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Comment by minton | Hacker News Reader

At my company we have weekly all-hands meetings. It lasts about an hour as ~15 people take turns giving updates. I’d say 95% of this meeting is just verbalizing the kanban board. I’d say 80-90% of the meeting isn’t applicable to most attendees except the owner who needs to be aware of everything.

I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.

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I'm not a software engineer, but isn't the idea that if everyone is sharing their progress and challenges then others who had similar challenges on previous projects can voice their suggestions?

It seems like "mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up" is why the meetings seem so pointless, because you aren't listening to other team's challenges and providing input?

Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged, so I don't want to project that onto you, but I always though that was the _idea_ of the daily/weekly standup?

The overall argument against it is that all the information is already reflected in the ticketing system and if anything had to be resolved you can do it 1:1 rather than wasting everyone’s time.

That sort of assumes that you know who to talk to.

I was thinking more about the case of "here's how we are doing it" and someone you wouldn't have thought to ask saying "oh, we tried to do that at [x] last year and it didn't work because [a], [b], [c]".

But then to ensure that that 'right' unknown person is at the meeting you basically have to invite the whole company. Much better to send out a quick "hey, anybody done any work with Monte Carlo simulations before" on the company mailing list.

Maybe twice a year you can have a big 'all-hands' all day work shop where you go through and discuss major long term issues.

isn't the idea that if everyone is sharing their progress and challenges then others who had similar challenges on previous projects can voice their suggestions?

At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.

And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.

Is your employer a software consulting company with teams working for different clients? I could see how in that kind of meeting there would be very little overlap in situational awareness of what each client's requirements are. I was imaging a team working on different parts of the same large product, where it may not be feasible to identify everyone who might be able to provide constructive criticism ahead of time to get them into one of those ad-hoc meetings.

Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.

I was in 50-person all-hands meetings for a product at Google, and there wasn’t the time or the context for anyone to give feedback on anything. At the time I felt bad about my inability to pay attention — without my laptop out I would barely have been able to stay in the room due to boredom — but the meeting really was a poor format and a waste of people’s precious time, attention, and energy, even at an hour a week.

Yep, "oh, we had a problem, but then we fixed it" accounts for about 50% of all the "content" in our daily standups. The solution is almost invariably (a) nontechnical, (b) wholly inapplicable outside some tiny domain, (c) trivial, or (d) so complicated as specific that the speaker rightly elides it from their report, making that 50% of time a total waste for everyone in the room.

The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.

>Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged

Before I moved and started working remotely for my company, I was in one of these meetings where a coworker who took over one of my projects from ~2012 was commenting on what he was doing, and I offered a suggestion in an attempt to help. My immediate supervisor said "That's not important". This is a guy hired all of 4 months before me -- we're #2 and #3 in terms of tenure among developers, and until about 3 years ago both reported directly to the owner of the company.

I then noted that I believed it was important, and I knew that because I had direct experience with the project where my supervisor did not (because I wrote it), and my supervisor asked me "well then why don't fix it instead of [the newer dev working on the project]?" in a dismissive tone. This is a project I hadn't worked on in half a decade and was no longer in my job description.

Thankfully the owner of the company was in the meeting as well, noticed the tension, and talked to both of us separately about it after the meeting (agreeing profusely with me that I was adding a valuable contribution and that my supervisor was out of line to snip at me). The supervisor later apologized to me directly. That was not the first time he directed uninvited hostility toward me, but it was the most public instance of it, and was the last before I started working remotely. Things are much better now, I imagine because the perceived threat of me trying to usurp his managerial role is now 1000 miles away from the office.

So yeah...sometimes these meetings aren't so great, haha.

The problem is that hands-on meetings are supposed to be short, so you'll have time to say "we're having this issue", but not enough time to detail all of the different approaches you've already tried, so you get a lot of less-than-helpful advice from people who don't have enough information to go on but think they do.

That's fair. I suppose the length of the meeting is tough to get right to make it work like that. Too long and you end up wasting time, too short and, like you said, not enough time to get real constructive feedback.

To be asked to pay detailed attention to everyone's diverse problems for a half an hour every single day is an incredible energy drain. I need to focus on my work. If I have to build 20 different mental models in my head once a day to make sense of 20 different people's problems, I can't do that.

The tried-and-true method of, "oh, ask so-and-so, they worked in that area" is strictly better, because no matter how many times you're redirected, you're bothering fewer people than at the daily standup.

In practice it's impossible to help someone with a software development problem in a standup. To understand their problem you almost always need a level of detail that's inappropriate for a standup.

You don't want to force 50 people to sit around waiting while two engineers discuss a problem for 5 minutes. Instead the meeting organizer should say, Sarah, you know about this area, can you connect with Justin after the meeting and see if you can help. Anyone else who has ideas is welcome to join.

Standups only work when people give a quick status update, their plans for the day, and call out any blockers. If it devolves into discussions of how to solve any problem it's no longer a standup. And anyone who schedules standups with more than a single focused team (preferably no more than a dozen people) just doesn't understand what a standup is for.

I just wear wireless headphones and tidy my room during big meetings. It's still easy to pay attention, and takes care of feeling restless during irrelevant parts.

In a sense, being in the conference room is asking people to be (ostensibly) 100% on during the whole meeting, which seems like a huge mental drain.

I love this idea but the four remote people are on a slack video call and projected to the big screen in the conference room. I can't imagine the response if I was seen walking around in the background cleaning stuff up.

Say your connection is rough and the quality is cutting so you’re just going to audio only?

Most of the people on my team have uninstalled their built in webcams for this exact reason.

Lucky. We do that every day.

(20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)

If people aren't getting value from a meeting, they should stop doing it. Or reflect on why they were doing it in the first place. Talk about it at retrospective! Or sooner! You do have those, right? :-)

I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer.

That's how much I believe in it.

Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..

Maybe you think there is no value, but don't realize the information you or others glean from the meeting pays off. Perhaps think about what value could come from these meetings and then determine whether you are getting it.

The psychological toll of being held to recount and justify my actions of the past 24 hours, every single day, is wholly demoralizing.

I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do?

We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.

In the past few years I have experienced a full spectrum of meeting philosophies. At one point I was required to attend 25 standups per week! I cried mercy and got it reduced to 15. It was still miserable. Mostly I reported that I accomplished nothing since yesterday, and if you really need something done today, see me after 5PM. My current meeting schedule is as follows: a) once a week, 30 minutes with my manager, b) once every two weeks, one hour with my team, c) once a month, 30 minutes with the whole company. Somehow work still gets done without all the meetings. Or wait... work gets done when people are not in meetings! What might be surprising is that in the environment with fewer meetings there is also less chaos, less confusion, fewer mistakes, fewer disasters, and less stress.

I always like to total the hours of every meeting with actual cost. It’s obscene when there’s no value.

We do this every morning at 8am sharp for 30 minutes. I finally just decided not to attend as the inertia from just sitting there was killing my morning productivity.

Exactly, if people start multitasking at meetings giving the meeting their full attention is probably not a good way to spend their time. Trust people to assign their attention as they please and measure results, not hours.

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