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Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

Standup for me is about a daily ritual—to show each other you respect each other well enough to show up and honour your working agreements. I believe that so long as you are intentional about it, you can do standup however you want. But I'll reiterate that it's really important to be intentional about it, and that's exact what you seem to be doing, so that's great!

We've stripped out standup completely bare. We're fully remote and use JamBoard. There's no going taking turns to give long-winded updates that causes people to tune-out. If you have an update, you must put it on a sticky, otherwise there's no need to talk. At the end of standup, the devs will discuss what we're going to work on for the day. We only talk about what we're working on with the full team if things aren't on track and we need help from product or design.

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> Standup for me is about a daily ritual—to show each other you respect each other well enough to show up and honour your working agreements.

As someone with narcolepsy, your daily ritual is everything that makes my life horrible.

I got lucky not to be a part of companies with this mindset now. Every other company was like this, and it was truly a miserable thing. I remember the secretary at my first job calling me every day whenever I was running slightly late, and one of my coworkers joked that someday he'd sabotage that phone.

The whole idea of it being "respect" is just bogus. My inability to put my ass in a chair at 9am every day has nothing to do with how much I respect you, the team, or the company. People are just different, and work in different ways.

And in my team, we would have taken this into account.

And that starts with a conversation (like the thread OP implied in their answer). Hopefully the conversation would then avoid any pressure on you in saying that the meeting doesn't work for you.

In my experience you can’t really have that conversation. The conversation is equivalent to “please change the way the team works, just for me.”

If a company isn’t set up for that, it’s hopeless. You’re asking to be more special than everyone else, and everyone else is going to notice.

It's unfortunate that there are companies that operate this way.

Presumably you are there because they wanted you there. Making a change to accommodate one person shouldn't be a big deal. I've said it a few times in these threads already, but processes should never be set in stone. You should always assume your processes will change. It doesn't have to be a huge change, just finding something that works for everyone. Of course, there is always going to have to be compromise, but the conversation should be allowed to be had.

I have had that conversation multiple times in multiple teams. We adjust things when they don't work; e.g. if someone is obviously not making it to a meeting in the morning.

I don't see why you couldn't make that ask.

There's no reason to beleive that youre the only person who wants a similar change. Not without bringing it up, and even if nobody already wants the change, they may not have thought about it, and will decide its a good idea when they have

> People are just different, and work in different ways.

That's exactly the point I was trying to get across.

I was expressing what standup is to my team and why we bother doing it at all, not what I think it should or must be. The point I was trying to make was around being intentional around the team's behaviour. If everyone wants show up whenever they want to, that's fine, let's just call it what is so that no one is wondering what the rules are. My team decided that we all want to start the day at the same time, so that's what we do, but processes aren't set in stone and this can change at any point. For example, if you were on my team, then we would change our process to accommodate you.

It sounds like you worked at incredibly toxic companies.

So yeah, you would work with your team to do it in a way that works for you and makes you and your needs and working style feel respected too.

Standup ought not to be at 9 AM then.

This.

For a while, I had a 9:30 meeting. It existed as a direct result of people hating the previous 9am meeting - no big deal, a few team members complained, I moved it, and everybody was happy.

The problem was not the standup, but the people. In my previous job the standups were early afternoon, because some people started at 8 and some at 9 - and we also didn't care much if someone was late.

As the parent mentioned, there should be respect, and seem they didn't have any for you

> As someone with narcolepsy, your daily ritual is everything that makes my life horrible.

I'm sorry you're in a shitty situation, but it's unfair to blame GP's perfectly reasonable ritual for it. It's your narcolepsy that makes your life horrible, not their ritual, and it's quite unfortunate.

You seem to have missed the point of not just the article, but the OP.

If you read the article, it advocates asynchronous conversation, and 'micro' updates.

In other words rather than forcing people to update at a specific time, that whilst convenient for you, is not convenient for all we should consider allowing people to do what they need to do and empower them to respond appropriately.

This is why OP mentioned that _your_ daily ritual is hurting them, because you are _forcing_ them to adhere to what works for you at _their_ expense.

It also goes both ways, but we cannot ask one to always considers us, and allow their needs to go unattended because it doesn't fit our narrative.

>This is why OP mentioned that _your_ daily ritual is hurting them, because you are _forcing_ them to adhere to what works for you at _their_ expense.

Technically true, but it's not like the "ritual" is some weird obscure requirement. Showing up on time is pretty much a default requirement of society. At least they're in a field where being slightly late results in embarrassment instead of firing.

The ritual is ok, but assuming people don't respect you because they aren't good at following it isn't.

dude (m/f), i guess EVERYONE would respect you being late if they knew you had a condition..

By far the most common complaint from support groups for people with sleep disorders is the sheer lack of respect people have for different sleep schedules. We get called lazy even when we work past midnight. By coworkers, and even family.

The usual advice is to find a different job with actually flexible scheduling or night shifts, for good reason.

You have no idea how many neurodiverse and chronically ill people in your company are trying to pass for normal.

Our fixation on “normal” makes people resist getting help that would make their lives easier and possibly make it easier for them to be “out”.

You have no idea what your coworkers are struggling with. I found out one had stage 4 cancer by asking why it was taking him so long to fix a problem. I’ve had exactly one coworker in >20 years who was open about being on the autism spectrum, and people were weird about it.

Nobody wants to be defined by these things so they don’t bring them up.

thats the problem then, right? i bet if people would just open up, in general the reactions would be positive. at least at the places were I worked at.

You’re asking for people to live in a future that doesn’t exist.

You don’t need “in general the reactions” to be positive, you need 100% of your bosses and peers to have a positive reaction, and you need to be able to predict it ahead of time because you can’t but that cork back in the bottle. Developer communities can be small. That information could affect future employment opportunities as well.

It’s gatekeeping, when you get right down to it.

Not sure you really read my comment properly. I’m advocating for teams to do whatever they see for themselves. What my team does is what we decided as a team, there are no assumptions. I am in no way saying the decisions of my team are in some way superior, I was just sharing what we do along with others.

If you have been diagnosed with narcolepsy your organisation should probably grant you a formal accommodation to cope with your disability.

It's an incredibly shitty thing to say that some guy on the internet "makes [your] life horrible" because he has a standing agreement with his team - a team you will never work on and a team that presumably doesn't contain any narcolepts and presumably would do their very best to accommodate one if they did.

> The whole idea of it being "respect" is just bogus.

It’s worse than that. The insistence that 8 am or 9 am indicates a “respect” for the team is in fact disrespect for the team.

It says we don’t give a shit about why it’s hard for you to be here at 7:45 or 8:45 (because doing a standup cold is bad too), do it anyway.

It’s a show of power. And a petty one at that.

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