6 ms·

Excellent answer up until paragraph three. Nothing will drive your developers (good and bad) away quicker than an a "quick morning standup", aka daily interrog

by jmulho 12y ago

Excellent answer up until paragraph three. Nothing will drive your developers (good and bad) away quicker than an a "quick morning standup", aka daily interrogation. Were you productive yesterday? Will you be productive today? What are your excuses? This innocent attempt to keep everyone on track has all manner of unintended consequences. Here is what happens to your developers calendars: Draw a box around the hour before standup. In that box write "Don't start on anything hard." Draw a box around the half hour after stand up. In that box write "Try to regain focus." Draw a box around the last hour of the day. In that box write "Do meaningless things I can mention tomorrow in standup, if necessary." Difficult tasks are rarely accomplished as a series of daily successes. As a manager, the most important thing to remember about the meetings you schedule is that they are for your benefit. If you are the type of person who needs to know what is going on every minute, you will hold a meeting every minute. When developers need to know what is going on they simply turn around and ask, exactly as often as necessary. One way managers could minimize disruption is to walk up and ask developers what is going on as often as necessary on a per developer basis.

neukoelln 12y ago
We also thought this way. We had our daily standup at half past ten, which was right in the middle between coming in and going to lunch. Now we moved it to quarter to two, which for most of us means a bit after lunch. Now we have no interruption throughout the morning, and the hour before the standup we're not working anyway.
- jonstewart 12y ago
  Yeah, I'm a fan of first thing in the morning--if everyone gets to work at the same time--or after lunch, where it helps ease people back into work whilst digesting.
e28eta 12y ago
I'm sorry that standups have been like an interrogation for you. They should really be for the team's benefit. The team as a whole should care about delivering the product, and should use standup to communicate about current progress, and especially to help each other with any blockers. It sounds like these engineers have tasks they think are important: I don't think anyone spends several days setting up a VM for fun. Does everyone have a say in what user stories are worked on? Do they have a mechanism to suggest improvements, and help prioritize them against the rest of the backlog to figure out what's most important?
- jonstewart 12y ago
  Likewise, I'm sorry you've had a bad standup experience. A standup should absolutely not be an interrogation, and perhaps I dwelt too much on the "competitive pressure" aspect. That competitive pressure should come entirely from within a developer, just from the normal psychological desire to achieve and do a good job and to know that someone cares about what you're doing. The manager actively needs to counteract the competitive part, to ensure that it's okay in the standup to say "I'm stuck" or "I fucked up" or "I need help".
michaelochurch 12y ago
I hate 95% of "Agile" (i.e. wolf-in-sheep's-clothing micromanagement) but I actually think that a daily standup is often a good thing or, at least, a necessary evil. In organizations, people will form suspicions, e.g. "does that guy actually pull his weight?" It's not a good thing. It's not what people should do. It's what they will do. Standups allay that suspicion. Of all the political games that an office environment can make you play, standup is one of the easiest ones, and that's good because even with the losses you mentioned (such as regaining focus) it's limited in the amount of time it takes, and you still have 50-65 percent of your time for real work, which is 3-4x what many programmers get. One way managers could minimize disruption is to walk up and ask developers what is going on as often as necessary on a per developer basis. Impromptu status pings are more disruptive (and, in some companies I've seen, obnoxiously frequent, like 1-4x per day) than scheduled status meetings. If you've decided that you need status updates, you should have the standup instead of having the whole office on edge all fucking day.
nitrogen 12y ago
15 minute standup meetings right before lunch are an ideal way for a team working on scattered parts of a big project to stay connected to reality. They shouldn't be structured as interrogations. Rather, each team member (works for non-programmers too) gives a brief summary of recent and near-future work, their longer term trajectory, and anything they need another person to review. Other team members then have the opportunity to point out they are working on similar things and need to make sure integration of the separate parts goes smoothly.
joesmo 12y ago
"Excellent answer up until paragraph three. Nothing will drive your developers (good and bad) away quicker than an a "quick morning standup", aka daily interrogation." While it's far from the worst thing to drive developers away, I do agree a standup/scrum meeting every day is stupid, counterproductive, and just plain useless. For the managers, they should be able to look at your ticketing/project system and know instantly what everyone is working on. Keeping tickets up to date is part of the job and really, it's not that hard. For the programmers, they are now tasked with figuring out what to say in the standup and how to make sure that they are not perceived as not working when they really are. Programmers who need to know what other people are working on in the team can also look at the ticketing/project system and when they need more information (as in cases where their work depends on someone else), they will ask directly. I've been to standup meetings in close to a dozen different companies, ranging from the smallest startup to some of the biggest tech companies and never have I ever seen a standup meeting end on time. NEVER. I don't think it actually happens. What I have seen is the meeting go on for half an hour to an hour, boring everyone out of their minds. Sometimes this even involved multiple teams whose work barely intersected at all. The other team's work status was a pure waste of time for anyone not on that team. Yes, it is absolutely an interrogation. A daily standup shows that the manager doesn't trust his employees. He doesn't trust them to keep the ticketing/project system updated. He doesn't trust them to do work without the threat of being shamed and/or seen as lazy if the work done doesn't sound impressive in a standup. He doesn't trust them to seek help on their own. Basically, a daily standup is the sign of an incompetent manager. Scrum is for rugby.
- jonstewart 12y ago
  A standup is for communication. "Here's what I'm working on, here's something cool I found out, Oh hey I have some code related to what you're working on, I need help, That sounds awesome, What a pain in the ass setting up VMs is", etc. I've actually found it's also a good way for the manager to communicate what s/he is doing, by participating as an equal. The standup should not devolve into the manager pointing a figure at each team member and asking them when they'll be done with a certain task.
  - 12y ago
jacquesm 12y ago
The daily standup: it will make a really bad team perform a little better and it will make a really good team go to pieces.
