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You don’t need standups

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Re: You don’t need standups

#171

Post by tnolet »

some_account wrote: post #82
chomp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"working on bugs" is not a great update, it's opaque and doesn't help your team or your leader get a picture of what you're struggling with. "I tried this and this and measured this latency from the application and suspect it's a race condition, I checked this code and feel like I'm on the right track, and if someone wants to take a second set of eyes on my bug I would appreciate it" is a much much better update. Sta…

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

If you don’t want to explain or share, I don’t want you on my team.

Re: You don’t need standups

#172

Post by UnpossibleJim »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #91
some_account wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

1. Agile is not personally great for programmers. 2. Agile is good for managers. 3. Managers run the business and make sure it exists. 4. Programmers need the business in order to have a job. 5. Agile is therefore good for the business, 6. And therefore Agile is good for Programmers, though not personally.

My, how very Douglas Adams of you =)

Re: You don’t need standups

#173

Post by majormajor »

taeric wrote: post #133
majormajor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have other issues with standups, but if your concern is "I don't look productive and I don't want to talk about what I'm doing" not having standups isn't going to make you look more productive. If you're working heads-down for weeks or months without standups, people are still likely to wonder if you're stuck/ineffective/blocked if you're not communicating in more detail than "it's still in progress."

I think the desire is more to have goals and work towards those. If you don't have daily goals, then having a daily standup is going to be pointless. That is, if I am working for weeks or months without making visible progress, but I have successfully delivered the last X things on time, why are you worried about what I look like? So, yes, people should grow into longer timelines that they can appear to be slacking o…

> That is, if I am working for weeks or months without making visible progress, but I have successfully delivered the last X things on time, why are you worried about what I look like?

I'm not worried what the OP looks like, or generally what I look like for that matter, but they were worried what they look like. I just dispute the claim that standups are the root of their anxiety about that.

Re: You don’t need standups

#174

Post by munk-a »

ahelwer wrote: post #69
chomp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"working on bugs" is not a great update, it's opaque and doesn't help your team or your leader get a picture of what you're struggling with. "I tried this and this and measured this latency from the application and suspect it's a race condition, I checked this code and feel like I'm on the right track, and if someone wants to take a second set of eyes on my bug I would appreciate it" is a much much better update. Sta…

That's useless because everybody else tunes out. Nobody cares what debugging methods you tried on some project they've never touched. If you need help you can just ask somebody.

I think your team is too big then. Don't have company wide standups, have a standup per team and possibly role. If you're working on a web stack have a standup where the backend devs talk, one for the DBAs (if that's a thing you have) one for the front-end people... If there's someone in a product manager role they might want to attend all the meetings but likely not.

If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours.

Also a standup with 40 or 50 people is just plain silly. I worked in gaming a few years ago and our standup was a full game team, the artists, designers, QA, server-devs, client-devs and our stats guy all spoke. It was a bit interesting to see what artists were doing but totally unnecessary for me to hear anything anyone said except the two other people I worked with, and we communicated well outside of the standup anyways.

Re: You don’t need standups

#175

Post by majormajor »

some_account wrote: post #82
chomp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"working on bugs" is not a great update, it's opaque and doesn't help your team or your leader get a picture of what you're struggling with. "I tried this and this and measured this latency from the application and suspect it's a race condition, I checked this code and feel like I'm on the right track, and if someone wants to take a second set of eyes on my bug I would appreciate it" is a much much better update. Sta…

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

Do you care how useful the thing you're building is for the people you're building it for? How well it fits in with what other people on the team are building? If any of your teammates have ideas that could be helpful, or have learned things that might be of interest to you?

I've often been the guy who comes in to help untangle a messy code base, and an entrenched "just let me build shit" attitude appears to be a chief predictor of unextensible and inflexible design. Even when not in a managerial role, I don't like to see people working in silos because experience has taught me that I'm gonna have to deal - as a fellow dev - with repercussions of poor design sooner or later.

Re: You don’t need standups

#177

Post by tw1010 »

Why the need for all this formalization of process. We're all adults. As long as we hire people who can communicate well, shouldn't just having conversations here and there when the need feels natural be enough?

Re: You don’t need standups

#178

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

People should try to think more long term about standups.

Yes, maybe you could remove them and maintain the same productivity for a year, so they appear wasteful.

But removing accountability, can lead you occasional bad decisions, which lead to more frequent bad decisions and then 5 years later you have some REALLY bad habits in place. Standups feel like babysitting, and they are not necessary if everyone is just ready to work, but I think the accountability from publicly stating goals for the day has a subconscious effect that can lead to people getting into a great routine.

I myself, never needed standups to prevent goofing off. But they really helped me get a handle on how bad I was at predicting the results of my work for a day. My optimize makes me perpetually underestimate the time it will take to do a task by a factor of 3-4. With practice in standups I've got that down to more like 2x.

Re: You don’t need standups

#179

Post by mohdmasd »

ben509 wrote: post #98
some_account wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

I'm not sure how much that micro-managing aspect is peculiar to agile and how much is just inherent to working on a team. > It forces developers to share every mistake they make, it makes them share if they are thinking incorrectly about something, it makes them easily replaceable. That's absolutely the point of a team. Contrary to popular belief, a team is not a meritocracy[1], it's a mediocracy . The beautiful thin…

Unfortunately, we do not live in Utopia. In reality, politics, competition and self-interest play huge role in the workplace. In some companies, admitting a mistake or showing vulnerability in front of the wrong crowd can be very damaging for your career there.

Re: You don’t need standups

#180

Post by blubb-fish »

now we don't need stand-ups. couple of months ago they were the best since sliced bread. in job interviews i still get asked every time how often we do stand-ups - right after whether my team is lean, agile or design thinking. good lord have mercy ...
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