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The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and get

• Palomides 3y ago
  yeah, getting alignment across the team and doing a vibe check at the cost of ten minutes seems pretty reasonable to me, the questions are basically just variants on "how's it going?"
  • ironmagma 3y ago
    They are too specific, formulaic, and reek of management tactics. If you mean, "how's it going?", say, "how's it going?" As the wise Dr. Seuss said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant."
    • bluGill 3y ago
      Hows it going is too vague for many. Every ask a kid what they learned at school today? The answer is always "nothing", or silence. You need to ask a different question to get a good answer. Which is one reason look for and ask different questions - if may break someone out of a rut.
      • ironmagma 3y ago
        If you answer "fine" to "how's it going" at standup, you aren't doing your job. It's not the prompt that needs to be specific, it's the engineer. If there are follow up questions, those can be asked, but asking the same three specific but thoughtless questions is just like having a form you have to fill out any time you make a change.
        • prepend 3y ago
          And kids aren’t doing their job by saying “nothing.” It’s easier to change the questions to improve responses.
          • ironmagma 3y ago
            Yeah but that's to be expected because they are kids. If your coworkers act like children, that's a problem; they should act like adults because they should be adults. What's easy usually isn't what's right.
            • prepend 3y ago
              It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like humans. If it’s easier to tweak questions or retrain everyone on my team, me included, I’m going with the easier path every time. In this case easy is right because the specific question isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the community, discussion, and information shared.
              • ironmagma 3y ago
                I don’t think so. People know what the purpose of a standup is. You don’t even need a prompt to get one going, just have everyone go around in a circle and talk. They will do it automatically. Isn’t this basically the point of the article?
      • besofrrn 3y ago
        [dead]
• ipaddr 3y ago
  The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management. If you are looking for a social event that's what happens at lunch over an hour while sitting not a 5 minute standup where everyone is trying to say just enough so they can get back to work. It's sad the standups are considered a social event. Back in the good old days you finished your work chilled on a cheap startup couch while two others played ping pong and you chatted. Or you met up a bar after and threw darts. What have we sold ourselves lately?
  • johnny99k 3y ago
    How do you meet up at a bar when your team is 1000 miles away?
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      Well, yes, exactly. > Back in the good old days [...] What have we sold ourselves lately?
    • bluGill 3y ago
      Fly everyone to one place so they can do this. Twice a year is good - enough that it is a good vacation/team building exercise, not so much that people feel like they are married to their job not their spouse.
  • nerdponx 3y ago
    > The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management. Speak for yourself. My team has a small window of overlapping time zones and it's a valuable opportunity to get everyone together and sync on all our projects. But our work is all loosely interrelated, so that's actually something we need to do. It's not a "social event" in the sense that you all get to hang out and make friends. It's a social event in the sense that it's an opportunity to verbally engage with your colleagues in a group setting. I agree that standup makes little sense on a team of people who are all working on unrelated projects. The silliest thing you can do here is assume that what works for you will work for everyone, and what doesn't work for you won't work for anyone.
  • 3y ago
• JohnFen 3y ago
  Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then. My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.
  • MajimasEyepatch 3y ago
    It's still valuable to share information about progress and impediments with the whole team. Alice and Bob may have some blocker that they've been communicating about, but Chris wasn't a part of those one-on-one conversations, so the standup gives him some valuable context about what's going on with the rest of the team. Maybe his work depends on something Bob was supposed to complete today that's going to take a few more days, or maybe he's encountered a similar problem before and has some advice, or maybe he'll remember the issue when something similar pops up later on. Alice and Bob would have resolved the blocker themselves, but this helps make sure the information is shared across the team in a way that simply moving cards on a kanban board wouldn't communicate.
    • leetrout 3y ago
      If you need a designated meeting for communicating with your teammate you already failed the qualification of highly functioning team.
      • MajimasEyepatch 3y ago
        The point is that it's a teammate who wouldn't ordinarily be involved in resolving the issue. There's still value in them learning about it.
        • gunapologist99 3y ago
          Sometimes, but most of the time it's probably going to waste their time (times ten).
• khokhol 3y ago
  Sure, we get it. But when you add forced rituals to the mix (such as the very worst: coerced standing), it ends up being just numbing and grating, especially over time. And when it gets to the point where you can just tell that most people are mouthing something to check boxes, while checking out, internally -- in that sense, it basically defeats the intended purpose.
• jacknews 3y ago
  Agreed. I also do not see any value in the current questions; individual status should be communicated with in a tracking tool. The standup is a chance to get everyone together, raise and share any issues or clever solutions or whatever, maybe get a 'feel' for status, and tell some jokes. It should be short, maybe extremely short sometimes.