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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> For example, in a meeting you're made aware that engineer X is working on Y, you have prior experience in Y. Immediate win. Does this happen 100% of the time? Of course not, but there's a probability it will.

How high does that probability have to be before it is a net gain?

Look at a realistic and common case: eight devs in a 30m standup.

That's four hours used up. Maybe once or twice a month one of those devs gets something out of the standup that they would not have gotten otherwise.

You're spending 80 hours of dev time per month for a payoff (at most) twice a month.

Is it worth it?

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OT related to standups, we now use https://www.dailybot.com/ and it has cut down on our meeting time across teams to quite an extent. The bot gives us daily checkins which records what we worked on the previous day, what we plan to work on today, what blockers we have. This has enabled us to identify blockers across teams and fix them as well as being productive and checking in whenever we feel like it. By EOD, everyone would have filled up the form/bot.

I'm not affiliated to the product.

Not to take away from your point, but a standup with eight devs really shouldn't take 30 minutes.

> Not to take away from your point, but a standup with eight devs really shouldn't take 30 minutes.

I have never heard of a standup taking less than around 3m-4m per person. I'm sure it happens, I have just never heard of it happening.

My experience (and the experience of almost every developer I've ever interacted with) is around the 3m-4m per person mark.

Wow, that’s really unfortunate. At my current company, standup is around 20 seconds per employee. Literally, the PM pulls up the JIRA board sorted by employee, and each person says “I’m currently working on ticket X, it’s [going well/I’m having trouble with Y/etc.]” and then you move on. If someone’s stuck on something they’ll take a minute or two to explain it and someone else can jump in to help. The PM often has a couple minutes of questions at the end that are requests coming from other teams.

For a team of 6 people, we schedule 15 minutes and it usually ends in under 10.

3-4 minutes per person is huge! What does an IC talk about for all that time? Thirty seconds per person is closer to the mark in my experience, and that’s as part of encouraging slightly longer stand ups as a fully remote team. The actual standup might usually be fifteen minutes or so overall as there’s often a couple of issues worth coordinating on.

Are your stand ups a way of identifying ways to move forward quickly, or just people feeling they need to justify their existence?

Good luck finding places that practice standups for software developers and where it isn't completely broken so that 30 minutes is an underestimate, whatever the number of people on the team.

Those places certainly do exist, just as lottery winners exist too. You just won't find them.

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