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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Scrum (stand up and all) is a waste of time and only lower tier companies are still using it.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a process at all. You might have once or twice a week sync meetings, and a biweekly planing meeting.

But scrum as it is traditionally thought (Daily stand ups, scrum master, agile coach) and all that hoopla is thought to be out of date.

If a company is spending 500k for an engineer the last thing they want is pointless meetings wasting their time, or have a non technical lower level agile coach try to dictate things (which I have seen it happen).

At that level the expectation is that the engineer is mature and will know how to unblock themselves and doesn’t need infantile hand holding.

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I remember working at companies where we'd have meetings once a week to discuss what people were working on and plan out the next week. Daily "standup"-style meetings were absolutely unheard of. If you had a "blocker", you'd check in with a coworker or boss, discuss it, and work it out, like a normal person. You're not sitting on your ass to announce "you're blocked" in a daily standup.

I agree so much with this that my blood pressure just went up.

Thing is that scrum is for kinda hostile enviroments where developers need some safeguards and peace agains adhock requests and constant ops works.

Yeah; the thing to remember with formal development processes is it's to try and force something upwards, not downwards. If the team is being forced to adopt Scrum, and the rest of the business isn't willing to adopt the contract placed on them (for Scrum the biggest is the business can't interrupt the sprint or -nothing- is a reasonable expectation from the sprint any longer, and any estimate is null and void and they don't get to ask why the team missed it without a finger pointing back at them), it's not Scrum that is the problem.

There are plenty of sub-500k TC engineers getting around, and the vast majority of companies are “lower-tier” by your implied definition.

These companies won’t succeed if they try to act like they’re working with mature engineers, because they’re usually not.

Skills like knowing how to unblock yourself, how to identify systemic problems in a team and correct them don’t come naturally to a lot of people.

If you’re not encountering teams like this I’m happy for you, but lower-performing teams often benefit by adopting a rigid methodology to kick-start the process of self-improvement.

In an ideal world, they further transform their working style into something that works for them by reflecting on their experience on a regular basis.

I've seen agile coaches be amazingly helpful...generally explaining to the VP why "pinning all three points of the PM triangle" is impossible, and why they have to pick either date or scope, not just throw headcount at it, if they want to continue to claim to be agile (let alone be successful.

That said, every agile process needs to be treated for what it is; maybe a decent starting place, and probably a collection of good ideas for the context it grew out of, but not directly transferable; the whole point of a retro (the one meeting that the agile manifesto actually stipulates) is to modify the process for the team.

Is an agile coach a PM? Or do they function more like a (lifestyle, executive) coach does?

Frankly, I think you're already fucked if you need an agile coach to explain that to a VP leading a software development project. Either the VP is grossly ignorant of what they are doing, or they have structural incentives that make building good software of secondary, or tertiary importance. I've never seen mere coaching fix this.

I feel like that is misunderstanding scrum. For example, standup is not supposed to be a status report, yet so many companies use it as one. In my mind it’s just a daily ritual where the team comes together and very quickly discusses the day. It should last no longer than 5 minutes. I understand that not everyone even wants that, and that’s totally cool, but standup gets a bad name since most people have experienced it as a status report.

I think the reason people end up using it as a status report is that nobody understands what to say otherwise. I can either say only "I'm not blocked" every day like a broken record (because if I were blocked why would I wait until the next morning to say so...), or I can say, "I'm not blocked and here's what I'm up to today", which is just a status report.

It’s supposed be more of a quick planning meeting. But yes, I would often just say “pass”. Although really as far as I’m concerned it’s all about the ritual of coming together every day.

I "quick planning" is an oxymoron. If anyone says "I plan to do this today" and the response is "actually you shouldn't, you should do something else", that one thing is going to be at least five minutes of discussion. If that happens twice or thrice it might as well be a half hour meeting.

And I actively dislike / don't understand the value of that sort of ritual...

It’s about coming together as a team as far as I’m concern and get energized for the day. It doesn’t work for everyone and that’s ok. “Quick planning” is like, “Hey, I need with this today. Is anyone available?” But really it’s about coming together for me.

I don't want to diminish your experience, I recognize that this makes sense for you, but it's a "to each their own" situation and I want to give you a perspective from the other side: I find stand-ups to be the exact opposite of energizing. The way I get energized is when I have something I'm so excited about working on that I've spent the whole night or weekend having to remind myself to stop thinking about it and be present with my family or friends, and then I sit down at my desk and get to dive straight into it. An hour or two later when I start following up on emails or doing chats or a stand up, that's fine, but it's not energizing, it's just when reality sets in.

I think this is just like the remote vs. in-person thing; it's mostly a personality trait. I don't have the "daily team ritual" gene, but others do, and that's ok.

Oh ya, if you read my replies around this thread (I’m not suggesting you should) I’m saying that it’s “to each their own.” I’m only defending stand up as a concept, but if a team doesn’t find it valuable they shouldn’t do it (same goes for all rituals and meetings). I’m realizing now there is a distinction on where the discussion is “I’m being forced to do stand up and it sucks” vs “This is why I like stand up.” As someone in the latter camp, if your standup is a soul-sucking status report (pr just plain soul-sucking), then atop doing it! And yet, your company is forcing you to do it. And that sucks.

Yeah totally, I got the sense that we agree on "to each their own" but land in different places. The unfortunate thing is that it's totally possible (indeed common) for members of a team to come down in different places on this. So you could have half the team's eyes glazing over every day while the other half of the team would lament losing the ritual.

I don't see the problem with the status report, as long as it's the culture that you usually only need a sentence or two.

Imo in bigger stand-ups, there's more pressure to sort of "show off", which means talking more, and combined with having more people there already it takes forever and is really painful.

But if it's just a handful of people who work together saying a couple sentences each on average, unless they're blocked or something interesting happened, it's fine.

Yeah I mean I prefer not to do it, but I don't hate the "small status report" kind of stand up. But I just question the "it isn't a status report!" line of explanation. If it isn't, then what is it? I often hear in response to this "it's just for blockers", but I have always found that particularly weird, because who just stays blocked until the next morning?

Ya, the "just for blockers" doesn't make sense. As far as I'm concerned, it's just time at the beginning of the today to come together to figure out what needs to be done for the day. The issue I take with "status report" is that I don't care, at all, about all the little things people did yesterday. I usually just tune out and I'm most others do as well.

Isn't the big point here that the daily stand-up is meant to be for communication within the team, not for reporting to management or stakeholders?

Indeed. But lots of places, including my current employer, don’t follow this.

I've worked for 15 different companies, and 13 of those had a standup. And of those 13/13 were a status report.

Congrats on being an engineer that can do these things. Many cannot and that is the bulk of teams out there. For those that are this skilled, this gives a window into areas they can flag for where they need to help level up the team.

But I'd urge you to reread your post and consider that it comes across as presumptuous, myopic, and holier-than-thou.

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