Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.
But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes.
That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.
There is absolutely no part of OP that warrants this charitable interpretation. My interpretation is that they just spent the day playing video game or something like that. You are reading things that are not there
I tend to make a lot of progress just organizing my thoughts during those times; it's like the act of doing something else distracts the part of my brain that would get in the way of the processing I needed to do otherwise.
Strangely, I also tend to play Rocket League pretty well, even though I'm not fully focusing. Again, probably something about just doing vs. thinking about how to do.
I don't switch off from work very well, though, so this invariably happens when I should be enjoying my personal time but I'm still thinking about work. The exact opposite situation from the OP's.
It just sounds like they’ve managed to get enough done to get by, and continue skating like this. I’ve seen quite of few people do this professionally. It’s just important to be honest about it.
My guess is there’s a motivation problem, which may be from the job itself, or something else.
>You are reading things that are not there
you too???
If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He delivered on expectations.
What make you think they deliver? Certainly not the OP.
I think everyone is reading OP as an “anti-agile champion”, a “hero against meaningless jobs”, but the way I read it they are just a lazy person lying their way around to trick companies into paying them for work that they are not doing. At all. Not even willing or trying to do. Just lying to people.
To be honest, if you’re a manager who can’t spot incompetence or laziness, then you deserve every bit of it. Same with upper management who hires managers who can’t spot incompetence. It’s really not hard at all. I don’t get why OP is the bad guy when he literally meets ALL expectations per their manager’s own words.