My eyes rolled back so hard I'm not sure they'll ever face forward again.
Lotta good stuff in this essay, but that one missed the mark a bit.
I'm normally concerned when that seems to be going on, especially in a startup...
For example, in a big company, the problems and coordination and politics are usually hard... so you might "thrive" if all you need to do is sprint tasks, you feel individually unblocked and productive, your individual metrics/reviews look good, and maybe your team looks good as far as anyone can tell.
I'd be careful with that in an early startup, which usually (unless it's more a "growth" scheme) needs to be more effective, efficient, and creative than a large, entrenched company.
(You can have some people be doing such brilliant holistic coordination in a startup, so that others can just go through routines and rituals, with their ducks lined up to plink, and get the right great startup execution out the other end... But I don't know how often or how well that actually happens.)
1) Is this process working to the satisfaction of the team?
2) Anyone have anything else to discuss about it?
And it should be perfectly fine for it to be less than one minute most weeks.
Several dev teams I've been on want retrospectives to help review and make things better. But those places are where devs have a lot of autonomy and ability to change how things operate in the team.
I've seen and been on teams that align more with your reaction but those are at jobs where where the dev teams have very little say in how they do things. Well that or it's filled with a lot of cynical people that don't actually care about what they are doing and don't have much desire for things to improve (they actively fight to keep the status quo).
Which leads me to: great, you are a "VP of Engineering" but there is little to justify why I should believe you are an exemplar of that title/position. The LinkedIn isn't a fraud, but it isn't full of any formal management degrees, IT coursework, IT Management coursework. I don't see companies whose products are on the front lines of foundational technology, scale, or quality.
Frankly, the resume is full of 1 year hopscotches. That... doesn't really tell me they are battletested. I get IT is an industry with zero respect for the neckbeard, and yeah they went to Yale, so they are of a minimum floor of hard work and intellect.
There are people out there with 40 years of experience in IT, and probably 30 years of management, with stories of massive failures, grace under fire, and the usual stories Machiavellian fake smiles to navigate.
And plugging a "Organizational Health" book is hilarious when you are a startup. Yeah, there are lots of unhealthy startups, but the really hard organizational health problems are long standing companies with the "dead pool" effect that chased away the best people, long standing feuds/grudges, sociopathic/paranoid wars over diminishing resource pools and budgets, and deep problems with legacy systems that need to be updated.
A startup? That's peanuts in comparison.
I don’t just sit around thinking “god I had a schedule I was stressed about keeping. You know what I need right now? A two hour meeting with eight people including my boss and my boss’s boss where I have nothing to say and nothing to hear. If I could pick one thing to change in my life, it would be that I have to go to bed early every single fucking day because I’m worried if I don’t I won’t get enough sleep and it’ll be a struggle to wake up and do work early tomorrow morning.”
Fuck your routine. I thrive on control. Let me have control.
In my experience, places that lack things like them are either small, and don't need them, or large, and in constant chaos.