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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not that the 15 minutes isn’t tolerable. It’s that it’s going to be scheduled poorly for someone, perhaps the entire team, in such a way as to break focus and drop context.

A previous team I was on had standups at 10 am. This meant even if you wanted to start working earlier and get heads down on something, there wasn’t much point. Add in the typical context loading time and that meant you weren’t really able to get going until 10:30. And guess what? At that point, lunch is an hour and a half away.

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My team have "Daily Scrum" at 9AM every morning all year long so it's booked into everyone calendar. Sure once it a while someone have a meeting with an external team and it's perfectly fine that they don't come to the daily.

Most of the time there's no managers and it goes like that:

  - What you work on yesterday?
  -- I've worked on automated tests X, Y and Z, had a few meeting with an analyst to validate the tests.  

  - Did you had any issues.
  -- No / I had a few issues about the X process, is there anyone that could me, I have a few questions ? 
  
  - What are you doing today. 
  -- Today I'm going to work on X Y Z with XX and I have a few personnal meetings about X Y Z with Team X for Project Z.

Our Teams meetups are 25 minutes (for a team 10 individuals). We finish the round-table in usually less than 10 minutes and keep the extra time for the people that wants to talk in depth about the issues they talked about in the "Stand-up". Others can leave the meeting and go on about their daily operations.

Oh, God, I hate that. I would rather get the stand-ups out of the way first thing in the morning so I can have interrupted time before lunch, but most software engineers are massive divas, who think it's a horrible affront to be in the office before 10AM. And even then some people are regularly late.

And now with no commute for most of is, it's still somehow difficult.

A lot of developers are of the late chronotype. That has nothing to do with being a diva, immature or lazy, it's just how we're built. There are plenty of reasons developers can be divas, but being a night owl isn't one. Chronic sleep deprivation will drastically shorten one's life span.

Yes, I did my share of that. Then I started going to be bed early, got myself an accu-pressure mat and all. Does wonders. How many of these people who are late nighters simply postpone going to bed, squeezing in that one movie before 1AM? And then they are wet sponges in the morning.

I am not denying genetic traits, but like with most things, it's not the only factor.

Not everyone's circadian clock works the way yours does. I hate having to schlep myself out of bed to join a pointless status update meeting half asleep.

10AM already is before my definition of "first thing in the morning".

Maybe we should just kill the synchronous status update meeting altogether and avoid conflicts like these?

Just block out the rest of your day and auto decline meetings. I do that and it works great. Forces everyone to schedule everything before noon. Also make sure to schedule lunch in as well. It make sure you auto decline that’s the trick. If you’re manually approving/declining each one you’ll end up allowing some which signals the blocked out time isn’t that blocked out to the rest of the team.

If you are not a manager, that sounds a little agro. I can stand for my untouchable lunch break, but the rest is not up to me.

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