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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and getting everyone together for a few minutes is a pretty high ROI activity.

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Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then.

My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.

It's still valuable to share information about progress and impediments with the whole team. Alice and Bob may have some blocker that they've been communicating about, but Chris wasn't a part of those one-on-one conversations, so the standup gives him some valuable context about what's going on with the rest of the team. Maybe his work depends on something Bob was supposed to complete today that's going to take a few more days, or maybe he's encountered a similar problem before and has some advice, or maybe he'll remember the issue when something similar pops up later on. Alice and Bob would have resolved the blocker themselves, but this helps make sure the information is shared across the team in a way that simply moving cards on a kanban board wouldn't communicate.

If you need a designated meeting for communicating with your teammate you already failed the qualification of highly functioning team.

The point is that it's a teammate who wouldn't ordinarily be involved in resolving the issue. There's still value in them learning about it.

Sometimes, but most of the time it's probably going to waste their time (times ten).

I disagree. Especially with remote teams, standups are how I find out that other people on the opposite end of my team are blocked on something I can easily help them with, or that they're doing something that has implications on my own work. I communicate with some people continually. There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.

This is exactly what the parent is calling out. Using a standup as a bandaid for fundamental team behavior.

> There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.

If that's a problem, it's a sign that the team is not functioning well. Standups can be a band-aid for the issue while a real solution is being developed, but it isn't a long-term solution in and of itself.

I think that there is separation between intentional knowledge transfer and accidental. It's great as an opportunity for accidental knowledge transfer, where one developer didn't know she could ask for help by another developer. Or that task can be picked up because it hasnt changes the status yet( not released) but other can start working if needed.

I've begun to believe that all of this ceremony is driven from an unspoken belief that well functioning software teams are a myth.

sure it would be great if people raised issues themselves instead of skulking. were proactive, took pride in their work, engaged joyfully with their collaborators, and developed real consensus and velocity.

but that's just a fairy tale. developers are generally useless, stubborn, lazy, petty, and fundamentally disorganized. lets not shoot for the moon and try to get them to work together. lets just dumb the whole thing down to try to get _something_ out of them.

> but in a well-functioning team

I think the routine maintenance is key for staying well-functioning. The problem is that once things are not functioning well it may be too far along to fix.

So it’s like saying why should married couples have routine date nights because if they were well functioning, they wouldn’t need to schedule. The point is to function well and it’s a useful technique.

But since in a well-functioning team everyone knows where everyone else is already, there is nothing that can be said in a standup that isn't already on everyone's radar.

Maybe I'm just unusually fortunate to have mostly worked on well-functioning teams.

Part of the way they achieve that knowledge is through the standup though.

Maybe you are super fortunate. Standups are just one method too. It’s not like it’s dogma and must be followed.

But it’s a useful technique. So saying it’s unnecessary seems odd. At least generally speaking.

yeah, getting alignment across the team and doing a vibe check at the cost of ten minutes seems pretty reasonable to me, the questions are basically just variants on "how's it going?"

They are too specific, formulaic, and reek of management tactics. If you mean, "how's it going?", say, "how's it going?" As the wise Dr. Seuss said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant."

Hows it going is too vague for many. Every ask a kid what they learned at school today? The answer is always "nothing", or silence. You need to ask a different question to get a good answer.

Which is one reason look for and ask different questions - if may break someone out of a rut.

If you answer "fine" to "how's it going" at standup, you aren't doing your job. It's not the prompt that needs to be specific, it's the engineer. If there are follow up questions, those can be asked, but asking the same three specific but thoughtless questions is just like having a form you have to fill out any time you make a change.

And kids aren’t doing their job by saying “nothing.”

It’s easier to change the questions to improve responses.

Yeah but that's to be expected because they are kids. If your coworkers act like children, that's a problem; they should act like adults because they should be adults. What's easy usually isn't what's right.

It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like humans.

If it’s easier to tweak questions or retrain everyone on my team, me included, I’m going with the easier path every time.

In this case easy is right because the specific question isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the community, discussion, and information shared.

I don’t think so. People know what the purpose of a standup is. You don’t even need a prompt to get one going, just have everyone go around in a circle and talk. They will do it automatically. Isn’t this basically the point of the article?

The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management.

If you are looking for a social event that's what happens at lunch over an hour while sitting not a 5 minute standup where everyone is trying to say just enough so they can get back to work.

It's sad the standups are considered a social event. Back in the good old days you finished your work chilled on a cheap startup couch while two others played ping pong and you chatted. Or you met up a bar after and threw darts. What have we sold ourselves lately?

How do you meet up at a bar when your team is 1000 miles away?

Well, yes, exactly.

> Back in the good old days [...] What have we sold ourselves lately?

Fly everyone to one place so they can do this. Twice a year is good - enough that it is a good vacation/team building exercise, not so much that people feel like they are married to their job not their spouse.

> The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management.

Speak for yourself. My team has a small window of overlapping time zones and it's a valuable opportunity to get everyone together and sync on all our projects. But our work is all loosely interrelated, so that's actually something we need to do.

It's not a "social event" in the sense that you all get to hang out and make friends. It's a social event in the sense that it's an opportunity to verbally engage with your colleagues in a group setting.

I agree that standup makes little sense on a team of people who are all working on unrelated projects. The silliest thing you can do here is assume that what works for you will work for everyone, and what doesn't work for you won't work for anyone.

My company makes a big point in work-life balance. We can meet up in a bar to throw darts at most 2 times per year - anything more and we are impacting family time. Lunch is a good social time, but that is personal time and often better spent meeting with people not on the team (some always go home, some meet with old team members...) Your team should meet during your normal 40 hour work week (or whatever hours you work) for team social time.

Meeting up over lunch doesn't work for remote teams. Nothing worse than eating while on camera. No thank you, I've tried and it's really not great. Especially if you have a hybrid team where some people are in the office eating together in a conference room and some are remote solos, the dynamics get really weird.

One of the biggest benefits to a synchronous standup is you know everyone has showed up and is available to discuss work stuff. With remote teams and flexible schedules, having a hard sync point helps people communicate better, even if it's just "hey, let's stay on the call (or start a new one) for an extra 10 minutes to sort this out" instead of spending hours or days in async communication.

Or just message someone and ask them if they have a few minutes for a call?

Why do you need a extra meeting to have a sync point to ask for a quick chat.

Just fucking talk to your team mates! Is everyone in kindergarten now?

Sure, we get it. But when you add forced rituals to the mix (such as the very worst: coerced standing), it ends up being just numbing and grating, especially over time.

And when it gets to the point where you can just tell that most people are mouthing something to check boxes, while checking out, internally -- in that sense, it basically defeats the intended purpose.

Agreed.

I also do not see any value in the current questions; individual status should be communicated with in a tracking tool.

The standup is a chance to get everyone together, raise and share any issues or clever solutions or whatever, maybe get a 'feel' for status, and tell some jokes. It should be short, maybe extremely short sometimes.

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