- sukilot 12y ago
  If the team is doing really well, no one will suggest a standup.
  - RogerL 12y ago
    Are you hiring? This sort of stuff tends to get imposed from above, or by busybodies enraptured with ideas and theory as opposed to practicality. I'm endlessly told how nothing but agile works, despite the fact that I'm 48, and successfully lead dozens of projects before agile was an idea, on time and on budget.
    - collyw 12y ago
      This is exactly what I have though. I code the same way as I have for years. (I am more organized and disciplined, but that is down to experience, and nothing to do with the way I work being labeled "agile"). If I was to take a list of aglie practices, I maybe end up ticking half of them. Same things I did when waterfall was all the rage.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    How I wish you were right.
therealidiot 12y ago
As part of my job I have the pleasure of a "quick morning standup" every day, and it's one of my least favourite parts of the job. It also routinely becomes a "not-so-quick morning standup" meeting.
jghn 12y ago
In my group standups are more about everyone touching base on what they're doing and what issues they have so that other people a) know that they're not duplicating effort and b) can chime in to help if they think that'd be helpful. That's far from an interrogation
logfromblammo 12y ago
I have an anecdote about daily stand-up meetings. The project I was on had its tasks written up in Excel spreadsheets, planned up to 2 years in advance. The management discovered, after seven years, that things were not being done that should be done. So they implemented daily stand-up meetings at exactly 8:50 am, including every single person on the development team, as well as all the testers. The natural politicians on the team immediately pivoted towards writing down every bullshit thing they did during the day, so they could recite them the next morning as evidence of productivity. Incidence of scheduled meetings that would require at least one of the seniors to be present exploded. Every single one of those damned meetings was scheduled for 10 minutes, and lasted at least 30. The stand-up is not the problem. Incompetent management is the problem. Management fads won't do anything to address the underlying deficiencies. The actual problem with that office is that smart and unethical developers are leading the incompetent managers around by the nose, using the very process and metrics that the managers had created to hide their lack of development knowledge. As a result, the senior developers assigned themselves the privileged tasks that sound important but don't actually require much work, assigned the grunt labor to juniors, and gamed every last one of the management metrics to make sure everyone on board with "the program" gets paid until the gravy train runs off the cliff. So naturally, every last line of that code base is DailyWTF candidate material. The management does not understand technical debt, so the seniors issued them high-interest loans from their own bank. This is not the fault of the developers. It is 100% the fault of the managers that allowed that toxic creature to take root. So with respect to the question post, I suggest that the "slow" employees may actually be testing their new manager's capability to manage them. This is particularly relevant if any of them have ever worked for another company. Assume they are trying to establish their own slack margin, so that they can safely read HN every morning, or some other equivalent time-waster, without falling behind on assigned tasks. If so, implementing a daily stand-up will only confirm that you are a management novice that can be manipulated. Just establish a tough, but fair, work standard, and check to see if the "slow" guys speed up in response, or continue to struggle for more hours. For the former, you will need to court their favor by assuring them that good productivity will not be punished. For the latter, you will need to continue their education by sharing the knowledge and experience you and the faster developers have acquired during your careers--but subtly, so as to not embarrass them before their peers.
rifung 12y ago
I think that your opinion is definitely valid and just goes to show that different things work for different people. I actually really enjoy stand up because it's the only way I get to know what other people are working on. It also makes it so that it's easy to prioritize depending on dependencies. However I would argue that the problem isn't stand up itself, but a culture of not being able to say you didn't finish something. After I realized in my last company that it was okay to say I couldn't finish something in time, the environment quickly felt much nicer to be in.
pcglue 12y ago
Yeah, I left my last company because of SCRUM gone wrong (1 hour daily "stand-ups" and 6 hour sprint planning meetings). One criteria in my job searches now is no Agile/SCRUM (to me, it's just another name for micro-management).
BerislavLopac 12y ago
My favourite take on the standup meetings is not to structure them as reports on what each team member did yesterday and planned to do today. They can include that if necessary, but I prefer using them as an opportunity to exchange knowledge. The team members should be encouraged to discuss any issues they ran into and share the ways they resolved them, and the lead should listen and make note of any recurring issues -- both related to technology and to the personal -- and see if they need resolving on a more individual level.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Its essential to regularly update what tasks are done and what tasks are being worked on by whom, but if you use some other system to handle those updates and keep people aware of the updates (e.g., visual artifacts updated as items are completed and pulled for work, as in kanban), then you don't need to do that in the standup meeting. Identifying issues encountered (both to share knowledge of how issues were resolved and to gather information on addressing barriers that haven't been resolved) is a pretty standard element of standup meetings even when they include progress updates, and certainly a good thing to keep them for if you've moved the status updates to another channel.
vraravam 12y ago
I am sorry - but I dont understand why your attitude towards daily standups is so pessimitic. I do agree that what you describe can be one possible outcome of standups, but, if everyone (at least individually in their own way) is looking to ensure that the project/undertaking succeeds, then there are a whole lot of other benefits that standups do provide. One advice to the OP - dont think of yourself a "manager". I always think of myself a "lead"er - as in "lead by example". So, anything that i ask (and consequently expect from my team) is definitely something that I would also do given the same circumstances. Going by this, the standup (as an example) is where I am the first one to share what I did yesterday, something interesting that I found out about yesterday, and what I hope to accomplish today. I add any blockers that I came to yesterday couched in the "can someone please help with this problem?". Since I open up the "discussion", its not even considered an interrogation - its just sharing my accomplishments, interesting things, etc with my peers/team mates.

