> The problems with the traditional daily standup is a lack of focus and off-topic discussions.
This is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not ruthlessly kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.
> It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people.
Everything does. Teams don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams.
But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting.
> Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t!
I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the scaling is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.
Any process is worthless if it doesn't exist to solve a problem, doesn't solve the problem, or targets an imaginary problem. It could be better if it solves the problem inoptimally.
What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time).
Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).
It also can solve the problem of helping team members know what each other are doing.
If standup were only what this essay describes, it would be a waste of time, but it's a lot more than that. It's also a chance for team members to describe problems they're having and benefit from the collective experience.
I'm a big fan of morning standup, but I suppose there are good standups and bad standups.
I'm not sure why that would have to be a process though. When I worked in a bigger team, if anyone needed help they'd just ask a deskmate if they didn't look too deep in flow, or drop a message in slack.
You can use Slack. If you have a problem, raise it in the relevant channel or reach out to the relevant expert. There's no reason to make that something that has to be done once a day.
If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever).
If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager.
Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.
We have a standup channel and its very easy to track and timezone insensitive. "Here's what I did, this didn't get done, blocked on this, planning to tackle Y next".
We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.
In my experience, there’s rarely a reason why an entire team needs to know what everyone is doing. Tasks are decomposed. You may need an update from a single person, but you never need an update from eight people.
Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.
Many times, you don't know a team mate is working on something that you would like to know about, or indirectly concerns you, or that you have an insight your team mate never would have thought to ask you about, if not for the stand up.
Everyone learns everyone's status all at once. It's n^2 for everyone to send their status to the whole team though. Standup should be under a minute per person. Leverage the power of sound waves.
Where I work we do one a week and it takes forever because people talk way too long. We often have two team members talking to each other about some niche thing nobody else cares about.
In my experience this just doesn't matter. If I'm working on a totally different work stream to somebody else, I'm not listening to them talk about that unless they're asking for help. It's not in my context, so I'm just not interested. Typically only 1 person at most will be working on something directly related to what I'm doing or something that directly pushes an important team goal, so for an average 6 person team I'm spending at least 2/3 of my time uninterested. That's why people complain about standups even if it's only 15m/day.
because in a complex piece of software you can be working on totally different details within the same bigger picture. I might be working on a bug in authentication while you tweak the order processing logic, but we're both working on an ecommerce site.
And you don't ever have experience working on stuff in the past that others are working now to where you can provide input or notice they are running into a problem you ran into in the past?
Had a former employer did the email-report thing, and I don't know about the manager, but it worked great for me.
I know that at my current job, the manager kind of tunes out. When he says what he's doing it's almost always: "I'm in meetings all day". Not saying "standup is bad" but it's a combination of things that aren't working.
If you do the standup the way it's supposed to be done, it'd be quicker and easier to just send an email. Assuming you've got people who can read and write intelligibly, which is a big if.
The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.
> The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning
I've been a deep proponent that standups should be done at lunchtime. Every place I've worked, I've tried to set the expectation that meetings are to be discouraged in the morning. Leave the morning aside for a chunk of deep work, use the standup to communicate where you're blocked and then segue directly into afternoon time where people can co-ordinate to unblock.
IME, daily standups exist primarily for management to take attendance. This is usually framed as "removing any immediate blockers to keep employees productive".
I've seen worse actually. I had a customer that had 7:15am daily scrum standups, it was a way to force employees to come in early.
This was a hospital, so granted, there was a culture of coming in early. Except IT doesn't get paid doctor salaries, neither do they have the growth of residents/fellows, so why should they come in early?
Quite obviously the problem was not with scrum nor with agile nor with stand-ups. Rather, agile weaponized into an enforcement mechanism. Whips do not work in the long term.
The most productive teams, in my experience, are ones where either:
1. The work/team/problem is interesting enough that people want to come to work
OR
2. The pay is high enough such that people want to come to work, perform well, and earn that paycheck
OR
3. The mission is important enough that people want to come to work to fulfill the mission
I’ve been looked at as a madman or a heretic for calling daily stand ups a waste of time for years. I’d include this person’s “walk the board” idea as also a waste of time.
