Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?

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In the past, all of my teams have had daily-standup meetings. Ie, recurring meetings scheduled for a specific time, when everyone would join the meeting (either physically or virtually) and give their updates

In an attempt to reduce people's meeting load and avoid interruptions, we're considering doing asynchronous slack standups instead. Ie, everyone posts their daily-update on slack at the start of their workday (no specific time). People can then follow up either on slack, or in-person, or offline, regarding any of the updates that others have posted.

Has anyone had experience with doing similar asynchronous daily updates, as an alternative to daily standup meetings? If so, how did it go?

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I have done that a few times and I feel the value drops to almost zero, or in some instances even negative, by doing this.

Standups should be short hence do them standing with no digital screens around and team-size is optimally ~5. 30-60 secs per person probably. Writing a line on Slack spreads them out and takes away more focus IMHO.

Many people will just ignore what is written in the Slack channel and you lose the advantage that everyone knows what is going on and can give feedback. Instant helping out or course correct does not happen.

You lose the team feeling a sense of the team making progress, it easily becomes each dev for themselves.

It often devolves into ticking a box and keeping up the appearance that you are on track, instead of quickly catching those potential situations. I have seen devs then get into terrible psychological pressure since they have over-reported in a way that is much harder in a real standup.

If you need to focus more I would prefer to just drop the daily standup completely once or twice a week.

> 30-60 secs per person probably

In my experience with a handful of teams so far, this has never consistently happened. There are always a few people (if not most of the team) that seem to not be able to be succinct. And many times, the standup turns into a back and forth between 2 or 3 members on a topic that's unrelated to what the rest of the members are doing and therefore a waste of their time.

And most of the time, it's just mind numbingly mechanical and boring, something to get over with so I can get on with my work.

I feel like a team meeting at the beginning of the week to sync up and then ad hoc meetings during the week between relevant parties would be better.

Maybe I've just had bad luck with stand ups or maybe it's me. Not sure.

Someone needs to say “parking lot” and move on. A bit of agenda control helps the team. You can always multitask when you’re on Zoom.

Someone needs to say something to those people so they know to speed it up and table discussions. Ideally peers would say it, not a manager, as it’s the devs’ meeting.

If you keep noticing this wherever you go, you should be the one to say it.

Worked on a contract where we did async standups, and implemented that in our small company for a bit. Stakeholder (owner/president) really liked it.

I haven't worked at a company that did physical standups, but what I've heard over and over is that they tend to devolve into longer meetings, and even worse, into blame game sessions.

Concur. You miss all context-sharing and exchange of q&a. And the team-ness plummets.

Yes. Both times there was zero value in them. People won't read them.

Daily stand-ups provide zero value in my opinion, asynchronous or not. If one has a blocker then it should be raised to the team in slack/email as soon as you realize you need help from the team. Waiting until daily stand-up doesn't seem sensible to me.

Paying attention to conversations the team is having in slack, the ticket tracker and pull requests gives a much better sense of progress than stand-up in my experience.

So I have mixed feelings. For people who don't want to invest in paying attention to PRs and slack, synchronous stand-up seems to provide more value because they are forced to listen. Personally I'd rather not have stand-up, but if it's required then I'd rather do it asynchronously so it minimizes my time wasted.

> If one has a blocker then it should be raised to the team in slack/email as soon as you realize you need help from the team. Waiting until daily stand-up doesn't seem sensible to me.

The point of the daily stand-up is honestly more for identifying when people are struggling but not reaching out for help. A lot of people have a lone wolf attitude towards work even if they have a team so spotting when someone is avoiding asking for help is important.

Ideally you wouldn't waste everyone on the team's time every day just to suss out individuals who potentially can't ask for help. A competent lead or manager should be able to identify those kinds of team members without a standup, and address the issue 1:1. If the lead or manager can't do that, why have a lead or manager at all?

I'm actually struggling to think of how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.

By asking people what they are working on all day? "Hey can you tell me the status of xyz please" type things?

Wander by the cubicle and peek over the shoulder?

Feels like stuff that would get people accused of being micromanagers. Honestly far better imo to just have a pre-set, teamwide thing set up.

This also involves the whole team in identifying and solving blockers rather than everything going through a lead, who could then just become a bottleneck (or a human-shaped blocker)

> how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.

Notice when things aren't getting done by the time they were estimated to be done, and notice if the person seems to be continually pushing back completion dates. After a day or two of "thought I could get it cone but couldn't", it's negligent to _not_ dig in to _why_ the person is struggling. Really not meaning to be snarky, but if a manager isn't doing this, I'm not sure what exactly they are doing.

IME most solid engineers prefer autonomy and trust over schedule and process, and would strongly resent having to spend their time in a meeting because their manager was unable to do people management.

doesn't matter what the point is, 5/5 companies i've worked at it's simply repeat what's already visible on trello/jira board to people who can't care less. Every time hated hearing scrum master talk on and on about random stuff.

I feel if your team has more than 6 members standup is anti pattern at that point

Yes. I introduced this with great success at my company. Every day a member of the dev team would post their standup to a dedicated slack channel.

It accomplished a number of things: people could make their own hours as long as they post sometime within 24 hours it didn't matter, it was persistent so people can search history (what was everyone doing on Friday), and commentable so those who need to get involved can start a thread on the post and schedule a meeting if need be for sync communication to follow up. It accomplishes everything of an in person standup, but is more efficient and respects people's time.

Yes, I work at a asynchronous first dev shop. This is all we do and it works alright.

The underlying prerequisite here is that you need to have a strong reading culture on your team.