by jmulho 12y ago

neukoelln 12y ago

We also thought this way. We had our daily standup at half past ten, which was right in the middle between coming in and going to lunch. Now we moved it to quarter to two, which for most of us means a bit after lunch. Now we have no interruption throughout the morning, and the hour before the standup we're not working anyway.

jonstewart 12y ago
Yeah, I'm a fan of first thing in the morning--if everyone gets to work at the same time--or after lunch, where it helps ease people back into work whilst digesting.

e28eta 12y ago

I'm sorry that standups have been like an interrogation for you. They should really be for the team's benefit. The team as a whole should care about delivering the product, and should use standup to communicate about current progress, and especially to help each other with any blockers. It sounds like these engineers have tasks they think are important: I don't think anyone spends several days setting up a VM for fun. Does everyone have a say in what user stories are worked on? Do they have a mechanism to suggest improvements, and help prioritize them against the rest of the backlog to figure out what's most important?

jonstewart 12y ago
Likewise, I'm sorry you've had a bad standup experience. A standup should absolutely not be an interrogation, and perhaps I dwelt too much on the "competitive pressure" aspect. That competitive pressure should come entirely from within a developer, just from the normal psychological desire to achieve and do a good job and to know that someone cares about what you're doing. The manager actively needs to counteract the competitive part, to ensure that it's okay in the standup to say "I'm stuck" or "I fucked up" or "I need help".