There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation.
A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates.
What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.
I'm fully aware that the standup could be done on slack or email with similar effectiveness most of the time.
However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone.
However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.
One person has a barking dog, the next a screaming child, the next a jackhammer. Several people have no headphones, so there’s brutal echo cancellation. Someone else is on Bluetooth, so there’s half a second latency. At least three are connected by potato.
Each word exchanged with a remote team is excruciating. I cannot imagine smalltalk or banter ever being a reasonable thing to do on Zoom.
It’s not really in the company’s DNA to be so paternalistic as “you must use wired headphones when connecting to a company Zoom meeting” although perhaps it would help. I’m sure everyone has headphones, but a lot of people choose not to use them or choose to use Bluetooth headphones that are great for music but wreck conversation. Only a few audio nerds have an inkling that this matters, let alone the boldness and clout to change others’ behavior.
I'm sorry, but your employer is incompetent if they are not working with their remote staff to make sure their equipment is functional and high quality. That doesn't mean they must decree that everyone use wired headphones. It means that they need to proactively make sure each staff member has a solution that actually works. I'm a manager and throughout COVID, whenever I noticed a team member with equipment issues I've worked with them to get it sorted out in a way that pleases them and helps everyone else communicate with them.
Being able to communicate is part of the job. If you can't do it for social or technical reasons, I'm going to work with you until you can.
We bought our whole team Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headsets. They cost around $250 each but are well worth the background noise cancellation and have excellent sound quality.
I looked around and couldn’t find the latency for these in the manufacturer’s spec sheet. Do you know what it is? Bluetooth does not bode well - usually hundreds of milliseconds, which is enough to interfere with conversation turn-taking.
I watch a group of twenty kindergarten students (5 and 6 year olds) every day who have figured out how to have effective remote meetings (turn taking, mute by default, etc) and most don't use headphones.
Bring up the issue with your team. Pick some norms to try, and iterate until it works. You got this.
That’s the argument. You need something very much like elementary school classroom management norms to make remote meetings sustainable with current technology. These norms are great for lectures but a serious drag on the kind of interactive, spontaneous conversation that is possible in person (or theoretically on higher quality, lower latency links).
Remote work partisans are reduced to arguing that this kind of conversation isn’t important to the work we do. Which is certainly possible! But does not match my intuition. Or my CEO’s intuition. Which is why we’re going back to the office. Maybe a remote competitor will beat us anyway. Time will tell.
I suspect that the remote dream is correct but early, and better telepresence technology will get us there eventually.
From your responses, it doesn't seem like your company is putting forth even the bare minimum effort to make it work.
I say this is a failure of management more than anything else. Tough pill to swallow if you have company pride, but a lot of people have figured this out many months ago. Doesn't mean it's perfect or a replacement for in-person meetings, but many teams are far ahead of what you guys seem to be doing (which is essentially nothing?).
I wouldn't go that far. The feeling I'm getting from their responses are of someone that appreciates the nuance and details of social interactions. As someone who lacks that detailed appreciation, this stood out for me.
It was like reading an audiophile describe what I previously thought were a perfectly serviceable set of headphones in less than stellar terms, while realizing they're probably right, but still cognizant that those short-comings did not affect my use of those headphones, in particular.
If audio quality is so critically important for communication, then yeah, maybe send your employees headsets and make it a requirement.
It shouldn't be a matter of audiophiles trying to convince their co-workers to change their habits. It's a management problem if hardware problems are preventing effective communication.
But if something is a disaster, like you describe, then they need to figure out a basic effective strategy for making it not be a disaster. Like headphones or turn off your mic if not expecting to talk. It's not exactly Rocket Science.
eh. I've been doing remote work for nearly 8 years now. It's always painful.
The problem isn't fancy headphones. That's just flippant. It's that mute/unmute and everything has latency. You can't just chime in like in person. It's awkward. "Sorry, what did you say James?" "Oh, I was just going to say..." Talking over each other is much more painful virtually than in person. Jokes land flat. No one laughs because they are on mute. Or possibly didn't hear it due to packet loss or other network/audio issues.
