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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I had a micromanager who hit everyone with 3 to 4 status pings per day. Even on work-from-home days, which defeats the point. His status pinging was a compulsion like email checking, but it eventually caused the team to fail.

Consequently, I hate status meetings and standups and the various so-called Scr(ot)um tactics used to make people feel watched. I realize they're probably necessary as an occasional annoyance, but I think they're an unnecessary pain in the ass most of the time. Their real purpose is to intimidate people into being productive, and that Theory-X bullshit doesn't work in the modern economy.

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I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation".

You might want to speak to your manager next time something like that is happening, because there's no way it can be good for your productivity or the other people on your team. It's certainly not a normal practice. At the very worst, if someone isn't pulling their weight they should be dealt with in private.

A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other words, standup pretty much kill half the day.

Can you really say they are worth it?

Our standups are at 11:45, so we have impetus to keep it brief and get to lunch. In any case, even if it does cut into a stretch of programming, it serves as an invaluable reminder to go get lunch.

Yeah, I agree that I'd be annoyed with standup at any time before 11:30, but 11:45 is perfect and basically doesn't interfere with anything. In a certain sense it doesn't cost any dev time at all if you take it for granted that your developers should stop coding midway through the day and eat lunch. (We absolutely do not eat lunch during standup - we have standup, then we physically leave the office to go eat.) Sure, some days we end up in endless meetings which mean we're stuck in the building eating takeout, but that has nothing to do with standup.

We experimented with 10 AM scrum but I found that if I came to the office at 9ish, I used to get distracted with the thought of Scrum. Eventually, we decided to move it to the afternoons at 4:30 which works out well because you are almost done with your work day and you can get distracted all you want.

The goal is 45 seconds a developer not 5 minutes. Round up to 10 minutes a day * 5 days a week = one 50 minute developer meeting a week which is fairly common.

PS: You do lose a little time gathering, and people generally spend some time organizing there thoughts etc. But, keeping track of a short synopsis is useful, as is knowing what other people are working on, and most importantly when someone get's stuck working on the same things for a few days. It also adds a lot of pressure to get at least one thing done every day, which many people slack on.

A 30 minute standup counters the whole idea of a 'standup' meeting.

10 people seems like a very large team for a single project, do you have multiple teams in the same standup? If that's the case then you're certainly wasting time as cross project communication is only rarely going to be useful.

You can do standup meetings in lots of different ways. Our standups are maybe 5min max for a team of 6 and they're very worth it.

The problem is trying to communicate this to management. I was told that standups are non-optional.

Yeah, but next you'll tell us at your standups you actually stood up. No one gave me an answer when I asked why they called our meeting standup meetings.

In my current project we do actually stand up, although only due to the pleasure of the team leader. The main reason it's called a "stand up" is to serve as a reminder that it should be very short, 5 minutes max, or otherwise the time most people would feel comfortable standing for a meeting.

Yeah, thanks for the answer. I was being facetious, because our micromanager would divert the meetings to be daily 25 minute meetings! Daily.

There is a large set of humans who get more work done when they're held accountable for it. I'm one of them. Call it "intimidating people into being productive" if you must, but it works. Even in the "modern economy."

The manager in the example you gave was indeed taking things a bit far.

We have a daily meeting that's not supposed to exceed 15 minutes. We're still trying to get into the swing of making that happen. But I find them invaluable for learning what other people are up to that day. And they frequently result in people being able to solve their problems after the meeting because someone else was able to help.

This sort of daily communication can be really helpful. But it's also really easy for it to devolve into a long meeting that's much less useful. And if management is using it to apply pressure to get more work done, they're making a huge mistake.

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