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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

I've assumed the 2pizza-thing was based on something like 'familjepizza' rather than the regular swedish size.

I agree about team size, 3-5 is good, any larger and people will start wandering off on their own or create cliques.

I'm also not a fan of "sync standups", that's micro management garbage. A three minute 'i'm blocked, who can help?' or 'no blockers today' session, that's the sweet spot. If someone wants a report on progression and so on they can book a meeting with a clear agenda in advance and the relevant people can prepare and do a succinct description of where they're at. No meeting that takes more than five minutes and doesn't have a set agenda should ever be held.

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I'm mostly with you. However, dailies are little "dayplanners" for the team, too. For the benefit of the team as a whole, I'd suggest more context, like "I'm still on the state machine, but should be done today. After that I'll start on the DB migration. Jenny, I'll ping you then." or "Still fighting the runtime for the Box ticket. I need a second opinion."

Takes only a few seconds more. Of course, the Dev should know beforehand what he is going to say ;)

That's implicit in the blocked/not-blocked. If I care about the state machine I'll flag that I'm blocked and ask if I can help, if I don't then I don't want to hear about it unless you want help and preferably first in a group chat where I can drop in when it suits me and we can share snippets of code and data directly while figuring things out.

Things like planning, ETA:s and the like that management roles are nervous about should be handled in another setting, because these are open-ended activities that might take one minute or thirty and making those decisions requires preparation that should absolutely not, ever, be done during the meeting. This takes discipline on the part of the manager, who has to figure out a clear purpose, who is a relevant participant, ask them individually when they have time, reserve the room or equivalent, write the invitation with agenda, send it out.

Commonly it's more done like 'we have a problem', 'ok, we'll meet after this', and then people waste half an hour doing a defective version of that process as an unnecessary group exercise.

I've been in many 15min meetings that I felt were a good use of time, cause everyone was involved the entire time and the topic was important. Not so many 30min ones; those usually end up being 2 people talking while the rest spectate.

The 2-pizza thing coined by Bezos means 6-8 people.

Three minutes being the sweet spot for me comes with some conditions. For one the team has to be remote first, or real good at async self-organising anyway. One aspect of that is that people show up in the video conference before the meeting starts and do the social idle chatter about sports and television or whatever in advance.

I'm guessing most of those fifteen minute meetings had a set topic, or agenda as I called it previously, and ended as soon as it became clear that it wouldn't be immediately productive or the relevant decisions were made. I've been in many, many fifteen minute meetings where someone spent the entire time in palpation for something that could drag it out for even longer.

It's not uncommon that people are brought into meetings to basically engage in parasocial comforting of someone in a position of leadership they don't have the maturity or competence to perform in, in organisations that did very little to support their assigned leaders. I find this practice quite offensive and that moving away from such ceremonies to people calling a meeting making clear in advance what they want answers to and giving the participants time to prepare paves the way for trust, accountability and flexibility in the work that allows the team to respond better to challenges.

Pretty much. Some 15-minute meetings are bogus after 5 minutes like you said.

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