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You'll find yourself choosing between getting "your" work done and doing everything else on the list. It's important to accept that enabling everyone else is pa

You'll find yourself choosing between getting "your" work done and doing everything else on the list. It's important to accept that enabling everyone else is part of your job. In my experience, code review is the single most important thing you can do to mentor your team, maintain your code quality, and monitor your progress. A daily standup ensures that no one spins their wheels for more than a day without giving you a chance to do something about it, which is really helpful for a junior team. However, remember that this meeting is for surfacing issues, not for solving them. Schedule follow-ups with the people who need it and let everyone else get back to work. Document things when you get tired of answering the same question repeatedly. Focus on ROI, not some higher principle of best practice. You can get a lot of mileage out of conventions and tribal knowledge.

ohthatsnotright 2y ago
If your team is waiting a full day to "surface issues" you've got some deep and troubling communication problems that a daily meeting isn't going to solve.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Having it last a maximum of a day is pretty convenient though. Of course it’d be better if people tell you after being stuck for a few hours, but not all people (especially junior) have learned/internalized that yet.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Depends on the team. I almost prefer juniors to make some mistakes and spend some time trying to figure it out on their own. There's a good chance they won't figure it out, but the journey they go on is a lot of time worth it.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    There's a good chance they won't figure it out, but the journey they go on is a lot of time worth it. That's true of the good guys. Just make sure that you don't let the not so good guys spin their wheels in perpetuity, day after day on yet another problem. Or sometimes the same in different clothes. The good guy also probably told you earlier by pinging you for a quick 5 minute chat / call and was then back on his way.
    - b20000 2y ago
      but i thought leetcode made sure you hire competent engineers?
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Many people prefer to focus on their work instead of constantly keeping an eye on Slack.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  I think it’s hard to draw a broad stroke. Good team members unblock themselves. Sometimes that means dealing an answer right now. Sometimes that means shifting to something else. My personal experience is team velocity is higher when you avoid team member immediately jumping for help when they face a problem. Loosing 1 day on 1x person is no worse than having 2x people loose 1/2 day. Also, sometime problems just take time to solve. I’ve often come up with solutions after letting a problem sit for a day.
- fiftyacorn 2y ago
  I think this depends on the dev - some devs will contact immediately when there are issues, and others suffer in silence. It comes down to devs who are good at communicating, and those who arent, and shows the importance of communication as a skill. I'd take a weaker dev who is good at communicating over one who suffers in silence everytime
- allknowingfrog 2y ago
  Well, the question was about junior engineers. In my experience, they will occasionally burn a whole day without making real progress. Communication is one of the many skills that differentiate juniors from more senior resources.
Culonavirus 2y ago
Where do you people get this "daily standup" idiocy from? Maybe I'm too old for this crap, but you can't get anything meaningful done in just 8 hours, and if you can, what you did is definitely not worth wasting time talking about. I feel like you have to be a literal code monkey that needs to be guided on almost a method-level to get any productive plus out of daily "standup". This hyper-corpo "agile" garbage should have been dead and buried a long time ago. As someone who has worked professionally as a coder for over a decade, one, at most two meetings a week is what's reasonable. Anything above that is a giant red flag, most likely means you don't trust your people, and reeks of shady business practices like rotating (hiring & firing) junior devs so you don't have to pay for seniors.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  its always somebody dropping these gems in interviews followed by “is this age discrimination” the purpose is to provide transparency to other stakeholders, to then forecast team velocity and aggregate potential throughput to those stakeholders. in which case your own velocity isnt important as opposed to knowing if other team members are blocked on something you may be familiar with or even responsible for a daily meeting that shouldnt exceed 10 minutes, or done asynchronously daily, is a decent way of accomplishing that
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    Alternatively why even have a meeting? Just have a channel in slack/mattermost/teams for your team to post what they did and what they are stuck on at the end of the day and what they plan on doing at the start of the day. You get the same result but without forcing people to spend the 15-30 minute wasted time before the meeting and the hour or so of degraded performance while they try to get back into the zone after the meeting. Standups only benefit management and they really are the pinnacle of "this could have been an email/message". The only time they may be acceptable is if everyone on the team dedicates their entire schedule (at least for the week) on that one project and if they work the exact same hours, the exact same days, in a no-remote environment. Then you can have a quick 10 minute meeting around the coffee machine while people grab their coffee in the morning. Otherwise just make it an email/slack message.

ohthatsnotright 2y ago

If your team is waiting a full day to "surface issues" you've got some deep and troubling communication problems that a daily meeting isn't going to solve.