michaelochurch 12y ago

I hate 95% of "Agile" (i.e. wolf-in-sheep's-clothing micromanagement) but I actually think that a daily standup is often a good thing or, at least, a necessary evil. In organizations, people will form suspicions, e.g. "does that guy actually pull his weight?" It's not a good thing. It's not what people should do. It's what they will do. Standups allay that suspicion. Of all the political games that an office environment can make you play, standup is one of the easiest ones, and that's good because even with the losses you mentioned (such as regaining focus) it's limited in the amount of time it takes, and you still have 50-65 percent of your time for real work, which is 3-4x what many programmers get. One way managers could minimize disruption is to walk up and ask developers what is going on as often as necessary on a per developer basis. Impromptu status pings are more disruptive (and, in some companies I've seen, obnoxiously frequent, like 1-4x per day) than scheduled status meetings. If you've decided that you need status updates, you should have the standup instead of having the whole office on edge all fucking day.

nitrogen 12y ago

15 minute standup meetings right before lunch are an ideal way for a team working on scattered parts of a big project to stay connected to reality. They shouldn't be structured as interrogations. Rather, each team member (works for non-programmers too) gives a brief summary of recent and near-future work, their longer term trajectory, and anything they need another person to review. Other team members then have the opportunity to point out they are working on similar things and need to make sure integration of the separate parts goes smoothly.

joesmo 12y ago

"Excellent answer up until paragraph three. Nothing will drive your developers (good and bad) away quicker than an a "quick morning standup", aka daily interrogation." While it's far from the worst thing to drive developers away, I do agree a standup/scrum meeting every day is stupid, counterproductive, and just plain useless. For the managers, they should be able to look at your ticketing/project system and know instantly what everyone is working on. Keeping tickets up to date is part of the job and really, it's not that hard. For the programmers, they are now tasked with figuring out what to say in the standup and how to make sure that they are not perceived as not working when they really are. Programmers who need to know what other people are working on in the team can also look at the ticketing/project system and when they need more information (as in cases where their work depends on someone else), they will ask directly. I've been to standup meetings in close to a dozen different companies, ranging from the smallest startup to some of the biggest tech companies and never have I ever seen a standup meeting end on time. NEVER. I don't think it actually happens. What I have seen is the meeting go on for half an hour to an hour, boring everyone out of their minds. Sometimes this even involved multiple teams whose work barely intersected at all. The other team's work status was a pure waste of time for anyone not on that team. Yes, it is absolutely an interrogation. A daily standup shows that the manager doesn't trust his employees. He doesn't trust them to keep the ticketing/project system updated. He doesn't trust them to do work without the threat of being shamed and/or seen as lazy if the work done doesn't sound impressive in a standup. He doesn't trust them to seek help on their own. Basically, a daily standup is the sign of an incompetent manager. Scrum is for rugby.

jonstewart 12y ago
A standup is for communication. "Here's what I'm working on, here's something cool I found out, Oh hey I have some code related to what you're working on, I need help, That sounds awesome, What a pain in the ass setting up VMs is", etc. I've actually found it's also a good way for the manager to communicate what s/he is doing, by participating as an equal. The standup should not devolve into the manager pointing a figure at each team member and asking them when they'll be done with a certain task.
- 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

The daily standup: it will make a really bad team perform a little better and it will make a really good team go to pieces.

sukilot 12y ago
If the team is doing really well, no one will suggest a standup.
- RogerL 12y ago
  Are you hiring? This sort of stuff tends to get imposed from above, or by busybodies enraptured with ideas and theory as opposed to practicality. I'm endlessly told how nothing but agile works, despite the fact that I'm 48, and successfully lead dozens of projects before agile was an idea, on time and on budget.
  - collyw 12y ago
    This is exactly what I have though. I code the same way as I have for years. (I am more organized and disciplined, but that is down to experience, and nothing to do with the way I work being labeled "agile"). If I was to take a list of aglie practices, I maybe end up ticking half of them. Same things I did when waterfall was all the rage.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  How I wish you were right.

therealidiot 12y ago

As part of my job I have the pleasure of a "quick morning standup" every day, and it's one of my least favourite parts of the job. It also routinely becomes a "not-so-quick morning standup" meeting.

