I'm working on it, but still, for god's sake, say it in Slack unless it's impossible to, which is almost never).
  - randomdata 5y ago
    When I started working from home, AOL Instant Messenger was still the hot new thing and long distance charges would kill you. Residential bandwidth simply wasn't there for calls. For all intents and purposes, it was textual communication or nothing. It was glorious. Having record of all conversations for easy reference really did help build better software, as far as I am concerned. These days, everyone wants to do video conferencing, it seems, and half the time the job doesn't get done right because someone misheard something or forget what was said. It makes no sense to me. I can only imagine that those who think voice communication is the best communication haven't tried anything else.
- wnoise 5y ago
  Reliable? Maybe. Enduring, definitely not. Chat logs, e-mails, bug-tracker tickets endure. Speech is completely ephemeral.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    I mean we'll still be talking after Slack is gone. Sometimes you want to establish a ritual that will outlast everything, including that switch from Slack to Teams because corporate reasons.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      I think you can export chats from Slack and build an archive out of it
soneca 5y ago
You are not on my team, so your perceptions what is shitty for you do not matter. That’s more the point of my comment: each team should discuss and reach their own ideal dynamic. If you were on my team, from your strong opinions here, the dynamic would certainly be different.
alistairSH 5y ago
This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still working on something. If that's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree. But, in practice, with my team, there might be one person with nothing much to report, but several others who needs assistance, want to demo something they've built, are ready to transition something to QA, or something else. If you aren't getting any of that in your stand-up then the team is "broken" and could likely use an open conversation about the meeting's purpose and value.
- randomdata 5y ago
  > If that's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree. If it gets said at all, you should also agree. If the goal if your standup is simply to hear people talk, talk about what you did on the weekend instead. That will actually provide value to the team in building a better relationship with teammates. "I did X yesterday, I will do X today" provides no information potential or bonding potential. It is flat out worthless. More realistically, if all you have to say is "I did X yesterday, I will do X today" it is best to not say anything at all. The goal shouldn't be to hear someone speak, but rather to achieve a business objective. Sometimes people won't have anything to contribute towards that objective and that's okay. Other times they will. They can speak then. Team meetings can be beneficial. Having the team meet so that they can utter practically-gibberish canned messages to each other is not beneficial. On the bright side, I see (from the parent comment and many others) that we have finally dropped the equally useless "no blockers" routine. We're making progress here!
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    It's not best to skip saying ten words that explain you're fine. It takes 10 seconds.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      That works if you are saying it to yourself in front of a mirror, perhaps. If there are other people listening in, it will take another five minutes just to wake them all up.
keithplayer 5y ago
If a team member says they worked on Jira #X and will continue working on it other members should be asking for the technical details. Everyone should be giving 1-2 sentences of the technical details of what you worked on yesterday and the same for today. It is up to the team to question what is happening not just for accountability and ensuring people aren't going off on already explored paths, but also to ensure the standup is actually interesting. A blocker isn't the only reason other team members might need/want to get involved in what someone is working on.
- randomdata 5y ago
  > also to ensure the standup is actually interesting. If you have to put forth effort to keep the standup interesting, you are admitting that the people see no value, which means that you are meeting just for the sake of meeting. If you see value in meeting just for the sake of meeting, why not talk about what you did on the weekend instead?

Buttons840 5y ago

No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to say.

