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Comment by fortylove | Hacker News Reader

I came to dislike standup at Amazon.

Everyday we had one to start the day, and people never talked about their blockers. Some folks would give a super brief overview of what they did and will do. This was fine, but not really interesting to have 5 days a week. But then other folks would give a play-by-play of what they did and how, and what they will do next and how they will do it.

It's like sounding busy was more important than the rest of team's time and sanity.

Personally, I think it's more helpful to just have a daily team 30 minutes scheduled to discuss any important topics, vs specifically to have a status updates. The actual standup function where people prefer updates can happen >= 1 day a week && < 5 days a week

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It's a slippery slope. If there's one guy that gives a 3 minute update, he'll look more productive than the guy that gives 30 second update. So the next day 30s guy will fill his update with unnecessary details to look as productive.

The cure is constantly being aware of that bias. And remembering that main audience for standups is not your manager, it's your peers. Talk about things you want them to know.

There's a lot of subtle tricks that people don't even use/remember at this point. Like doing standups while actually physically standing. This creates a negative feedback loop instead of positive: if someone talks too much, the whole team will pushback.

we combatted the bias factor by having managerless standups, and a designated (rotating) person just takes notes and forwards them to the manager.

Its actually fine. Management has repeatedly admitted they get little out of standups when there isn't a managerial level blocker (IE, we need them to interface with a team) and the concise written note updates allow them to see patterns of issues and address them more holistically.

For engineers, it got rid of the implicit bias talked about here.

Our standups are like 5 minutes or less now, and blockers / collaboration on blockers is way more common.

This also made the stakeholder check in every two weeks way more productive, people I think shifted their look what I did and how I did it energies to that meeting, where its 100% more appropriate.

I really like that.

Having management present can subconsciously push people to turn standups into a productivity contest.

in the notes, is there information about who did what or not?

I hesitate to broadly interpret this, but notes are not meant or used to "keep score", and if things can be explained without naming people they are, for sure, but

"person A is going to help person B to unblock them because of x y z" is about as detailed as one needs to be, usually.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean here?

You actually answered my question, thanks. I was/am just curious about which person has the decision power about who works on which part. But I guess it goes something like: person A tries to solve X. If he can't solve it, he asks the team and someone in the team will try helping. If the problem cannot be solved within a reasonable timeframe, then someday management will ask what's going on.

No manager in the meeting. No one to impress. Everybody stands. Light banter at the beginning because we're a team. One person leads the standup, round robin each time. Standup leader takes notes to paste in chat after, hurries people the f up if they're going on and on. Lastly, if you are late to standup even by 1 minute, you have to sing a song of Standup Leader's choice.

Yeah. "Let's take that offline/out of the meeting" when someone talks longer than 1 minute (longer than 30 seconds if it's a larger team).

By the way, I was at a place that did XP, and one of the rules was that if there was a meeting, there had to be food. What that did is, if someone was talking too much, someone would ask them "Are you going to eat that?" That, um, gently if not subtly told them to stop talking so much. Also, it meant that we got to snack.

we used to call ‘parking lot’ as in ‘Let’s take this outside’. Then when the standup ended, those that wanted to get in on the topics on the parking lot would stick around.

And for every minute you ran late, you had to do a push up.

It's not supposed to be a slippery slope. This is where a functioning "Scrum Master" is supposed to tell that person to stop talking and move on to the next person. That never actually happens though, so the next best scenario is light shaming of the guy who talks too long. If you have bad managers or too many people with management anxiety then it can be good to kick them out of the meeting.

I understand that this is how it is supposed to work in theory. But realistically most startups don't (and dare I say shouldn't) have the luxury of a dedicated Scrum Master.

Another thing I don't like is that it relies on humans to do a good job. How do you hire a good Scrum Master if you've never been one yourself? Hires like that are usually hit or miss. What if you need to hire ten of those?

> But then other folks would give a play-by-play of what they did and how, and what they will do next and how they will do it.

Saw a principal engineer do that. He would take what could be summarized in a sentence or two and spend 5+ minutes describing it.

Same guy once rejected a PR and made me initialize a field to null instead of empty string, his rationalization is that he's been both a DBA and a developer over his 7 year career, so he knows better. than apparently the entire industry that's been moving away from code like that for the last 10+ years.

yes, you read that right. 7 years, not all of it in software dev, working as a principal engineer.

politics are a bitch sometimes.

> take what could be summarized in a sentence or two and spend 5+ minutes describing it

Don't hate the player, hate the game. I had a job that required weekly status updates by e-mail (cc-ed to the entire team for some reason). My updates went on for pages. If somebody asked me to look at something and it took more than 10 minutes, that went on my status report: "Worked with so-and-so to do such-and-such"). My boss confided in me that could tell what I was doing and he appreciated it. Why? Because he summarized those statuses into a big, long (the longer the better) update e-mail to his boss.

If you incentivize stupidity, you're going to get stupidity, even from smart people. Especially from smart people.

> If you incentivize stupidity, you're going to get stupidity

Has anyone here had experience with daily standups done exclusively over Slack (or similar service)?

To me it seems like it would mitigate some of the downsides like people talking too much. And being asynchronous and in written form is a big plus to me. I can just skim through it quickly rather than sit through a monotonous daily meeting.

at one company we did a project wide daily standup on irc. all teams, about 50 people would report all at once at a specific time of day. there was a bot that would track that everyone has reported, and that was it. as a developer i would look at the report log to see if anyone was touching issues that i was working on, and if so possibly talk to that person later to see if there was anything we needed to coordinate. likewise i'd look if anyone reported blockers where i could help.

Forcing introverts to get out of the comfort zone and talk to each other has lots of benefits.

Async Slack gives everyone the opportunity to tune out, which they definitely will.

A blocker can be resolved either on the standup or during a quick follow-up call that happens right after. Going async risks that the same blocker will be resolved in 1-2 days.

I strongly recommend against it.

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