5 ms·

You hit the nail on the head here. The whole standup process is extremely degrading. I don't think I'd ever work at another company that does a daily standup, t

You hit the nail on the head here. The whole standup process is extremely degrading. I don't think I'd ever work at another company that does a daily standup, the most I can take is 3x/week - and ideally as short as possible.

wpietri 4y ago
I suspect it depends a lot on the standup. My favorite place I worked had a great one. 10-15 minutes every morning, a brisk and helpful way to get focused, line up the help you needed, and kick off the day. I miss it deeply.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  We talk for a full hour every day, but there are only usually 5 or 6 of us, and we are all invested in every feature, so the meetings end up being a fairly detailed review and feedback on everybody work.
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    > full hour every day > invested in every feature Sounds like hell to me.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      I got pushed to a team that did this. I decided to try to extend the meetings for as long as possible with the goal of eating so much time nothing got done anyday. The daily stopped shortly after
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Interesting! Did you all find that helpful and worth the time?
- komali2 4y ago
  Conversely, I did a project once where we had not a single stand-up in 9 months. CEO would come up with some designs, I'd asynchronously comment on them with questions or concerns, then slice the designs into tickets that'd I'd pump good amounts of context and detail into, estimate and prioritize, then chuck my engineering team at them. We'd all asynchronously work on them. If they had questions, they'd slack me. This across five timezones. Once or twice we'd have a miss on a ticket probably because I didn't define it well enough, but I'd just point out the issues in code review and they'd rewrite as needed. Oh well. Meanwhile we all have a phenomenal quality of life because our entire day schedule is set on our terms. And we delivered a whole ass SaaS product from scratch in like 9 months for around 2,500 engineering hours if my brief math is right so the founders were happy.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Behold: Utopia.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Why, "conversely"? It sounds like you had a great experience, which I'm happy for. But I think there are plenty of good ways to work.
    - komali2 4y ago
      Converse argument I mean. As in, allow me to offer a different experience I had. I may not be using the word correctly.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Could you say more about the team size? Taking a 2000-hour year as ballpark, 2500 hours in 9 months is puzzling to me. And as long as I have your attention, how many releases happened during that period?
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      2500 hours in 9 months could be two developers logging hours on the project. The project may have had stretches when dependencies limited the amount of work that could be done, and often one assumes at least an hour of non-billable time lost to miscellaneous business shit, per IC, per day. The rest of the team (not logging engineering hours) may have included a (probably part-time) designer and likely some kind of project manager (likely also part-time—that is, managing 2+ projects at once for different clients). 7 (billable, on average) hours * 47 weeks (assuming 25 weekdays lost to holidays, sick days, and vacation, over a year) * 5 weekdays only yields 1,645 hours per worker per year, anyway. Divide by four, times three, to get ~9 months, and 2500 hours just looks like two full-timers on the project, really, if we're talking billable hours, but that's also (it reads like) not counting support roles and non-dev contributors like design or PM or maybe testers. Or it might be one full-time and two half-time devs, or whatever. I'd guess not more than four developers contributing significant time, anyway, based on the numbers and with fairly pessimistic assumptions for how many hours could be logged a week, and maybe as few as two.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  I think a lot of this is just personality driven. I don't find meetings to be a way to get focused or a way to "kick off the day"; indeed, I always need a break afterward. Yes, this applies to a good 10-15 minute standup. And I don't really know what people mean when they say things like "line up the help you need". Why would I wait until a meeting the next morning to reach out to relevant people for help? However, I recognize that lots of people don't feel the way I feel about any of this.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > Why would I wait until a meeting the next morning to reach out to relevant people for help? It's hard to notice you're stuck when you're stuck. For a lot of programming problems putting your head down and ploughing through is the right approach - but you do need to come up for air occasionally. And if you need help then it can be hard to ask without feeling like you're interrupting someone else's work, so having a regular point where everyone's already not going to be in the middle of deep work is useful.
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      Again, I recognize that this is a "to each their own" situation, but I don't relate to this at all. I know when I'm stuck and I know who to ask (or who to ask who I should ask) and I have good asynchronous communication tools where I can ask people things without immediately interrupting them.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        A lot of people believe they know the optimal time to reach out. But with my manager hat on, it's also true that a lot of people wait well beyond what's optimal for the organization. Things that can get in the way include pride, anxiety, laziness, a tendency to procrastinate, underestimating the resources available, and overestimating the cost of interruption, and underestimating the cost of delay. Maybe you are the rare sort of person who is perfectly calibrated. But if so, know that it's rare.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
My current employer doesn't do any stand ups at all. I've been there four months and not a single all-devs meeting. Sure we avoid degrading. But I've never been part of a team that's more dysfunction than this one.
- majikandy 4y ago
  Introduce one? But call it a quick 5 mins regroup with the team.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    I wiah. But it's not even on the radar. In fact, I'd be marginalized more than I already am. I said to someone on the leadership team, "How can we have a team without a single team meeting?" I got no reply. I'm not even sure they heard me.

