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Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#21

Post by punchingw0rms »

Yes, when I haven't done much. Like a lot of people my productivity fluctuates throughout any given week.

2 stand ups per day is brutal! I would fight against that for the simple reason that it is an interruption to my and others work flow and do you really need to know what has happened twice within 8 hours? This just sounds like micromanagement.

Your stand up sounds whack - it's supposed to be just the team, for the team. Then you can use jargon that the team will understand. Directors and Execs would have a hard time following. Surely this is why we have transparent scrum/kanban boards for these people.

Your work's ways of working really riles me up, man!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#24

Post by ojkelly »

Two 30m standups in a day aren’t really standups. That’s starting your day with an hour of meetings. Which is probably partly responsible for killing the momentum you need to get through your work.

You’re anxiety is likely because you don’t feel safe sharing the amount of progress you did or didn’t make. Unless your working on the most basic boring stuff, you’re not going to have the same rate of progress—at least not in a manner that is easily digestible in a standup.

I’ve seen this play out in so many teams over the last decade. A standup shouldn’t be a daily grilling on progress by higher-ups. If you’re team is full of adults and professionals, you don’t need hurrying along.

IMHO A standup over 15m means the team is too big, or you’re all sharing too much.

The most useful thing I’ve found standups do is surface blockers to the whole team, as there is often someone who can help that you might not expect.

If you need to go deep into anything, do it after the standup so others can leave.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#26

Post by misterflibble »

virtueman wrote: post #7

This is the point of standup. Give the worker anxiety and pressure him to do more work. During my years and years of standup, I never learned anything useful and I doubt anyone else did either. The good news is that management generally doesn't understand the low level details, so you can project confidence while using technical jargon to make them think you are far more productive than is the reality. It's really ju…

I can't vote this high enough, this is exactly my thinking

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#27

Post by misterflibble »

faangiq wrote: post #23

Natural, since this agile crap is a whip for the code monkey slaves. Enjoy the absurdity.

Especially in enterprise teams, it is a daily interrogation just for management to keep tabs on your performance. I'm fine meeting and giving status updates every few days, but honestly not every single day

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#28

Post by strikelaserclaw »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #12

A previous job was like this, and I am a very uneven worker - sometimes I do a lot when I'm in the flow, sometimes I hardly do anything (despite wanting to). On those days when I hadn't done much, my manager, the product manager, and the project manager, would all imply pretty strongly I hadn't done enough at the next standup, and ask why I hadn't done more, and so on. Pretty stressful. What I started to do was, when…

this is the way, surprised others don't use this. From working in the corporate world, 60% of the job is just keeping a certain kind of appearance up.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?

#29

Post by roflyear »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #28
adrianmsmith wrote: post #12

A previous job was like this, and I am a very uneven worker - sometimes I do a lot when I'm in the flow, sometimes I hardly do anything (despite wanting to). On those days when I hadn't done much, my manager, the product manager, and the project manager, would all imply pretty strongly I hadn't done enough at the next standup, and ask why I hadn't done more, and so on. Pretty stressful. What I started to do was, when…

this is the way, surprised others don't use this. From working in the corporate world, 60% of the job is just keeping a certain kind of appearance up.

Yeah. But man what a shit way to get by in life.
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