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Do a daily stand-up Make sure to monitor your team every day and force their performance first thing in the morning. Focus on the daily grind to ensure meaning

Do a daily stand-up Make sure to monitor your team every day and force their performance first thing in the morning. Focus on the daily grind to ensure meaningful change can never occur. Hire randomly Never put in the work to identify potential candidates based on their contribution to the industry or relevant projects. Always rely on blind applications to a job ad then make the applicants perform grueling and humiliating coding tests until they've successfully demonstrated their pain tolerance and allegiance. RTO Make your developers as uncomfortable as possible and force them to move to the most expensive real-estate market possible. It's important to remind individual contributors of their position on the social hierarchy. Home ownership and starting a family is for execs only.

chaosharmonic 3y ago
Pay quietly Don't pay your staff consistently for the same work. Refuse to advertise your budgets, and loosen your "ranges" to get people in the door when they push you about it, but then use those same targets to hand-wave away people already inside -- who come to you after comparing notes or observing the impact of broader market conditions like inflation. Also, stop them from comparing notes or doing fifth-grade level math like compounding effects. That education is there to help you, not them - and speaking of which, it taught them better than to talk out of turn, let alone to question the people they work for. (...satire aside though, you do know standups can be done in the afternoons, right?)
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Don't forget having HR regularly discourage sharing salary for some bullshit reason in flagrant disregard of labor laws.
superfrank 3y ago
> Do a daily stand-up I absolutely disagree with this one. Both the best and worst teams I worked on as a developer both had daily stand ups and the frequency, length, and process was nearly identical. If daily stand ups are a problem for your team, it's usually a symptom of a bigger problem, not a cause. I'm a manager now and I have multiple teams who report up to me. Personally, I hate daily stand ups so when I took over a new team last year, I floated the idea of switching them from 5 stand ups a week to 3 a week and they unanimously vetoed it. Of all the teams who report to me, they're actually the one that does the best work and are the most independent. If you feel like your manager or PM is micromanaging, removing your daily stand up isn't going to fix that. They're just going to micromanage you though a different medium.
- go_discover 3y ago
  A stand up is fine if the team wants to do it. Once it's dictated from above and run by a manager it's lost all worth
- neilv 3y ago
  > If daily stand ups are a problem for your team, it's usually a symptom of a bigger problem, not a cause. I'm sure that's true for some teams, but daily standups can also be a problem for teams that are functioning well. What if the daily standup routine isn't highlighting problems (nor otherwise helping), but it's just wasting time, throwing off flow, or frontloading a bunch of distractions into people's brains first thing in the morning? What if people have to contort their schedules to do it (either starting before they're woken up or done their morning exercise, or interrupting the flow of early-risers who'd already dug into their work)? What if the team members are good at async collaboration, and have a good sense when on-demand real-time is worthwhile, so daily synchronous standups seem like someone else needs help/nudge to learn the skills of the other team members, to avoid sabotaging a high-performing team's effectiveness and morale?
  - superfrank 3y ago
    > What if the daily standup routine isn't highlighting problems (nor otherwise helping), but it's just wasting time, throwing off flow, or frontloading a bunch of distractions into people's brains first thing in the morning? Why don't you change the format of the meeting in a way to make it helpful? > What if people have to contort their schedules to do it (either starting before they're woken up or done their morning exercise, or interrupting the flow of early-risers who'd already dug into their work)? Why don't you talk to your team to move the stand up to a time that's convenient to everyone? > What if the team members are good at async collaboration, and have a good sense when on-demand real-time is worthwhile, so daily synchronous standups seem like someone else needs help/nudge to learn the skills of the other team members, to avoid sabotaging a high-performing team's effectiveness and morale? Then why are you having stand ups at all? ========== (I don't know if you are the one who has those issues, but I'm going to use "you" in my response just because it's easier) None of the things you listed are problems with a daily stand up. Almost all of them seem to be communication issues within your team where you can't or won't communicate your needs to the rest of the team. You're an adult (I assume). If something isn't working for you, speak up, take some ownership of the problem, and work with your team or your manager to find a solution that works for everyone. Maybe everyone else on the team is getting a ton of value out of the meeting and you are not. If that's the case then it seems like the problem isn't stand up, it's you. Remember, not every meeting you attend is there to give you value. Some meetings exist for other people to get value from you. Just because you're not getting something from it doesn't mean it's a bad meeting. On the other end of the spectrum, if you talk to your team and no one is getting any value out of the meeting, then the problem isn't the meeting, it's that your team leadership sucks and they're making everyone go to meetings that no one is getting value out of. Daily stand ups are just a tool. Saying daily stand ups suck would be like saying hammers suck. Your may not need a daily stand up, but that doesn't mean they're bad.
ryandrake 3y ago
> Hire randomly > Never put in the work to identify potential candidates based on their contribution to the industry or relevant projects. Corollary: Never promote internally If there is someone on the team interested in and capable of stepping up to become a team lead or manager, ignore him or her, and instead hire someone externally for the leadership role. Bonus: Always use the excuse "Gosh, we can't find any good internal candidates, so we grudgingly need to look outside the company for leaders!"
dudul 3y ago
I would bet a lot that there is probably very little difference in outcome between hiring randomly and hiring with these complicated, disconnected, grueling interview processes that every company seems to be doing now.

