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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

"The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a trap where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask individuals questions that only really matter to them. Beyond about 8 people (and maybe as low as 5) this means a bunch of people are standing around while other people give updates on things they don't really care about. I've seen standups with 20 people that last 45 minutes as the manager goes around the room, basically. That's not a standup.

It's even worse if PMs and other non-eng are there. Just, stop."

A lot of managers or PMs really can't be allowed into a standup. Especially if they show only from time to time and take over the meeting.

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I've been at a place with PM-driven standups. It was fine because:

1) If the team was like, "our team on this project is tiny and we all sit next to each other, so we don't need them", or "we'd rather do Slack messages for standups, on this particular project", he'd let that happen without a fuss, aside from ensuring that any communication he needed from it was still, somehow, happening. So it was still team-driven and very flexible.

2) He was very disciplined about not turning them into project status meetings, or making standup messages take the form of status updates.

[EDIT] I should add that the benefit to him was that he got to hear a lot of unvarnished truth about what was going on, which micromanagers don't get, because he was at all times, in the face he presented to the team, on "our side". That put him in a much better position for polishing up the information he had for consumption outside the team(s), which benefited us, too. He might have questions or something, and it's not that he never pushed back on anything, but he let standups be standups, and kept that stuff separate and as non-confrontational as possible.

> Especially if they show only from time to time and take over the meeting.

I do not understand the mindset that goes into thinking that somehow a person is 1. Not required for a meeting and so can only attend on occasion and 2. If present must drive the entire thing.

I guess in theory they might think they are improving things if they assume it is an unguided, unfocused disaster with out them, but in my experience it is the exact opposite: a focused, relevant, quick stand up without vs a meandering, drawn out, ritualized boilerplate, "explain to the PM stuff everyone else knows" meeting with.

PMs can be genuinely useful too. They just need to use the most important words in their toolkit: "you 2 (3,4) discuss offline/afterwards, next person". Not to be used if people are casually chatting, but to fix that problem of 2 people having a conversation while 6 others listen for no reason.

It’s called “pulling rank”. And in most situations it’s not considered an option to tell a director or VP to shut up and not disrupt the meeting.

I'm not as cynical. The "pulling rank" types definitely exist but I've worked with a lot of PMs who overshare either because they're aware the engineering team doesn't see all their work and want to "prove their value" and/or they're are genuinely excited about their work and keen to share with the engineering team. Those types always react well to gentle reminders to keep it brief.

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