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Comment by fmakunbound | Hacker News Reader

Christ what is PI planning? We're doing something "OKR" meeting related which I have neither the interest nor time to look up the un-abbreviation. Luckily one can Zoom with sound and video off at least...

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Yes! One of the greatest advantages of the "Zoom" age (well technically it is Teams for me) is that when there is a big meeting with 10+ attendees that you find completely useless, you can just silently turn off your video, and do something else: clean your room, do the dishes, have a short workout, wait for the meeting to be over while laying on the bed, do some work that you find meaningful, or browse job postings.

If the meeting was in person, I could do none of that, and I'd have an awkward chat with my boss about why I seemed disinterested at the meeting.

This is why work/life balance and mental health improved for remote workers. While remote workers were disengaged during those meetings, they at least felt somewhat productive and had a way to cope. When they are all forced back into the office and can't escape these fiascos their mental health will nose dive and the great resignation will continue until employers "figure it out".

Yes I also just hanged out at home and let the leaders in the team do the talking. Because the proces is so broken here, they don't just talk objectives, they talk super details which is totally useless for people that don't have the same domain knowledge.

And close to nothing is written down, so people will not know what to do when they are done debating.

It's out of this world crazy.

Didn't think I would ever experience such a wild process

In Scrum you have Sprints (~weeks) and Releases (~months), and at the start of each you meet to plan User Stories and Features, respectively, that you want to accomplish during those time frames. SAFe is a formalized version of Scrum of Scrums (multiple Scrum teams working together) and PI (Programatic Increment) is just another name for Release. So PI planning is release planning, but all the scrum teams have to coordinate dependencies (team A needs to complete story X in sprint 2, so team B can use it to complete story Y in sprint 3; teams B and C need to allocate time to design an interface in sprint 1 that they both use in sprint 2, etc), so it has more overhead.

Ours started out taking three full days, and we eventually pruned them down to two full days which was still painful, but mostly productive. I can't imagine four whole days - day 5 would have to be dedicated to drinking.

Isn't scrum teams having dependencies on other scrum teams a process smell?

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