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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Any process is worthless if it doesn't exist to solve a problem, doesn't solve the problem, or targets an imaginary problem. It could be better if it solves the problem inoptimally.

What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time).

Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).

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Everyone learns everyone's status all at once. It's n^2 for everyone to send their status to the whole team though. Standup should be under a minute per person. Leverage the power of sound waves.

Where I work we do one a week and it takes forever because people talk way too long. We often have two team members talking to each other about some niche thing nobody else cares about.

Well, yes, I would suppose it's n^2, but with a very small constant as most e-mail clients run on computers.

> Everyone learns everyone's status all at once.

In my experience this just doesn't matter. If I'm working on a totally different work stream to somebody else, I'm not listening to them talk about that unless they're asking for help. It's not in my context, so I'm just not interested. Typically only 1 person at most will be working on something directly related to what I'm doing or something that directly pushes an important team goal, so for an average 6 person team I'm spending at least 2/3 of my time uninterested. That's why people complain about standups even if it's only 15m/day.

> If I'm working on a totally different work stream to somebody else

Why are you in the standup of people who you are not working with?

If the people on your "team" are working in totally different streams, it's not a team in any real sense.

because in a complex piece of software you can be working on totally different details within the same bigger picture. I might be working on a bug in authentication while you tweak the order processing logic, but we're both working on an ecommerce site.

Ok, but does it make you a part of the same team?

yes.

And you don't ever have experience working on stuff in the past that others are working now to where you can provide input or notice they are running into a problem you ran into in the past?

do I have experience communicating with present and future team members? yes. how is that relevant?

Because even if you aren't working on the same area of code right now, previous experience in the area can potentially help your teammates.

It also can solve the problem of helping team members know what each other are doing. If standup were only what this essay describes, it would be a waste of time, but it's a lot more than that. It's also a chance for team members to describe problems they're having and benefit from the collective experience. I'm a big fan of morning standup, but I suppose there are good standups and bad standups.

I'm not sure why that would have to be a process though. When I worked in a bigger team, if anyone needed help they'd just ask a deskmate if they didn't look too deep in flow, or drop a message in slack.

You can use Slack. If you have a problem, raise it in the relevant channel or reach out to the relevant expert. There's no reason to make that something that has to be done once a day.

If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever).

If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager.

Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.

We have a standup channel and its very easy to track and timezone insensitive. "Here's what I did, this didn't get done, blocked on this, planning to tackle Y next".

We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.

In my experience, there’s rarely a reason why an entire team needs to know what everyone is doing. Tasks are decomposed. You may need an update from a single person, but you never need an update from eight people.

Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.

Many times, you don't know a team mate is working on something that you would like to know about, or indirectly concerns you, or that you have an insight your team mate never would have thought to ask you about, if not for the stand up.

The point of it isn't to know what everyone is doing, it's to know when someone is hung up on something that you can help them with.

1) This is not a daily occurrence. If it, your team has more serious issues.

2) They can ask in slack. Encouraging people to reach out proactively is a skill and culture the team needs to develop.

Had a former employer did the email-report thing, and I don't know about the manager, but it worked great for me.

I know that at my current job, the manager kind of tunes out. When he says what he's doing it's almost always: "I'm in meetings all day". Not saying "standup is bad" but it's a combination of things that aren't working.

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