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Comment by fook-dang | Hacker News Reader

"prevent developer burnout."

...Frankly I think all the standups & the pressure from constantly asking me if I am contributing (every single day?!) instead of trusting that I am... burns me out.

I don't mind 2-3 standups per week, 15 mins max.

But 5x 30 minute standups... Is exhausting. It feels like a lack of trust from product managers.

Oh yeah... and unqualified, zero engineering experience, diversity-hire product managers. That's super annoying-- being managed by people who did not obtain their role via the route expected of an engineer (having demonstrable engineering skills)

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If you read about agile, standups are supposed to be conducted among the dev team members who are working together on something, and primarily for their benefit, not as a status update to or for someone else. The PM or whoever is considered the "product owner" in scrum could listen in and help unblock issues, or report delays to other people, but not demand more information or change things up that have already been planned. Of course, it actually working this way is rare, although I have seen it.

I haven't really seen this, but a poorly performing product manager or product owner completely breaks the scrum or agile model (to the extent it works at all). They are assumed to basically know the domain and know what needs to be built at a high level, and the software requirements originate from them in the scrum model. If they don't know what the requirements should be or how to communicate them or how to collaborate with the engineers on the requirements, it is completely garbage-in-garbage-out. On the other hand, working with a product owner who is a domain expert and happy to help define software to solve their needs can be a joy.

The equation of "agile = standups" has done more harm to agile (and projects using it) than anything else. I run a company and we use a lot of agile project planning methods, but threw out the standup. Especially in the era of remote work and varying timezones, it makes no sense at all.

That's all kinds of wrong. A stand-up is supposed to take 15 minutes max, and if no one is stuck with anything, it shouldn't take more than just a couple of minutes. It's not supposed to be a "status meeting" at all.

Unfortunately, in practice,that doesn't seem to happen very often.

It’s a synchronization primitive, not the only kind available but most popular. It should not be 30min. Maybe 10.

And it’s not a test of your contribution. It’s part of being a team.

"Why is it called a stand-up meeting?"

"So we are incentivized to get it done quickly and go back to our desks."

"Ah, so if we sit down we can make the meeting longer...."

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