Aeolun 2y ago
Having it last a maximum of a day is pretty convenient though. Of course it’d be better if people tell you after being stuck for a few hours, but not all people (especially junior) have learned/internalized that yet.
monocasa 2y ago
Depends on the team. I almost prefer juniors to make some mistakes and spend some time trying to figure it out on their own. There's a good chance they won't figure it out, but the journey they go on is a lot of time worth it.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  There's a good chance they won't figure it out, but the journey they go on is a lot of time worth it. That's true of the good guys. Just make sure that you don't let the not so good guys spin their wheels in perpetuity, day after day on yet another problem. Or sometimes the same in different clothes. The good guy also probably told you earlier by pinging you for a quick 5 minute chat / call and was then back on his way.
  - b20000 2y ago
    but i thought leetcode made sure you hire competent engineers?
zeroCalories 2y ago
Many people prefer to focus on their work instead of constantly keeping an eye on Slack.
SkyPuncher 2y ago
I think it’s hard to draw a broad stroke. Good team members unblock themselves. Sometimes that means dealing an answer right now. Sometimes that means shifting to something else. My personal experience is team velocity is higher when you avoid team member immediately jumping for help when they face a problem. Loosing 1 day on 1x person is no worse than having 2x people loose 1/2 day. Also, sometime problems just take time to solve. I’ve often come up with solutions after letting a problem sit for a day.
fiftyacorn 2y ago
I think this depends on the dev - some devs will contact immediately when there are issues, and others suffer in silence. It comes down to devs who are good at communicating, and those who arent, and shows the importance of communication as a skill. I'd take a weaker dev who is good at communicating over one who suffers in silence everytime
allknowingfrog 2y ago
Well, the question was about junior engineers. In my experience, they will occasionally burn a whole day without making real progress. Communication is one of the many skills that differentiate juniors from more senior resources.

Culonavirus 2y ago

Where do you people get this "daily standup" idiocy from? Maybe I'm too old for this crap, but you can't get anything meaningful done in just 8 hours, and if you can, what you did is definitely not worth wasting time talking about. I feel like you have to be a literal code monkey that needs to be guided on almost a method-level to get any productive plus out of daily "standup". This hyper-corpo "agile" garbage should have been dead and buried a long time ago. As someone who has worked professionally as a coder for over a decade, one, at most two meetings a week is what's reasonable. Anything above that is a giant red flag, most likely means you don't trust your people, and reeks of shady business practices like rotating (hiring & firing) junior devs so you don't have to pay for seniors.

yieldcrv 2y ago
its always somebody dropping these gems in interviews followed by “is this age discrimination” the purpose is to provide transparency to other stakeholders, to then forecast team velocity and aggregate potential throughput to those stakeholders. in which case your own velocity isnt important as opposed to knowing if other team members are blocked on something you may be familiar with or even responsible for a daily meeting that shouldnt exceed 10 minutes, or done asynchronously daily, is a decent way of accomplishing that
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Alternatively why even have a meeting? Just have a channel in slack/mattermost/teams for your team to post what they did and what they are stuck on at the end of the day and what they plan on doing at the start of the day. You get the same result but without forcing people to spend the 15-30 minute wasted time before the meeting and the hour or so of degraded performance while they try to get back into the zone after the meeting. Standups only benefit management and they really are the pinnacle of "this could have been an email/message". The only time they may be acceptable is if everyone on the team dedicates their entire schedule (at least for the week) on that one project and if they work the exact same hours, the exact same days, in a no-remote environment. Then you can have a quick 10 minute meeting around the coffee machine while people grab their coffee in the morning. Otherwise just make it an email/slack message.