I like remote work and can't imagine going back to an office, but I don't go around pretending there aren't serious downsides.
Haha. Just last week I posted in the intranet about exactly this. The response was telling. Pandemic bad, so cut those poor parents with screaming kids some slack. You cannot understand me because the birds outside are too loud? Please tell me :). I think we should all just communicate. Blah blah.
Everyone has decent company-issued headsets. If the company policy is to waste time in meetings, so be it. I get paid either way.
I think smalltalk is fine until everyone has finally arrived though.
Part of this is because most meeting software (Webex, Zoom, etc) deprioritizes it.
The single most important 2 functions of any meeting software should be: (1) Am I currently muted? (2) Can I toggle my mute status?
This used to be solved by a devices called an LED, coupled with a button, back when we had physical phones. Thankfully, we've moved on to more effective solutions. /s
Zoom is usually acceptable with a single presenter and everyone else muted. The problem is that a true conversation requires several speakers unmuted and sometimes exchanging turns very quickly, with overlap.
I mean thats kind of sad that the team is so helpless to not be able to enable a very low bar for sound quality. How hard is it to buy a headset or a headphone and a microphone to everyone on company dime? At least on all of our teams people are very capable of saying "hey X can you freaking plug your microphone in, we can only hear your neighbors dog"
In the past year, I realized that any routine meeting, no matter how informal or "agile", needs predictability, even if it's just starting the "serious time" 5 minutes after the hour by stating the date and ending the call with a predictable sign-off. I feel like this duty should fall in the Project Manager, but some have balked at me that it sounds "stiff" to deliver, so I take this responsibility.
I used to stress about standups ("Will the next 15 minutes be focused on that outstanding Defect on my plate?"), but this added etiquette has helped things go smoothly (or at least I think so... and most colleagues tell me they agree)
>It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people.
Agreed generally.
With my current employer we do it every day.
5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.
Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.
Title was a little clickbaity but the solution and conclusions are how I have run standups and I can't see any other way than forms of walking the board, unblocking, & working to solutions in real time.
We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.
I like to type my standup update into Teams and read from it when I’m on the mic. I tried to get the rest of my team to try that so we could skip the meeting itself but it didn’t stick.
Author doesn't understand the unstated point of standups, even though he does allude to it when describing his thought process.
> I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job
In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up.
As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
Most children think that school isnt necessary. But from a social stand point, we don't need some ace students. We just need all students to be good enough to finish certain simple tasks.
So yeh, agile and standups are necessary social constructs, like taxes and insurance.
After reading the negative comments I feel like a misfit. We have two standups a day and it has been great so far. After a year into this social appocalipse I am just happy to see faces. We do not have any issues with severe noise or hardware though.
For the usual noise, like keyboard, Krisp [1] has been a pleasure to use (beware, shameless referal link plug)!
I like my daily stand ups. To be honest, I need it to get my day started, and I also care about what my teammates are up to.
Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).
The pandemic has made the morning stand ups valuable again!
Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total.
Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.
It seems like the title of this essay should be "My Daily Standup is a Waste of Time." To which the obvious answer is: ok, so change it. That (in my humble opinion) is the basic core feature of agile, that teams own their own processes.
So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."
The author circles back on himself though and notes that even though the 15 minute stand up itself is "a waste of time" the conversation it catalyzes amongst employees afterwards is of value.
My team runs a daily stand and it's the highlight of our day.
* It cuts about a bunch of other noise and meetings because we hash a lot out during daily stand.
* It a fun watecooler some days.
* We have engineering, product management, and design in stand up. Great opportunity to understand and build empathy for other specialities.
Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. And I love it.
In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end.
There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful.
If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.
Daily Standup is wrong if you are doing it wrongly. It shouldn't take more that few minutes for each person to do a briefing. Any other meetings with substantial scope are scheduled with later time.
