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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.

Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place.

Other than that, your points stand.

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This seems crazy to me, but I don't work in FAANG. A basketball game (I'm assuming recurring) during work hours? Quality of life from inside work? Are you all at campus for most of your day (ie, longer than 8h?)

To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that boundary. Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)

> To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family

Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends?

> Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)

So it's not okay to intrude on "work" by playing an occasional basketball game, but it is okay to push mandatory work activities that eat up one's personal time? Also, if you think those activities are not work, you are deluding yourself -- no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.

You’ve honestly never made friends with any of your teammates at work? (A friend being someone you’d choose to spend some of your time off with).

It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory" and a game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other, too.

> It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory"

It sounds to me that you are the one trolling. It should be quite clear that when someone who has power over you "invites" you to do an "optional" after work gathering with other people (who are often your direct career competitors), it is not really an optional thing.

> game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other

And I am not sure what's your point here. It sounds like you are misunderstanding what I am saying.

Speak for yourself, cobber.

I've been at many workplaces where I've enjoyed hanging out with coworkers for fun at the pub. Granted, usually complaining about the company and boss.

> no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.

Oh, there absolutely are people who like to do this, but their intent is not at all altruistic.

True and that's a big part of the problem. I just don't want to spend my free time with people behaving like that.

That makes two of us, but I believe we are the minority in a lot of companies.

What studies show that 5 days x 8 hours is the optimal point for productivity?

We picked those numbers based on tradition (and complaints from unions about the 7x12 schedule) well before software engineering was a career. Companies that do 5x6 or 4x8 seem to be doing fine.

Studies looking at WW1 and WW2 show that 40 hours a week is optimal. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262809555_The_Produ...

You can use scihub to get the paper or here's a secondary pop-sci source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190912-what-wartime-m...

You can work any hours of the day.

Intramural stuff is usually scheduled DURING work hours - so people are at work for this stuff to happen.

If you schedule an intramural basketball game for 5:00 a.m. in the morning or 8:00 p.m. at night - nobody is going to make it - just like if you schedule a standup during those hours - no one is going to make it.

It's expected that you either can do your job in less than 8 hours on some days - or you work extra hours to make up for enjoying your life doing things like playing basketball.

Most adults can be adults.

The freedom to schedule things during the day is very powerful and a huge factor in my wellbeing. Being able to for example spontaneously drop work for a few hours to enjoy the first beautiful weather of the year is worth more a lot to me psychologically.

Being able to schedule out of work things during "work" hours is amazing too! I've been able to have a level of involvement in volunteer and community projects that is not really possible on a nights & weekends basis. Maintain relationships with my friends and family who don't work 9-5s, watch their kids regularly. Go to those odd-hours sparsely attended religious services and grow different connections in that community too.

To me this is all much more sustainable than having a relationship to work where I grind away at it waiting for it to be over so I can live my life. There are risks here too, specifically boundaries as you mentioned. But when managed well it feels like work is just one of my obligations among several, rather than the time I suffer through so I can do worthwhile things instead.

Pre-pandemic, Google stopped serving breakfast at 8 and started dinner at 7. A lot of the younger folks were there for 11 hours every day so they could get all three meals. If you're there that long, you need to take breaks once in a while, which they of course provided plenty of options. They even had laundry machines on site so that you could do laundry between meetings.

Breakfast stopped at 10, not 8. Dinner started at 6, but most people didn't stay for it.

Yeah, you could roll up at 10 and grab breakfast, start working at 10:30, then finish at 4:30, work out, shower, then grab dinner and head home. Pretty fucking idyllic.

Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.

Team building. A lot of great stuff and camaraderie have been built over a coffee and walk, or some beer after hours with colleagues.

To the grandfather commenter: I still agree that you weren't missing anything about your parent company. Work needs to happen and it needs to be aligned with a market and be profitable or have a strategic advantage (to make the company desirable).

You know that 8 hrs is entirely arbitrary right? It’s not some directive from god. I really don’t see why you’re so jammed up by some people playing basketball during (gasp) work hours

Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation.

I've been in MANY different standups. The vast majority of them are not well run.

Standups are also (rarely) recorded, and therefore unsearchable.

Have you ever thought - maybe an email process can also be done well?

Maybe the majority of your email threads are terrible. That doesn't mean they have to be. Maybe you think all of your meetings are well run - it doesn't mean everyone else thinks they are...