jghn 12y ago

In my group standups are more about everyone touching base on what they're doing and what issues they have so that other people a) know that they're not duplicating effort and b) can chime in to help if they think that'd be helpful. That's far from an interrogation

logfromblammo 12y ago

I have an anecdote about daily stand-up meetings. The project I was on had its tasks written up in Excel spreadsheets, planned up to 2 years in advance. The management discovered, after seven years, that things were not being done that should be done. So they implemented daily stand-up meetings at exactly 8:50 am, including every single person on the development team, as well as all the testers. The natural politicians on the team immediately pivoted towards writing down every bullshit thing they did during the day, so they could recite them the next morning as evidence of productivity. Incidence of scheduled meetings that would require at least one of the seniors to be present exploded. Every single one of those damned meetings was scheduled for 10 minutes, and lasted at least 30. The stand-up is not the problem. Incompetent management is the problem. Management fads won't do anything to address the underlying deficiencies. The actual problem with that office is that smart and unethical developers are leading the incompetent managers around by the nose, using the very process and metrics that the managers had created to hide their lack of development knowledge. As a result, the senior developers assigned themselves the privileged tasks that sound important but don't actually require much work, assigned the grunt labor to juniors, and gamed every last one of the management metrics to make sure everyone on board with "the program" gets paid until the gravy train runs off the cliff. So naturally, every last line of that code base is DailyWTF candidate material. The management does not understand technical debt, so the seniors issued them high-interest loans from their own bank. This is not the fault of the developers. It is 100% the fault of the managers that allowed that toxic creature to take root. So with respect to the question post, I suggest that the "slow" employees may actually be testing their new manager's capability to manage them. This is particularly relevant if any of them have ever worked for another company. Assume they are trying to establish their own slack margin, so that they can safely read HN every morning, or some other equivalent time-waster, without falling behind on assigned tasks. If so, implementing a daily stand-up will only confirm that you are a management novice that can be manipulated. Just establish a tough, but fair, work standard, and check to see if the "slow" guys speed up in response, or continue to struggle for more hours. For the former, you will need to court their favor by assuring them that good productivity will not be punished. For the latter, you will need to continue their education by sharing the knowledge and experience you and the faster developers have acquired during your careers--but subtly, so as to not embarrass them before their peers.

rifung 12y ago

I think that your opinion is definitely valid and just goes to show that different things work for different people. I actually really enjoy stand up because it's the only way I get to know what other people are working on. It also makes it so that it's easy to prioritize depending on dependencies. However I would argue that the problem isn't stand up itself, but a culture of not being able to say you didn't finish something. After I realized in my last company that it was okay to say I couldn't finish something in time, the environment quickly felt much nicer to be in.

pcglue 12y ago

Yeah, I left my last company because of SCRUM gone wrong (1 hour daily "stand-ups" and 6 hour sprint planning meetings). One criteria in my job searches now is no Agile/SCRUM (to me, it's just another name for micro-management).

BerislavLopac 12y ago

My favourite take on the standup meetings is not to structure them as reports on what each team member did yesterday and planned to do today. They can include that if necessary, but I prefer using them as an opportunity to exchange knowledge. The team members should be encouraged to discuss any issues they ran into and share the ways they resolved them, and the lead should listen and make note of any recurring issues -- both related to technology and to the personal -- and see if they need resolving on a more individual level.

dragonwriter 12y ago
Its essential to regularly update what tasks are done and what tasks are being worked on by whom, but if you use some other system to handle those updates and keep people aware of the updates (e.g., visual artifacts updated as items are completed and pulled for work, as in kanban), then you don't need to do that in the standup meeting. Identifying issues encountered (both to share knowledge of how issues were resolved and to gather information on addressing barriers that haven't been resolved) is a pretty standard element of standup meetings even when they include progress updates, and certainly a good thing to keep them for if you've moved the status updates to another channel.

vraravam 12y ago

I am sorry - but I dont understand why your attitude towards daily standups is so pessimitic. I do agree that what you describe can be one possible outcome of standups, but, if everyone (at least individually in their own way) is looking to ensure that the project/undertaking succeeds, then there are a whole lot of other benefits that standups do provide. One advice to the OP - dont think of yourself a "manager". I always think of myself a "lead"er - as in "lead by example". So, anything that i ask (and consequently expect from my team) is definitely something that I would also do given the same circumstances. Going by this, the standup (as an example) is where I am the first one to share what I did yesterday, something interesting that I found out about yesterday, and what I hope to accomplish today. I add any blockers that I came to yesterday couched in the "can someone please help with this problem?". Since I open up the "discussion", its not even considered an interrogation - its just sharing my accomplishments, interesting things, etc with my peers/team mates.