It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language
The problem with this, and why there's such a wide variety of opinions, is that this is an individual skill.
Either you're good at keeping yourself to a short summary, or you're not.
If you're not, most teams lack the social bludgeon / care to push back on you, to the degree that should happen. Consequently, one person who sucks at summarizing ruins standup for everyone.
And whether or not 1+ of those people are on your team is a dice roll.
Standup is a wedge into the calendars of people with impossible calendars. If there is something to discuss with them the options are talk about it in standup, wait for the next weekly sync on the topic, or try to play calendar tetris to get an ad hoc meeting in the next couple of weeks. Talking about it in standup clearly wins here. So standups get long.
I have never really loved standups and have tried to tinker with them, but I've not found much that works any better, tbh. I've just sort of accepted the standup as an imperfect meeting that is probably still worth having. It does sort of keep everyone up to speed with what is going on, and it can surface blockers that might have lingered otherwise. Plus, without it, engineers, especially remote ones, might not really see or communicate with their team that much during the week if they are are otherwise head down. The other nice thing about standups is that they are short! I'm more okay with the shortcomings of standups because they don't take up much time at all.
Is it really 15 minutes? What about all the time lost from flow/focus, the hour before the meeting where you are unable to start new work, the hour after where you have to scramble to communicate/fix erroneous update info, etc.
What if the scheduled time is right in the middle of your best focus time of the day? You've lost most of your day. every day.
Not for me. And I go from client to client every few months. I did see horrible 1hr+ stand ups in the past, but I don’t think the author was exposed to that kind of horror
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadThis is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not ruthlessly kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.
Everything does. Teams don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams.
But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting.
> Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t!
I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the scaling is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.
What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time).
Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).
If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever).
If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager.
Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.
We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.
Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.
2) They can ask in slack. Encouraging people to reach out proactively is a skill and culture the team needs to develop.
Where I work we do one a week and it takes forever because people talk way too long. We often have two team members talking to each other about some niche thing nobody else cares about.
In my experience this just doesn't matter. If I'm working on a totally different work stream to somebody else, I'm not listening to them talk about that unless they're asking for help. It's not in my context, so I'm just not interested. Typically only 1 person at most will be working on something directly related to what I'm doing or something that directly pushes an important team goal, so for an average 6 person team I'm spending at least 2/3 of my time uninterested. That's why people complain about standups even if it's only 15m/day.
Why are you in the standup of people who you are not working with?
If the people on your "team" are working in totally different streams, it's not a team in any real sense.
I know that at my current job, the manager kind of tunes out. When he says what he's doing it's almost always: "I'm in meetings all day". Not saying "standup is bad" but it's a combination of things that aren't working.
The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.
I've been a deep proponent that standups should be done at lunchtime. Every place I've worked, I've tried to set the expectation that meetings are to be discouraged in the morning. Leave the morning aside for a chunk of deep work, use the standup to communicate where you're blocked and then segue directly into afternoon time where people can co-ordinate to unblock.
This was a hospital, so granted, there was a culture of coming in early. Except IT doesn't get paid doctor salaries, neither do they have the growth of residents/fellows, so why should they come in early?
Quite obviously the problem was not with scrum nor with agile nor with stand-ups. Rather, agile weaponized into an enforcement mechanism. Whips do not work in the long term.
The most productive teams, in my experience, are ones where either:
1. The work/team/problem is interesting enough that people want to come to work
OR
2. The pay is high enough such that people want to come to work, perform well, and earn that paycheck
OR
3. The mission is important enough that people want to come to work to fulfill the mission
There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation.
A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates.
What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.
However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone.
However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.
Each word exchanged with a remote team is excruciating. I cannot imagine smalltalk or banter ever being a reasonable thing to do on Zoom.
Being able to communicate is part of the job. If you can't do it for social or technical reasons, I'm going to work with you until you can.
I watch a group of twenty kindergarten students (5 and 6 year olds) every day who have figured out how to have effective remote meetings (turn taking, mute by default, etc) and most don't use headphones.
Bring up the issue with your team. Pick some norms to try, and iterate until it works. You got this.