randomdata 5y ago
Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it[0]. And I still don't care. What am I going to do with the information? [0] https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
- nitrogen 5y ago
  What am I going to do with the information? The purpose of a functioning standup is contextualization. If you know your teammate is still working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work is related and you can design some shared data structure that speeds up both of you. If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more productive individually and as a team, though, the interconnectedness of the team is just as important as what any one member is working on.
  - Salgat 5y ago
    Isn't this a very basic function of a kanban board?
  - randomdata 5y ago
    If I know when the teammate starts working on X and stops working on X, why am I not able to infer that he is working on X during the period in between? In reality, I already know that he is working on X and anything that is relevant to that already applies. I'm still not clear on what information ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” gives me.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Tone of voice, body language, hesitation, etc. Non-verbal clues that maybe you can help your teammember, or that they can help you. It gets better if there's some detail about the task, like "Still working on X, runtime is too slow but I found a paper linked from Wikipedia with a promising algorithm." Lots of inferred and implied knowledge transfer can happen through intetactions that seem simple on the surface. E.g. in my example here, ideas of how to approach research for a task, what kinds of obstacles are normal, etc. If you're not building camaraderie, then maybe your standup isn't set up right or at the right time, but that doesn't mean the concept or the information is useless. And as a last resort, if you can't change something, then put in your own effort to make the best of it instead of just wasting the time entirely.
      - randomdata 5y ago
        > if you can't change something Oh, but I can change something. If you remember having this discussion last year, it was ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today. No blockers.” To which I pointed out that the "No blockers" part serves no purpose as if anyone had a known blocker, they would have already let the team know when it became a blocker, not wait for a fixed time of day. It is not coincidence that the last part isn't said today. Today, I am here to share that the rest of the canned response is also useless. Build camaraderie. Actually talk about the work you are doing with your teammates. These things can be beneficial and you'll still get the same non-verbal cues if there is something afoot. Don't waste valuable time on nothingness.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  You lose two hours of productivity if someone interrupts you with random information? I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I was, but I think 30 minutes would be my max lost productivity.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    One hour to build up the universe, only to have it shattered. One more hour to get you back to where you were. I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it accounts for the additional friction involved. You might be the exception, but humans in general are known to avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for the mind to accept that the time is right. And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    There has been research in this area. It's shocking (in both the literal and figurative sense) how much time is wasted by interruptions for people who do "thought work" like software development. If you have a daily standup around 10am, like the last place I had them, it's possible that you have instantly reduced the effective productivity of your entire team by 20% or even more. Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is one of the top perks for many developers and some developers are also much more productive working at non-traditional times. The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition, particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest of the day. If anyone reading this does use daily standups and everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every team is different and doing what works for your team is what matters. But personally I have found that while sometimes useful points do arise during standups the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not least because IME the same information would probably have been passed on some other way and often faster in any moderately functional development team anyway.
- 8note 5y ago
  Standup has a known time that you can plan around, and makes a spot to put all those short bits of info in one time, so you can avoid being interrupted and context switching when it's not standup
- sdevonoes 5y ago
  Usually standup meetings are scheduled at a given time in the day (usually, it's the very first thing in the morning). You know when it's coming; it's not like people randomly poking at you and making you do a context switch.
  - VBprogrammer 5y ago
    I moved my team's standup to just before most people take there lunch. Initially it was an accomodation for someone who was temporarily working in a different time zone but after they returned home no one on the team wanted to change it. I like it for two reasons, I go for lunch straight after so don't have two context switches. And it sometimes works as an effective midday target for me to try to get a ticket progressed before the standup.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      In practice, lunch does not bring a context switch as you just don't go to lunch until you reach a natural stopping point. Standups cause a context switch because they are scheduled by the clock, not by the work. Asynchronous standups avoid that problem, but I've never seen an async standup bring any engagement and ends up being nothing more than "I'm working on X again. Duh." which is completely pointless.
      - VBprogrammer 5y ago
        Maybe for you, lots of us go for lunch with colleagues, play sports or boardgames and so that tends to happen on a schedule. At least we did until we all started working from home.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Like another commenter said, you can always say "Hey guys, give me 15 minutes while I wrap this up" and you don't enter context switch mode. Unless you work with completely unreasonable people, they'll wait. In fairness, as you are forcing a context switch for a standup, it is likely that you do work with unreasonable people.
- Nimitz14 5y ago
  > Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it What a gem. Whenever the next "silicon valley" is made I'm waiting for a character to say this. Simply hilarious. Get off your high horse. You can afford an interruption or two per day.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s the interruption. I work from home and I got interrupted all day, from family asking me something to teammate asking for my help and sometime joining a call. It’s the context switch that is bad. You can hold off most interruption to try to complete your current train of thought (like give me 15 minutes to complete this and I’ll get back to you). But when you have something that is mandatory, you avoid going into any deep work like a debugging session or architecting a new feature. And most of the time the standup does not really help, because productive teammates will reach out to each other during the day anyway if something impact them. And manager should reach out to developer anytime something pop up that impacts their work, not just wait for next day to let people know. Standup can be great if the responsibility across the team are spread out, but only at a lower frequency (once a week?).
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  If it takes you two hours to get back on track I think that whatever you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
handrous 5y ago
Meanwhile, I'm constantly realizing that something I remembered didn't happen in Slack or Email or the issue tracker, but on a call, so now I have to hope I thought to take notes, in the moment, and then go find them, when calls are basically the only thing I ever have to take those sorts of notes for, and they're infrequent enough that I'm not so great at consistently remembering to do that (I'm working on it, but still, for god's sake, say it in Slack unless it's impossible to, which is almost never).
- randomdata 5y ago
  When I started working from home, AOL Instant Messenger was still the hot new thing and long distance charges would kill you. Residential bandwidth simply wasn't there for calls. For all intents and purposes, it was textual communication or nothing. It was glorious. Having record of all conversations for easy reference really did help build better software, as far as I am concerned. These days, everyone wants to do video conferencing, it seems, and half the time the job doesn't get done right because someone misheard something or forget what was said. It makes no sense to me. I can only imagine that those who think voice communication is the best communication haven't tried anything else.
wnoise 5y ago
Reliable? Maybe. Enduring, definitely not. Chat logs, e-mails, bug-tracker tickets endure. Speech is completely ephemeral.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  I mean we'll still be talking after Slack is gone. Sometimes you want to establish a ritual that will outlast everything, including that switch from Slack to Teams because corporate reasons.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    I think you can export chats from Slack and build an archive out of it

