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Comment by lovedev | Hacker News Reader

I think the point of this article was not to bash standups but to give an example of empowering your team to make decisions.

Be bold. Make change. Improve the way you work.

Was cancelling standups going to far? Maybe. But that's not the point.

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It's pretty hilarious to me that not having standups is even in the same sentence as "going too far".

I don't mean to pick on you with this comment - you are accurately describing the state of the industry.

My first job was at a very large company where every team was required to have a Product Owner, Scrum Master, Business Analyst, QA and then however many devs were on that project.

Our product owner broke her foot one weekend and wanted to sit during Monday's standup meeting. Our scrum master demanded she either stand or leave the meeting. Arguing ensued, loudly.

I bring this up only to say, our industry, while being very progressing in some areas, also happens to be extremely dogmatic about some ridiculous concepts without really understanding them.

Your scrum master is a tool and a liability and if they worked for me this would result in a documented disciplinary action.

Don’t tolerate power-trippers.

Ultimately his contract wasn't renewed because everyone had generally had enough of his schtick.

Wrt that meeting though, several of the devs (including me) got pretty loud and ultimately our PO sat and our Scrum Master pouted.

ooh yeah, the industry is dogmatic about ill thought about so called agile principles. Nobody dare to question them it baffles me.

I've been consulting for over 10 years, how come I've never encountered a useful scrum master if they do exist

Well for one, consultants are rarely brought in to working, well-functioning companies.

Also, scrum (as in the dot-org) doesn’t do a great job of teaching management how to measure the performance of their team so it’s very easy to be bad at anything for a long time and never know it if you’re also bad at management.

I find anything (including scrum) works pretty well if you send your management team out for training too, and don’t let them piss around with soft metrics.

Hm, is this illegal in the US? From a brief search, I think that since the 2008 amendments to the ADA, temporary but severe injuries give you protection under the ADA, and being able to sit during standup seems like an entirely reasonable accomodation.

Sometimes someone can also just be reasonable without it being legally mandated, methinks

Yes, that's obviously the preferred option, but in this particular case it seems like it didn't happen.

The devs were a part of the loud arguing, and eventually the SM just kinda pouted while the PO sat and we all just had a normal standup meeting.

Scrum master could be in a lot of trouble to demand this from a temporary disabled (broken foot) person

that's exactly my reluctance to question Agile processes, because people will think I am pushing it too far.

I remember in 1999 when i had my first programming job while i was in the Uni. It was simple, i had a part of the software to built, i estimated how much time it was going to take and i built it. No stupid time consuming ceremonies.

I guess that the new "gamerization" has been partly caused by millennials and other contemporary generations need for constant recognition.

Everyone is great at pointing out problems. But people are rarely good at coming up with (good) solutions without a level of overall understanding and context.

I think good management takes employee input and uses it to influence decisions while also considering the needs of the entire group of employees and the company.

But either way, I’m not bashing you, just disagreeing :) No harm in trying things and experimenting to find what works for you.

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