Hacker News Reader

I am not sure where you work, but I am surprised that with such a lackadaisical attitude towards attending a meeting, any work gets done at all.

If you have a meeting at 11 AM in the morning, people are supposed to show up on time. Do all your meetings run late? Or does only the standup get this treatment?

Sidenote: if somebody's late > 2 mins, they can join midway or miss the standup altogether, just as is the case with any other meeting.

At the standup, strictly speaking, we give each developer a minute, else the master calls time on them. In a team of 7, that makes the standup 7 minutes long. Typically, people tend to keep their updates short as a way to share what they did yesterday and what they will do today. For any conversations longer than a minute, we take it offline. I have been in companies where this is done via an official master, and other places where we just follow the process ourselves as adults and don't go overboard with updates.

You get back to your desk in < 10 mins, practically for us - it was more like 7-8ish minutes.

I am no standup aficionado, and can't claim to know where you've worked to know the reality virtually everywhere with such confidence, but anybody aware of the process will help you fix it. It appears you've not met such people.

We had fines for latecomers and people that talked too much at one of my last companies, like $2 or whatever that goes towards end of week beers or the Christmas party. People pulled into shape real quick.

I've worked in three fortune 500 companies (banking and finance). Several SV tech companies (in satellite offices - not in SV). Two pure startups. An engineering firm. I have never seen it be anything but a waste of time. And it always consumes significantly more time than the boosters claim it does.

And we can look at each other's anecdotes with suspicion. But there's a paradox that when someone says "Oh it's only 1 minute per person" then my natural response is "why isn't that a status line they set in IM or something?" at whatever asynchronous time it suits them best in their workday. How could it possibly be the best way to communicate 60 seconds of information by making everyone break their flow and gather together. And if it's more than 1 minute, and you're getting into actual meat, well then there are even bigger issues afoot like an inappropriately large and inefficient audience.

If you're just stating exactly what everyone can see in JIRA or whatever product you use, then it's a waste of time.

Aside: In probably half those teams there were remote developers who'd have to call in. Boy, that added a whole new fun level where everyone does nothing while technical issues are sorted.

EDIT: After the flurry of downvotes by these scrum disciples, I can't even reply to the disingenuous reply to this that makes some astonishing projections, and again tries to moral high ground.

If you are on a team that derives value from scrums, you are probably on a shitty team.

Debating with the zealots of scrum land (who, like the guy below, will repeatedly tell you -- in between their evangelizing -- that they're not really zealots) is a Schrödinger's Cat of productivity, where not only does it take no time and impose no flow penalty, completely and fully detached with every inkling of software development knowledge industrywide, it also conveys everything to everyone and is all powerful.

You didn't address the very basic issue: Why can't your team(s) have proper meetings? People coming on time, or at least not waiting for people to come on time? Why can't they maintain the discipline of not ratholing and going off into technical issues?

As I'm not necessarily in favor of standups, nor has anyone responding to you claimed to be, you're simply blowing hot air complaining about the purpose behind standups as opposed to addressing the comments they are making.

Not respecting people's time (frequently late for a meeting, meeting organizers making the on-time people wait for the off-time ones, etc), not being able to communicate well (cannot summarize, or meanders to off topic stuff) are all qualities of poor workers and poor teams. Such behavior is quite common, in my experience, but these are legitimate reasons not to work with them. Once you hit some minimal level of technical ability, the other skills matter at least as much in a team environment.

There are plenty of pointless rituals most people have to do in their life and work. Amongst those things, being able to handle a simple 15 minute meeting a day is one of the easiest. When people have trouble with it, it's a sign of a behavioral problem. Either some team members do not have the minimum bar of discipline/communication, or they are intentionally acting this way as some sort of civil disobedience against scrum. There are usually appropriate ways to make change - in most cases such behavior is just a sign of immaturity. Of course, there is such a thing as poor management, and sometimes such behavior is the only realistic way. But then again - it's still a good turn off for me not to work there.

As I said in another comment: Following scrum does a good job of exposing problems. And everything you describe sounds like problems in the team or the management.

> virtually everywhere

I've never experienced that in the 7-8 companies I've worked at over the past 10 years.

At the last 7-8 companies I've worked at, I've described exactly how it has been. I have been personally responsible for eliminating them at the last 4 orgs. They were an echo of shitty management.

And I'm hardly alone in observing this being a common pattern.

In the one job where standups went well, our limit was 15 minutes, for about 7 developers.

> Standups are initially scheduled for the start of the development day.

There's no reason it should. We did not have it at that time.

If it's at a reasonable time (e.g. after all people have normally begun work), then have a low tolerance policy for those who come late. Sometimes our standups were about 5 minutes, because some people were on vacation and some were late. When the late people showed up, it would be to an empty room. We didn't wait for them beyond 1 minute.

There's no way we would tolerate 30 minutes, let alone an hour. If it was going beyond 15 minutes, many/most of the developers would abruptly leave. You have to have an idea what you're going to say before you enter the room, and not go into technical details - the standup is not a problem solving session. People who randomly droned in giving their update would be "coached".

For a while we had the manager in the room. Then we booted him out - he was no longer welcome (it was an amicable parting :-) ).

> but what I just described is the standup reality virtually everywhere.

I can believe your experience is more common than mine, but I can also say I wouldn't work with such sloppiness in the team. In our case, our team wasn't the standout. This discipline was drilled in at the organizational level and had support from the leaders.

It may sound bad the way I write it, but it was actually very easy to cultivate this culture, and everyone liked it. This was literally the easiest and simplest part of the work day.

Edit: Lest this come off as a pro-scrum comment, I assure you it's not. There are things I don't like about Scrum, and am not sure I'd like to go back to working scrum-style. However, the complaints in the parent post are not problems with scrum, but cultural problems. As one of the pro-scrum people in my company put it: "I'm not really sure Scrum does a great job in improving productivity. But it's excellent at exposing existing problems in teams."

We had a client doing an "agile transformation" corporate style, ie they pulled the entire floor in to talk about everything for an hour every morning. Imagine 30-40 people, all from different teams, all huddled around a whiteboard talking about their work. It was a shitshow.

I think we need to just kick all the suits out of the engineering process, because they insist on stupid shit like that and never address the core issues.

If you don't have it at the beginning of the day, then you're putting a hard gate on flow. This phenomena is well known, and the disruption of having a scheduled event mid-workday is significantly larger than the time of the disruption. Everyone is going to fade out of their work long before and won't re-engage for sometimes after.

As to scrum exposing cultural problems, maybe that's true, but in some cases scrums are a clumsy attempt to solve cultural problems (as I said in another comment, agile was the failure mode for orgs stumbling with "waterfall").

Terrible progress visibility? Let's have a scrum! No team member communications? Scrum will fix it! People sandbagging or not doing their work? Don't worry, Scrum will save the day!

On good teams we all know what each other is working on. We're all aware of the codebase. We see the commits. We are available when someone has a problem (and people know who is a good person to asynchronously ping when they have a problem in specific domains), and are open to the reality that everyone is imperfect and doesn't know everything. On good teams scrums serve absolutely no value, and are a redundant waste of time. On bad teams they are an attempt to bandage over all of the lack of those factors.

Talking about the beginning of the day assumes everyone starts at the same time. Having it just before most people go to lunch can be less disruptive. I agree scrum isn't helpful usually though.

This is exactly my experience with scrum too.