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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why the standup cant just be an asynchronous chat room. The information is easier to review and follow up on, and people can check in when its not a disruption. My gut feeling is, at most places, 90% of the purpose is for the pm to feel like the captain of the ship, and 10% is an attendance check.

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We've experimented with both in-person and purely digital standups through Slack. The latter was exceptionally convenient, but we found it almost never led to any meaningful conversations. It became 100% a status report. In-person standups for us, on the other hand, follow the template of a status report, but every once in a while lead to a really important exchange happening between a few team members that really unblocks someone or course corrects something early on. So we've went back to only in-person standups.

Yes! This is the important interaction not the update itself but the chance to stop a problem or course correct early.

I guess I'm weird because I'm able to have a conversation with someone without standing up in a circle playing whatever games the specific manager wants to play.

That sounds nice, although a lot of places those conversations immediately got killed because of "cross-talk". Sigh.

I once convinced a team to try going without standups, but instead put it in slack for a week. At the end I was the only one who thought it was a success. I had one guy tell me he didn't like it because he didn't read it if it was in slack.

My jaw kind of hit the floor. That was my point all along about standups, the information being conveyed isn't actually needed for your job.

Agree, status updates are a waste of time on Slack or in a real meeting. Nobody actually cares about others statuses. If there is a real blocker a competent worker should resolve it on their own without waiting until the next status meeting imo.

or pull in the people necessary to resolve it.

I don't really understand why people believe the only way communication happens is by standing up every day to talk about their feelings.

I did a project this time last year where that's exactly how it was handled - there was a Slack bot to which you sent a daily update. Everyone in the team could view everyone else's status so was easy to see what was going on.

How did people feel about it?

Personally I felt it was a little silly because the team manager didn't seem to review it ever and each team member was working on completely different systems. When there was a need for actual communication/coordination, we used slack or set up meetings.

That stated - I liked it better than when I was in teams where there was the same dynamic (IE: very little necessary coordination across the team) but we met daily (or in some cases, twice daily shudder).

My favorite is when the PM uses Slack to cancel the daily standup on a daily basis because their schedule didn't allow for it, yet have no problem with the standup interrupting your day

I’m a PM and (perhaps not like the others, but) in my mind the standup is not just the status update, the important bit is to convey any roadblocks or problems you’re facing and the team or the PM can assist to resolve them. I think though, that many teams out there probably do not feel comfortable enough to talk about such things and the standup merely becomes the status update bore.

Team members shouldn't be waiting for a meeting to communicate roadblocks or problems. They can send out a message to the other team members at any time.

This installs a ridiculous mindset, what if a dev hits a block at 11am and your ceremony is at 10am?

If someone has hit a blocker or other problem, surely they would find the help they need to resolve it at the time rather than waiting for a standup, right?

Slack standups were great for us, for a while. When there were ~10 people posting just a few lines, it was easy enough for everyone to skim through it daily. I didn't notice a lack of productive conversation - people made good use of threaded conversation and @-mentions. When the channel started to grow, unfortunately the system broke down. It's onerous for everyone to skim that much material first thing in the morning.

Yeah, basically what "StatusHero" does -- I like it, although now we just have "StatusHero" updates + a regular stand up...

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