chaosharmonic 3y ago

Pay quietly Don't pay your staff consistently for the same work. Refuse to advertise your budgets, and loosen your "ranges" to get people in the door when they push you about it, but then use those same targets to hand-wave away people already inside -- who come to you after comparing notes or observing the impact of broader market conditions like inflation. Also, stop them from comparing notes or doing fifth-grade level math like compounding effects. That education is there to help you, not them - and speaking of which, it taught them better than to talk out of turn, let alone to question the people they work for. (...satire aside though, you do know standups can be done in the afternoons, right?)

mrguyorama 3y ago
Don't forget having HR regularly discourage sharing salary for some bullshit reason in flagrant disregard of labor laws.

superfrank 3y ago

> Do a daily stand-up I absolutely disagree with this one. Both the best and worst teams I worked on as a developer both had daily stand ups and the frequency, length, and process was nearly identical. If daily stand ups are a problem for your team, it's usually a symptom of a bigger problem, not a cause. I'm a manager now and I have multiple teams who report up to me. Personally, I hate daily stand ups so when I took over a new team last year, I floated the idea of switching them from 5 stand ups a week to 3 a week and they unanimously vetoed it. Of all the teams who report to me, they're actually the one that does the best work and are the most independent. If you feel like your manager or PM is micromanaging, removing your daily stand up isn't going to fix that. They're just going to micromanage you though a different medium.

go_discover 3y ago
A stand up is fine if the team wants to do it. Once it's dictated from above and run by a manager it's lost all worth
neilv 3y ago
> If daily stand ups are a problem for your team, it's usually a symptom of a bigger problem, not a cause. I'm sure that's true for some teams, but daily standups can also be a problem for teams that are functioning well. What if the daily standup routine isn't highlighting problems (nor otherwise helping), but it's just wasting time, throwing off flow, or frontloading a bunch of distractions into people's brains first thing in the morning? What if people have to contort their schedules to do it (either starting before they're woken up or done their morning exercise, or interrupting the flow of early-risers who'd already dug into their work)? What if the team members are good at async collaboration, and have a good sense when on-demand real-time is worthwhile, so daily synchronous standups seem like someone else needs help/nudge to learn the skills of the other team members, to avoid sabotaging a high-performing team's effectiveness and morale?
- superfrank 3y ago
  > What if the daily standup routine isn't highlighting problems (nor otherwise helping), but it's just wasting time, throwing off flow, or frontloading a bunch of distractions into people's brains first thing in the morning? Why don't you change the format of the meeting in a way to make it helpful? > What if people have to contort their schedules to do it (either starting before they're woken up or done their morning exercise, or interrupting the flow of early-risers who'd already dug into their work)? Why don't you talk to your team to move the stand up to a time that's convenient to everyone? > What if the team members are good at async collaboration, and have a good sense when on-demand real-time is worthwhile, so daily synchronous standups seem like someone else needs help/nudge to learn the skills of the other team members, to avoid sabotaging a high-performing team's effectiveness and morale? Then why are you having stand ups at all? ========== (I don't know if you are the one who has those issues, but I'm going to use "you" in my response just because it's easier) None of the things you listed are problems with a daily stand up. Almost all of them seem to be communication issues within your team where you can't or won't communicate your needs to the rest of the team. You're an adult (I assume). If something isn't working for you, speak up, take some ownership of the problem, and work with your team or your manager to find a solution that works for everyone. Maybe everyone else on the team is getting a ton of value out of the meeting and you are not. If that's the case then it seems like the problem isn't stand up, it's you. Remember, not every meeting you attend is there to give you value. Some meetings exist for other people to get value from you. Just because you're not getting something from it doesn't mean it's a bad meeting. On the other end of the spectrum, if you talk to your team and no one is getting any value out of the meeting, then the problem isn't the meeting, it's that your team leadership sucks and they're making everyone go to meetings that no one is getting value out of. Daily stand ups are just a tool. Saying daily stand ups suck would be like saying hammers suck. Your may not need a daily stand up, but that doesn't mean they're bad.

ryandrake 3y ago

> Hire randomly > Never put in the work to identify potential candidates based on their contribution to the industry or relevant projects. Corollary: Never promote internally If there is someone on the team interested in and capable of stepping up to become a team lead or manager, ignore him or her, and instead hire someone externally for the leadership role. Bonus: Always use the excuse "Gosh, we can't find any good internal candidates, so we grudgingly need to look outside the company for leaders!"

dudul 3y ago

I would bet a lot that there is probably very little difference in outcome between hiring randomly and hiring with these complicated, disconnected, grueling interview processes that every company seems to be doing now.