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Comment by troels | Hacker News Reader

The first thing I do is work to gain enough political leverage so that I can manage my own time.

Sounds like a nasty place to be in if the first time you do is politically based.

It's a hard lesson, but everything in a company is driven by politics. Technical skills will only get you so far - maybe to the senior individual contributor position. Beyond that, your job will include communication, evangalization, and compromise.

I realise the way I put it may sound ominous, but it's for the good of everyone involved really.

Most organisations are shockingly ineffective. Micromanagement and lack of long term planning is abundant. I get hired because I'm good at writing software. This is not wrong, but I can add much more value if I deliver what is needed rather than what is asked. My goal is simply to be able to do that.

Could you share a longer description of how do you do it?

I'm afraid I'm not deliberate enough to have an actual playbook I go by. It's more like; this is my goal for the first month or two.

To what extent? Up to days? Weeks? Months?

Would you oppose daily standups?

"Daily standups" are morale killers.

Daily standups for remote workers are godsend. You'd think you could rely on people to communicate over chat or email, but the standup actually gets everyone talking and discussing.

Perhaps. But do they really need to be daily? Maybe 2 or 3x a week.

Having tried all three, every day built a lot more comradery than 2-3x per week. It also helps the remote workers feel more in touch with what's going on.

My current team does weekly, and two of us are remote. Our half hour meeting invariably runs over an hour, up to two hours. If we did it daily, we could keep it to the cap without really taking more time.

Indeed; I saw the same problem. Our team (4 out of 8 are remote) does daily meetings now, and it's actually pretty rare that we go over 10 minutes, let alone the scheduled 30.

Would you mind expanding on this? I'm interested how your experience with them differs from mine.

Generally people are incapable of communicating efficiently. A standup should cover: 1) what did you do yesterday 2) what are you doing today 3) do you have an issues?

This should take less than one minute per person. "Issues" should be resolved offline.

I once worked on a team where the "scrum master" would update Jira for each person's status. This resulted in a 30 second update turning into 2 or 3 minutes of detailed status.

I also worked on a 15 person team that had a giant stand up for the entire team. The resulted in a 30 to 45 minute stand up.

Sure, those are bad. That doesn't mean standups are bad though. One thing I found successful was to push for the standup to start 15 minutes before lunch. That gives ample time for the standup (2-3 minutes per person is longer than one should need, but my team likes to take notes during the standup, which while lightweight does delay things a bit) and a bit of followup, and deciding where to eat.

Also doing it just before lunch means everyone is in the office, you aren't breaking anyone out of flow unnecessarily, and everyone has a decent idea of what they will actually be working on today (since they are already in the context), so you don't have the issue of "hmm I don't remember what I was doing" or "uhhhh....oh right I'm planning to work on X" delaying things.

Can you give an example of how you’d do this?

Unnamed envelopes left on people's desks?

In the broadest sense, by gaining the trust of people and by showing initiative, rather than waiting for someone else to dictate what I should be working on.

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