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Comment by gravlaks | Hacker News Reader

Why do you hate them? I find them very useful. Everybody gets to voice their frustrations and what works, which we can learn from and improve upon.

What if I our team has a concern that isn't mentioned in a checklist?

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The recent retrospectives I had were used against me in my yearly evaluation where it was pointed out that I "complain too much" and that it "looks bad". That's about it for my involvement in this process.

Gotta love how they bank all these complaints for withdrawal at your annual bonus review instead of addressing them with you quickly and privately like an adult.

I once forgot something and several weeks later it ended up on my quarterly review. No reminder that it needed to be done (and it still needed doing) except for that one quarterly complaint.

You're attributing your hate all wrong if you blame the retrospectives for this, rather than bad management.

That is normal management, dismissing it as "bad management" makes it sound as if it isn't widespread and that we shouldn't base our practices around working with such managers. Managers who don't penalize you for being negative are rare, even those who say they don't typically do it anyway.

Eh, they are probably just focusing on what they can change. Changing managers is a hassle with a good chance of getting it wrong. I can clam up, say nothing, and work on other work during retro very easily.

You are really making me appreciate that my line management has never had any involvement in "scrum ceremonies" including retrospectives.

Yet to see any of the methods applied in working conditions. Even the best intentions on "following processes" tend to lead nowhere or just become abused by misapplication.

What works is when people share goals and collaborate.

While I really enjoy Agile and Lean development, my most recent employer had an extremely toxic culture where retrospectives were basically akin to the Hundred Flowers period of China. If you voiced frustration, you provided an O(1) way for them to find who to bully into quitting next.

My current employer just lets me do literally whatever we want. A service is basically owned by a developer. And so far my customers absolutely love my work.

Not the op, on most projects the improve upon part is mostly out of scope for the team, so it ends up being only about venting frustrations.

> which we can learn from and improve upon.

Not OP, but on my past two teams and my present team, this part has never happened. It was/is just a box ticking exercise.

What I don't like about our version is that we only focus on small portion of all things in the list (from the OP), mainly the Agile procedural issues.

I think the purpose of having such a checklist is not to limit the discussion to other concerns, but rather serve as a reminder what all the different things can be a problem and should be discussed.

Maybe I've just been unlucky, but in my experience retrospectives are mostly virtually identical every time: nothing happens about the frustrations, so they become a complaint session instead of something positive.

What can you do to change that?

Only thing you can do when your manager doesn't do this job is say you will personally take on the extra responsibility for no extra pay and no reduction in other tasks and give most of the credit to your manager. Then if you are lucky all of this extra work might lead to a promotion far down the line, or it will go to the person who were more positive during meetings making the manager like him more and all your work fixing things got wasted.

Realistically, the only thing you can do in this situation is to switch teams and/or company if the problem comes from above.

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