soneca 5y ago

You are not on my team, so your perceptions what is shitty for you do not matter. That’s more the point of my comment: each team should discuss and reach their own ideal dynamic. If you were on my team, from your strong opinions here, the dynamic would certainly be different.

alistairSH 5y ago

This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still working on something. If that's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree. But, in practice, with my team, there might be one person with nothing much to report, but several others who needs assistance, want to demo something they've built, are ready to transition something to QA, or something else. If you aren't getting any of that in your stand-up then the team is "broken" and could likely use an open conversation about the meeting's purpose and value.

randomdata 5y ago
> If that's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree. If it gets said at all, you should also agree. If the goal if your standup is simply to hear people talk, talk about what you did on the weekend instead. That will actually provide value to the team in building a better relationship with teammates. "I did X yesterday, I will do X today" provides no information potential or bonding potential. It is flat out worthless. More realistically, if all you have to say is "I did X yesterday, I will do X today" it is best to not say anything at all. The goal shouldn't be to hear someone speak, but rather to achieve a business objective. Sometimes people won't have anything to contribute towards that objective and that's okay. Other times they will. They can speak then. Team meetings can be beneficial. Having the team meet so that they can utter practically-gibberish canned messages to each other is not beneficial. On the bright side, I see (from the parent comment and many others) that we have finally dropped the equally useless "no blockers" routine. We're making progress here!
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  It's not best to skip saying ten words that explain you're fine. It takes 10 seconds.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    That works if you are saying it to yourself in front of a mirror, perhaps. If there are other people listening in, it will take another five minutes just to wake them all up.

keithplayer 5y ago

If a team member says they worked on Jira #X and will continue working on it other members should be asking for the technical details. Everyone should be giving 1-2 sentences of the technical details of what you worked on yesterday and the same for today. It is up to the team to question what is happening not just for accountability and ensuring people aren't going off on already explored paths, but also to ensure the standup is actually interesting. A blocker isn't the only reason other team members might need/want to get involved in what someone is working on.

randomdata 5y ago
> also to ensure the standup is actually interesting. If you have to put forth effort to keep the standup interesting, you are admitting that the people see no value, which means that you are meeting just for the sake of meeting. If you see value in meeting just for the sake of meeting, why not talk about what you did on the weekend instead?