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Comment by f17 | Hacker News Reader

It's making effective use of your time in standups.

If you have an advanced degree and your job is making you do standups, you should get another job.

most of the eng on my team have masters degrees, and we have standups. this is common where i work and i assume other faang

You should aim for a research environment where you don't have to justify your existence to some "product manager" every 24 hours. Take it from me as an old person: if you work in stupid environments in stupid ways on stupid stuff... what happens is exactly what you'd think would happen.

Why do you think standups are stupid?

They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.

It's a process without a purpose. It is a process that kills flow and causes less work to get done. Everything important must fit within a short story 24/h later which means work gets packaged into easy to explain daily concepts.

It serves no purpose because if you are blocked today waiting till a morning meeting is a bad approach because the meeting than expands to discussing an issue that belongs at another meeting. Plus the time wasted adds up.

Asking for help today is something seniors do.

Standup meetings treat developers like children and encourage bad habits.

I agree with the sentiment that justifying your existence every 24 hours isn't an effective use of anyone's time. Perhaps "standup" wasn't the right word. But in general, verbal communication/meetings/etc. was the gist.

Common to you means right? That was a good point, an olympic swimmer trains to swim not to explain how to swim.

Standups are the worst way of doing status updates except for all the others. For me an environment without standups is at least a yellow flag.

I used to have a bot that asked people every day if they needed help, then ask who they needed help from and what they were blocked with.

That adds just enough push to force people into asking for help.

If you’re using a standup as anything other than a pulse on making sure progress is possible. You failed.

As a manager, one has to manage many different personality types. Not all people are proactive in communicating that they need help or are lagging. The manager could go to each of his directs and ask these questions individually, but it is more efficient to do it as a group. The group setting also gives coworkers the opportunity to say, “oh, I know what’s going on. I can help with that.”

Stand ups do not have to happen every day. That’s where a lot of managers fail.

Those different personality types react differently to standups. Managing different personalities could mean providing different approaches.

It could mean that. It could also mean that there are some parts of working in a group (instead of solo) that are non-negotiable, such as periodically meeting with that group even if it is on a call.

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