Remote work partisans are reduced to arguing that this kind of conversation isn’t important to the work we do. Which is certainly possible! But does not match my intuition. Or my CEO’s intuition. Which is why we’re going back to the office. Maybe a remote competitor will beat us anyway. Time will tell.
I suspect that the remote dream is correct but early, and better telepresence technology will get us there eventually.
I say this is a failure of management more than anything else. Tough pill to swallow if you have company pride, but a lot of people have figured this out many months ago. Doesn't mean it's perfect or a replacement for in-person meetings, but many teams are far ahead of what you guys seem to be doing (which is essentially nothing?).
It was like reading an audiophile describe what I previously thought were a perfectly serviceable set of headphones in less than stellar terms, while realizing they're probably right, but still cognizant that those short-comings did not affect my use of those headphones, in particular.
Maybe the issue is your unwillingness to change habits and adjust to different situation.
It shouldn't be a matter of audiophiles trying to convince their co-workers to change their habits. It's a management problem if hardware problems are preventing effective communication.
Any headphones work, even crappy. Muting microphone works. Technical side of these meetings is really not difficult.
The problem isn't fancy headphones. That's just flippant. It's that mute/unmute and everything has latency. You can't just chime in like in person. It's awkward. "Sorry, what did you say James?" "Oh, I was just going to say..." Talking over each other is much more painful virtually than in person. Jokes land flat. No one laughs because they are on mute. Or possibly didn't hear it due to packet loss or other network/audio issues.
I like remote work and can't imagine going back to an office, but I don't go around pretending there aren't serious downsides.
Is it a modern SaaS issue?
It really depends on if everyone has a proper remote working setup or not. If your team is remote, that should be a top prority in your company.
Everyone has decent company-issued headsets. If the company policy is to waste time in meetings, so be it. I get paid either way.
I think smalltalk is fine until everyone has finally arrived though.
Part of this is because most meeting software (Webex, Zoom, etc) deprioritizes it.
The single most important 2 functions of any meeting software should be: (1) Am I currently muted? (2) Can I toggle my mute status?
This used to be solved by a devices called an LED, coupled with a button, back when we had physical phones. Thankfully, we've moved on to more effective solutions. /s
I believe that most of the time, background noise can be avoided. Using good microphones, separate rooms, RTX Voice, …
I used to stress about standups ("Will the next 15 minutes be focused on that outstanding Defect on my plate?"), but this added etiquette has helped things go smoothly (or at least I think so... and most colleagues tell me they agree)
Your rationale fails Kantianism.
> we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be.
That's not a standup.
Banter is great!
Now and again, pick a time that works for everyone or even not everyone.
But that's not a daily standup.
Agreed generally.
With my current employer we do it every day.
5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.
Maybe once a week or perhaps Monday and Friday.
Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.
We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.
https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-sc...
> I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job
In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up.
As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
Most children think that school isnt necessary. But from a social stand point, we don't need some ace students. We just need all students to be good enough to finish certain simple tasks.
So yeh, agile and standups are necessary social constructs, like taxes and insurance.
Unmotivated workers have existed forever. No methodology is a panacea.
For the usual noise, like keyboard, Krisp [1] has been a pleasure to use (beware, shameless referal link plug)!
[1] https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46
Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).
Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total.
Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.
So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."
No need to feel that "agile" is threatened.
The ceremony is part of the spell.
* It cuts about a bunch of other noise and meetings because we hash a lot out during daily stand. * It a fun watecooler some days. * We have engineering, product management, and design in stand up. Great opportunity to understand and build empathy for other specialities.
In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end.
There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful.
If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.
It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language
Either you're good at keeping yourself to a short summary, or you're not.
If you're not, most teams lack the social bludgeon / care to push back on you, to the degree that should happen. Consequently, one person who sucks at summarizing ruins standup for everyone.
And whether or not 1+ of those people are on your team is a dice roll.
E.g. https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...
Yes.
What if the scheduled time is right in the middle of your best focus time of the day? You've lost most of your day. every day.