I've been in many different companies and the majority of all processes are not well run. That just means things are being badly run, not that you shouldn't do the right things and run them well.

And no, email processes cannot be well done. You may think your's are, but that doesn't mean everyone else does.

If I had my druthers I would ban email for all in-house communication and do everything verbally, via chat apps, or workflow management tools. Anything that needs more thorough elaboration should be written down as a thoughtfully articulated memo. If you feel the need to record the contents of a 20 minute group conversation to search it later that probably means you need to focus and take better notes.

I will say it is truly a wild claim to assert that an intramural basketball game is more conducive to team productivity than a stand-up meeting though.

You haven't convinced me there's a good substitute for email when it comes to threaded, easy, async, thoughtful communication. Your suggestions all fail one of these.

There is no reason threaded, async, or easy need to be requirements for all types of communication.

A 10 minute conversation can be had outside of a stand-up meeting, and without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it.

> without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it

In my experience, the very people who think these cross-team sync meetings are a waste that they don't need to be a part of are the first to make noise that they weren't consulted or included in a discussion that actually doesn't impact them.

10 minutes x everyone on the team x scheduled time for all x disruption and context switch loss

I like in person updates myself, but it's not as obvious of a cost calc as you present. There is definitely a place for async, written updates

The Hallmark if a bad manager is having zero consideration for their subordinates.

I find bad managers usually can't grasp the cost of interruptions from meetings - because their work isn't interrupted from meeting - because their work IS meetings.

I'm sure you're aware of this, but 99% of standups are not this way. Given that, it's safe to assume that wherever you are, they don't need to exist. The odds are quite simply much better.

I would go to the office to play basketball with my team. I'd think that it'd build team chemistry and cross team collaboration.

Those are such buzzwords. I for one would hate to be forced to play basketball just for that.

This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league

Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.

Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive.

I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering.

That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting

As it happens the last The Office episode I saw a couple of months ago involved Michael Scott organizing a basketball match during work hours, even though corporate had just been complaining about low numbers from him and his team (if I remember right).

Related to a comment further up the thread about fruits, a close friend of mine told me some time ago how one of his colleagues was complaining in the company chat about the kiwi fruits that were being given by the company as free perks having too much of that “hairy” stuff on them (I’m on my phone, too lazy to search for the exact English term), and how he preferred to be served “lean” and “shiny” kiwi fruits instead. Said friend works at the local subsidiary of a big US tech company of which everyone on this forum has heard about.

Agree to disagree.

A team standup has close to no value.

Having a high quality of life has a lot of value (including increased work productivity).

As the California Milk Campaign went - happy cows make quality cheese, and happy workers make quality work...

Again - one can be moved, the other cannot.

Getting a bunch of introverts to talk to each other every day can have tremendous value for the company.

But in most companies standups are just agile cargo cult. Nobody knows why they are doing standups, so naturally they turn into "I publicly report to my manager and pretend I work really hard, because everybody else is doing that".

People forgot (or never realized?) that standups are not for the manager, they are for the team.

It has value to a single person - the person running the meeting. Everyone else zones out until it's their time to speak.

That’s why I just do 3-5 min syncs 3-4 times a week one on one with my direct reports with flex to lengthen if a deeper topic comes up. Uses more of my time but less zoning out and more chance to actually unblock blockers. Downside is I need to tell people to communicate if there is value in team collaboration, but we have other opportunities for fostering that.

If team happiness comes from basketball, that's (probably) not the team driving revenue. I've mostly only seen that tied to results in professional basketball teams.

(Not to hate on balls: it was great playing volleyball in grad school. After 5pm. A couple of $B companies came out of that group.)

High intensity physical activity keeps you in shape both physically and mentally.

Standup everyday with people burnt out and depressed due to a lack of excercise and poor nutrition is a recipe for failure too.

"High intensity physical activity..." is exactly one of the things I DON'T want. Any programming position that wants me out of my chair for exercise... nope.

I'll deal with exercise and nutrition on my own time, thank you very much.

No one’s talking about forcing a basketball game, but people here are acting like taking the time out of the blessed 8 hrs to play one of you want is sacrilegious.

I guess you and I are in the minority now because I absolutely agree. To me, the hypothetical was akin to skipping school to go hang out with your friends.

A team building activity has 10x the priority than some standup. If you need a standup to get stuff done or to motivate people then you’ve already lost.

Not for the participants apparently.

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