At my small company with 4 developers we post YTB: yesterday, today, blockers. It goes into a special slack channel and we all try to take the time to read other’s updates to help with blockers and stuff. Just a small sentence for each section. It’s works nicely but we also are super small. I prefer it to spending a 15 or more minutes on a video call listening to two people talk while everyone else ignores them. If we need to chat on video we self organize.

What's the point?

If you closed/updated a ticket the interested party will see it, or you can explicitly mention them in the ticket.

If you're blocked, you usually know who's blocking you, so you can contact them directly.

Let's say you're a FE dev waiting for a BE dev to finish a specific API request for you. You ask him how long it will take, and if it's possible to provide a dummy API in the meantime. Alternatively you can mock this API by yourself. If no solution found you can switch to another task or escalate it to the PM.

But this problem shouldn't exist in the first place. It's only exists b/c of Scrum. In mini-waterfall based SDLC methodologies (i.e. Design/Plan->Build(Iterate)->Ship cycles) developers are working on much larger work chunks (i.e. mini-projects), they're opening and managing tickets by themselves, instead of being assigned tickets opened by PM/PO. So if they're blocked on a specific API request, they still have other things to work on.

I don’t know I’m not a frigging manager or pm. I just code for money and don’t complain constantly.

Works fine. People sometimes don't read what's in the slack channel, but it's not as if they always pay attention in the standup either.

I personally prefer it. I'm fairly detailed oriented, and honestly if I had to talk, I'm probably the guy who ends up taking more than my share of time (sorry folks).

With a text-based standup, I organize my thoughts, ping people who might find the update relevant (to bump it to their attention), and can follow up with a reply-in-thread option (for blockers and such).

In the age of the lockdown, I actually think it's beneficial to drag people's faces into a zoom meeting for 20-40 minutes (sometimes we get into debating stuff, hopefully not too much) - just so we have some human contact.

The rest of the day might be spent in solitude. If we're not in an office, let's at least leverage the scrums for some coffee talk.

Back in pre-covid times, for a while, we had a team with around 6 local devs and a couple of devs in other more remote (and earlier) time zones. We had the remote members give their standup in slack and the locals do an actual standup. They took turns reading the slack standup from the other members. We kept each other on track during standup for the most part though sometimes things would wander until we brought it back in. We tried to be conscious of the time but not rigid about it. We also did periodic calls of the whole team even though the times were not the most convenient for anyone. The team members liked each other and were helpful when needed and were willing to do occasional, short off-time calls to talk about longer term plans.

I personally prefer async, though as people here have pointed out it dissolves the sense of team cohesion.

Standups have taken a life of their own as each company adopted the agile paradigm. - Replaced weekly status reports - purely individual status oriented instead of taking the form of a team huddle to remove obstacles - Blockers are usually outside of the team doing the standup so it usually goes something like this “I have a blocker with certain microservice, I will/ have reached out to the other team and waiting to hear back”. This doesn’t solve any problem nor the team can do anything to unblock. So a rep from the team has to attend a meta standup to blurt out the blocker

I have never been part of the team that did daily standups (& I led one of the teams). I am happy for that.

You don't need to do daily standups just because most dev teams do.

We didn't use slack unfortunatly, we had Zoom meetings planned every day for 15 minutes and our manager would make us go round table to discuss our ongoing projects and challenges etc.. it was very interesting since our small team were all working on very different problems, we could all try to focus for 2 minutes to solve a problem all together as a sort of team blitz. Sometimes it worked marvels.

We do this every Tuesday and Thursday. It works extremely well. I feel like it gives me time back without sacrificing too much human interaction.

My team does async standups in a slack channel and it’s much better than the synchronous meeting for certain.

Working with a team that does this right now. Kinda hate it. It's too easy to spend a ton of time rewriting your response. There's a bot to help out - Asks you a set of questions and compiles and formats it nicely, and that only makes it worse.

I guess it depends on the person. I tend to waste time “rehearsing” what I will say in standup. (Yes, I know, you aren’t “supposed” to do this, but the alternative is that I might blank out on what I did the day before entirely.) Writing for me is faster and clearer.

I did, it worked beautifully but got Shot down by the Scrum Master :/.

They have to justify their employment somehow!

Yes, this is obviously more efficient. And hence contrary to the purpose of daily stand ups which is to waste everyone’s time to make the manager feel empowered and remind the slaves who owns them.

Yikes. Who hurt you?

Yikes, who hurt you? scrum master and scrum in general is the biggest bullshit jobs out there. More useless than a person holding doors and the door is automatic.

yes, we would all post 3 lines in stand up channel by 1pm. It was much easier to easy to scan and see what's everyone is upto. Morning is the worst time to have dozen people talk about their irrelevant problems that you have no idea, interest or skills in. If there is an issue that requires team input we would just setup 4pm meeting for selected team members/experts to join and give their thoughts. Mgmt would never understand this, but fewer meetings and more productivity.

I forgot the history look up thing, it really helps out when you wanna remember who was working on the feature xyz.

One of the side benefits of doing them live, especially in the new new, is promoting connectedness. You lose that when you go fully async. It’s 15-30 out of your day.

We currently do this. Team is compromised of folks across multiple time zones so it comes in handy.

However, I do feel like synchronous stand-ups are more productive

Yes, one day a week devs post the standup update on slack. We call this "No meetings Tuesday".

I hate people taking multiple minutes in standups (we have 1 person who almost always takes far too long) but I wouldn’t want to do them asynchronously. It’s certain that people aren’t going to even glance at text updates. As much as I hate phone calls and meetings, I think a proper daily standup is a good thing.

We do slack stand up on a Friday, works well

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