wpietri 4y ago

I suspect it depends a lot on the standup. My favorite place I worked had a great one. 10-15 minutes every morning, a brisk and helpful way to get focused, line up the help you needed, and kick off the day. I miss it deeply.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
We talk for a full hour every day, but there are only usually 5 or 6 of us, and we are all invested in every feature, so the meetings end up being a fairly detailed review and feedback on everybody work.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  > full hour every day > invested in every feature Sounds like hell to me.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    I got pushed to a team that did this. I decided to try to extend the meetings for as long as possible with the goal of eating so much time nothing got done anyday. The daily stopped shortly after
- wpietri 4y ago
  Interesting! Did you all find that helpful and worth the time?
komali2 4y ago
Conversely, I did a project once where we had not a single stand-up in 9 months. CEO would come up with some designs, I'd asynchronously comment on them with questions or concerns, then slice the designs into tickets that'd I'd pump good amounts of context and detail into, estimate and prioritize, then chuck my engineering team at them. We'd all asynchronously work on them. If they had questions, they'd slack me. This across five timezones. Once or twice we'd have a miss on a ticket probably because I didn't define it well enough, but I'd just point out the issues in code review and they'd rewrite as needed. Oh well. Meanwhile we all have a phenomenal quality of life because our entire day schedule is set on our terms. And we delivered a whole ass SaaS product from scratch in like 9 months for around 2,500 engineering hours if my brief math is right so the founders were happy.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Behold: Utopia.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Why, "conversely"? It sounds like you had a great experience, which I'm happy for. But I think there are plenty of good ways to work.
  - komali2 4y ago
    Converse argument I mean. As in, allow me to offer a different experience I had. I may not be using the word correctly.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Could you say more about the team size? Taking a 2000-hour year as ballpark, 2500 hours in 9 months is puzzling to me. And as long as I have your attention, how many releases happened during that period?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    2500 hours in 9 months could be two developers logging hours on the project. The project may have had stretches when dependencies limited the amount of work that could be done, and often one assumes at least an hour of non-billable time lost to miscellaneous business shit, per IC, per day. The rest of the team (not logging engineering hours) may have included a (probably part-time) designer and likely some kind of project manager (likely also part-time—that is, managing 2+ projects at once for different clients). 7 (billable, on average) hours * 47 weeks (assuming 25 weekdays lost to holidays, sick days, and vacation, over a year) * 5 weekdays only yields 1,645 hours per worker per year, anyway. Divide by four, times three, to get ~9 months, and 2500 hours just looks like two full-timers on the project, really, if we're talking billable hours, but that's also (it reads like) not counting support roles and non-dev contributors like design or PM or maybe testers. Or it might be one full-time and two half-time devs, or whatever. I'd guess not more than four developers contributing significant time, anyway, based on the numbers and with fairly pessimistic assumptions for how many hours could be logged a week, and maybe as few as two.
sanderjd 4y ago
I think a lot of this is just personality driven. I don't find meetings to be a way to get focused or a way to "kick off the day"; indeed, I always need a break afterward. Yes, this applies to a good 10-15 minute standup. And I don't really know what people mean when they say things like "line up the help you need". Why would I wait until a meeting the next morning to reach out to relevant people for help? However, I recognize that lots of people don't feel the way I feel about any of this.
- lmm 4y ago
  > Why would I wait until a meeting the next morning to reach out to relevant people for help? It's hard to notice you're stuck when you're stuck. For a lot of programming problems putting your head down and ploughing through is the right approach - but you do need to come up for air occasionally. And if you need help then it can be hard to ask without feeling like you're interrupting someone else's work, so having a regular point where everyone's already not going to be in the middle of deep work is useful.
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    Again, I recognize that this is a "to each their own" situation, but I don't relate to this at all. I know when I'm stuck and I know who to ask (or who to ask who I should ask) and I have good asynchronous communication tools where I can ask people things without immediately interrupting them.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      A lot of people believe they know the optimal time to reach out. But with my manager hat on, it's also true that a lot of people wait well beyond what's optimal for the organization. Things that can get in the way include pride, anxiety, laziness, a tendency to procrastinate, underestimating the resources available, and overestimating the cost of interruption, and underestimating the cost of delay. Maybe you are the rare sort of person who is perfectly calibrated. But if so, know that it's rare.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

My current employer doesn't do any stand ups at all. I've been there four months and not a single all-devs meeting. Sure we avoid degrading. But I've never been part of a team that's more dysfunction than this one.

majikandy 4y ago
Introduce one? But call it a quick 5 mins regroup with the team.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  I wiah. But it's not even on the radar. In fact, I'd be marginalized more than I already am. I said to someone on the leadership team, "How can we have a team without a single team meeting?" I got no reply. I'm not even sure they heard me.