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Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

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Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#141

Post by nitely »

vvanders wrote: post #137
machinelearning wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME standups are not even effective in unblocking most people. Why would someone want to admit they're blocked by something in front of everyone? Someone else will inevitably proclaim that they have the solution, however simple it may be, and make the asker look stupid while elevating themselves. Most people know who to ask to be unblocked or can ask their manager. 1:1s are the time to sync with regards to status on…

I really hope you aren't using 1:1s as status meetings, that's the worst possible use of your time[1]. As a developer I've found stand-ups to be useful to know what's going on within the team and if feature A with collide with feature B. [1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-t...

Does your team communicate outside of the stand-up?

I usually know what everyone is working on (because of ticket assignments, code reviews, some occasional side meeting, etc), as I usually work with teams of 5 (or less) people.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#142

Post by philipov »

machinelearning wrote: post #133
adenverd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering manager here. I think a lot of people miss the point of standup, or abuse it to somehow micromanage engineers. Standup is for the team, not the manager or PM. It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you. Other times, your manager is better positioned to get you what you need than…

IME standups are not even effective in unblocking most people. Why would someone want to admit they're blocked by something in front of everyone? Someone else will inevitably proclaim that they have the solution, however simple it may be, and make the asker look stupid while elevating themselves. Most people know who to ask to be unblocked or can ask their manager. 1:1s are the time to sync with regards to status on…

yeah, for a lot of people, being blocked isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#143

Post by mobjack »

nemothekid wrote: post #136
adenverd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering manager here. I think a lot of people miss the point of standup, or abuse it to somehow micromanage engineers. Standup is for the team, not the manager or PM. It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you. Other times, your manager is better positioned to get you what you need than…

> It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you To preface, I'm assuming you are talking about daily standups. How often do you see this actually working for you? In most cases, if someone is blocked, then they would communicate that, either to a manager or a coworker. If someone is blocked for…

Blockers are not always obvious.

People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else.

Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track.

Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster.

With just weekly meetings, these issues could go unresolved for days.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#144

Post by nitely »

mobjack wrote: post #143
nemothekid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you To preface, I'm assuming you are talking about daily standups. How often do you see this actually working for you? In most cases, if someone is blocked, then they would communicate that, either to a manager or a coworker. If someone is blocked for…

Blockers are not always obvious. People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else. Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track. Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster. With just weekly meetings, thes…

This assumes people don't communicate when they get blocked, but wait 24hs to announce it in a meeting.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#145

Post by darkmighty »

svantana wrote: post #82
wccrawford wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have definitely had my battles with people who want to poke holes in my plans, rather than support me. They think they're helping me, but they aren't. They're just killing my enthusiasm. If I'd been left to try, I'd have worked hard at it, had an experienced, learned some things, and maybe even accomplished it. Instead, they did their best to stop me. I now snap at people who do this to me. I no longer let them thr…

That's too bad. I invite criticism of my projects, because I want to make sure I'm not fooling myself. Other people's perspective can shine new light on a problem and force you to reconsider the idea, hopefully leading to improved design.

It's very delicate because from personal experience most projects are likely to fail, and most projects start way over ambitious (almost a natural bias). What takes lots of experience to learn is also that that's not necessarily a problem. It's ok to fail sometimes, and it's ok to be overambitious at the beginning and scale back to achievability, most of the time.

Initial ambitions largely set an upper bound on whole project possibilities -- you generally want upper bounds set pretty high. All projects have unknown unknowns that will reveal themselves, and modeling this kind of meta-knowledge is difficult and perhaps not worth the effort.

So to offer a general counterpoint, it may be a valuable skill to listen to constructive advice including ones poking holes in your ideas. The key is to persevere in the face of problems, as long as they're not obviously intransposable (tip: don't go against laws of physics, e.g. thermodynamics or newton's laws). If those hurdles would come up sometime, it might be better to devote more time early on to overcome them.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#146

Post by nitely »

fhbdukfrh wrote: post #128
alexis_fr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standups to me are just a way to ensure everyone is awake. And able to answer a simple question and make a sentence. I don’t exactly care about the contents, except from time to time when it makes us notice that a colleague is on a wrong track.

They have real value in building team: We are all standing around in a circle; our alignment means something. They're also one of my easiest ways to include remote workers- they always go first. (the phone is part of the circle)

Well said. Trust falls bring great value as well.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#147

Post by ansible »

nitely wrote: post #144
mobjack wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockers are not always obvious. People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else. Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track. Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster. With just weekly meetings, thes…

This assumes people don't communicate when they get blocked, but wait 24hs to announce it in a meeting.

Yes, exactly. A lot of people don't do a good job communicating this sort of thing. It helps to have someone else ask you what's blocking your progress.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#148

Post by erobbins »

mrcoder111 wrote: post #70

I really hate this article. Pretty much everything I've ever accomplished in my life is because I speak it into existence and hold myself accountable. But then again, if you're the type of person who makes things happen, you don't rely on crappy psychology studies to tell you how to live your life.

I'm not the type of person who makes things happen. Especially if I can now fail in a public and embarrassing way having told people my plans.

If I keep things to myself I end up generally doing better.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#149

Post by kelnos »

adenverd wrote: post #126
t34543 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I refuse to do stand ups

Engineering manager here. I think a lot of people miss the point of standup, or abuse it to somehow micromanage engineers. Standup is for the team, not the manager or PM. It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you. Other times, your manager is better positioned to get you what you need than…

> the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?"

If you've waited until the next standup to raise a blocker, you've potentially wasted as much as a day of your time.

If I have a blocker that I need unblocked to get my work done, I'll immediately get in touch with the person or team that can help unblock me. If I don't know who that is, or need help coordinating, I'll go to my manager, again, immediately.

> The status update portion exists so that your manager doesn't randomize you in the middle of the day asking about that thing you're working on.

That's what the issue tracker / scrum board / kanban board / whatever you use is for. Certainly some people and teams are better and worse about keeping it up to date, but a solid incentive of "if you keep this up to date we won't have to do standups" will motivate most people. As much as I hate Jira, if you eliminate a meeting from my day that I consider a waste of time, in exchange for keeping it updated, I will definitely keep it updated.

For special cases, the manager can asynchronously ask their report on Slack (or whatever) what they're up to, and the report can answer when they're at a natural break point.

This whole "we all need to be face to face in the same place at the same time" nonsense needs to go. People are remote, people are in different time zones, and they still need to be able to participate naturally and asynchronously.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#150

Post by kelnos »

mobjack wrote: post #143
nemothekid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It serves multiple functions, but the most important is the last bit: "are you blocked by something?". Most of the time, someone else on the team knows how to unblock you To preface, I'm assuming you are talking about daily standups. How often do you see this actually working for you? In most cases, if someone is blocked, then they would communicate that, either to a manager or a coworker. If someone is blocked for…

Blockers are not always obvious. People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else. Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track. Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster. With just weekly meetings, thes…

> Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track.

Not in my experience. Most developers I work with will raise issues in Slack as they come up. That's part of what being an owner of your tasks is about: communicating issues early and often.

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