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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

> Daily standup

I have never worked at a company where this actually goes right and could not be replaced by [insert ticketing system here]. We use Basecamp to do daily check-ins on a very high priority issue, if we have one, which we usually don't.

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Managers are the only people that like daily standups, so far as I can tell.

I've never figured out why you couldn't just do it over slack or equivalent. It's massively inefficient to get everyone to meet up in the morning.

Many places do it over Slack.

Managers need to justify their jobs. Reading off a slack report every day seems too simple and not worthy the salary they're paid. Compare that to a large meeting and live status updates, everyone stands, etc. Now that is some "serious work" happening.

Think of it from the point of view that managers have mangers they report to. When shit goes wrong they have to cover their asses. "So it's late. But did you check on their progress? Wait just over slack, no actual meetings? Ok, that obviously needs improvement".

It's not like it's a requirement that "managers" be at a standup meeting. Some of the best teams I've worked on have done daily standups without managers, and I dare to say most of us enjoyed them and found them productive!

Managers are often looking for ways to fill their calendar. Meetings, calls that could be a two-minute Slack exchange, et c. Some will hop into meetings like that if they can. They love the recurring ones, especially, bonus if they can apologize any time they have to skip it for something that actually, maybe, matters ("uh, yeah, we don't care if you come, OK, thanks for apologizing I guess?")

I have never been in a team where managers were present at the standup meeting. In fact, sometimes I have no idea who my "manager" even is. We've got a team, we've got stakeholders, we do the work. If a manager wants to join, that's fine, but he's not in charge of that meeting.

All this talk of standup meetings being primarily for managers is really weird. It's not for managers, and they have no reason to be present. It's for the team, to improve cooperation within the team. If the team has a better way to accomplish that, then they should use that.

We do it in person on MWF and slack TTh. I find slack updates to be both more effective and more efficient. It is obviously why it is more efficient; but it’s actually more effective because unfortunately I am one of those many people who simply drift off when in a meeting, and putting updates down in writing helps infinitely.

My current place does it on slack and has a standup. Oh, and everything is also logged in jira tickets. Makes little sense, in my opinion.

Why are your managers attending stand up? The Daily Scrum is the team's meeting. I swear Scrum is only fragile because no one reads the bloody book, or if they do they skim it or ignore it.

From the scrum guide... "The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team."

It is the team's event, if there are other people there it should be at their request. The guide goes on to say that.. "If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting."

If something is self-organized, there is no need for all this ceremony and bullshit that comes with capital-A Agile or Scrum. You just shoot the shit and talk about what you're doing.

Stand-ups and all the process attendant appears to be universally imposed from on high as a micromanagement technique, or because they were sold the idea as some kind of silver bullet by a talk or a snake-oil consultant.

I agree. Scrum is training wheels. If your team is mature and knows when to talk to each other then awesome, let the team do what works for them.

I feel like Scrum is for teams that suffer Stockholm syndrome from poor management and need to be taught how to human beings again.

I think Scrum provides a good baseline of working for new teams, but ultimately the team is free to shape it however it works best for them.

The main value of Scrum as an official process, is that it gives you a stick with which to chase toxic management out of the room. They're not sufficiently Scrum if they crash your meetings and demand to be in charge. Though in my experience, most companies that do Scrum have a management that keeps their distance unless invited.

I like standup on my current team. We're in an open office already, and just (physically!) stand up and say "I'm doing X today". Whole thing never goes over 2-3 minutes, and it's a friendly way to keep everyone up to date with the bigger picture.

It's similar at my office. We also use it to let the rest of the team know on occasions when you're blocked on something.

Why wait until a meeting to air that you are blocked, just sort it out when you become blocked. Where is the agility?

Exactly. I've always understood Scrum to be moderately successful at getting usable work out of terrible developers. Companies that use it should be avoided. If your employer introduces it it's time to quit.

Having dedicated communication time allows everyone to plan their dedicated focus or "deep work" time.

Generally if things can get unblocked as you go, that's better, and so this isn't particularly common. But sometimes you need your manager to go kick down a door for you and it's a handy time to let him know. Sometimes it's more benign and it's just easier to ask the group in person when everyone's together sipping their coffee together than it is to fire off a bunch of Slack messages or a group email or whatever.

And to be clear, when I say "blocked" I'm not talking like "I can't get any work done until X", I'm more talking like "this particular avenue needs X to happen before I can continue it, so I'm shelving it for now and doing something else until we can get it resolved." If you find yourself in the former case, something has already gone horribly wrong that should probably have been resolved days ago.

There are different ways something can be blocked. It's possible something is too complex to wrap your head around and you need an extra set of eyes and brains, or it might be blocked by outside impediments. It doesn't really matter, all obstacles need to be addressed and solved somehow.

This is a very important point that's often forgotten. You shouldn't wait for the appropriate meeting, but address it right away. The next stand up meeting is more of a backstop. It's the time to admit: "I guess I really am stuck here. Can anyone else look at this?"

Smoothly running teams don't need this, but many teams don't run that smoothly, and then it's better to address it at the stand up than not at all.

From what I understand, that's the end goal, with daily standup being a way to break the ice and get people who like to silo themselves off to actually ask instead of making no progress.

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