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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.

That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.

And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.

So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.

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I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.

I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.

The AI is watching your screen and check-ins, it doesn't need to ask you, it knows what you are working on.

It will tell you how much time you spent working on tickets, and how long to spent working on the perfect reply for hacker news.

By that point one would be wise to find another job, because an IT gig wont be any different than a glorified McJob (if it's not eliminated entirely)

> By that point one would be wise to find another job

Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.

Is that not already reflected in the ticket status?

Not if there's a ticket you're sort of but not quite stuck on, and feel uncomfortable updating the ticket status, as it could then prompt your lead to say "well, have you tried X already?" and feel clever about their contribution, while the reality is more complex and then you have to get into an awkward chat with them about why X is a poor idea in this case.

https://www.dailybot.com/ I think we're re-inventing early 2010s development trends with extra steps.

this is literally something my team already does —- you don’t need AI but this does fit with my running theory that AI makes it easier for people to see stupid processes they should change

My employer literally moved to this this week.

That's been around a while in various forms. It's still no replacement for synchronously asking follow up questions and being available for decision making.

But that's what a modern AI agent can do, which previous ones couldn't. If a company gives it full access to the project management system, your previous conversations with it, and its prior conversations with the other team members, I believe it can be quite good at follow up and recommendations. I do absolutely see managers giving it some limited decision making (e.g. "Yes, we should split this subtask off into next sprint") very soon.

Yea but that's not quite the same social pressure and implication of urgency; people are more motivated if they know they're talking to a human. That's my impulsive guess, anyway.

But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.

This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.

Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.

As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.

Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.

> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.

What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time

When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.

>async doesn’t go well with scale,

Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.

>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read

Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.

>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable

Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.

The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them.

Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup.

Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script?

It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec.

You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it.

Now you need three managers. The reason for the 20 person standup is to save money and give lip service to the standup trend.

Same manager with right-sized stand-ups wouldn't cost anymore money, unless that manager is making many multiples over what any of their team makes. It seems more like a kneejerk reaction to not "waste" the manager's time at the expense of the actually-more-important-but-hierarchically-less-important employees.

Easy. Have another team member run the stand up.

Again the problem is that no one is interested in processes to make things better or more efficient and then people blame the process.

The process might have plenty of short comings, but we’ll never know.

>But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether

All of that can happen just fine in a real-time team chat as well - and give people the chance to provide actual context and links, and also check back at the actual discussion later.

Essentially the old "This meeting could be an email. Yeah, but would you actually read the damn email?" thing.

async scales better than sync in this context as on larger teams you might need a queue.

> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.

In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.

Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.

>Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack

If a second "please respond, I need the answer now" Slack message is not enough, you have bigger problems

So add yet more process and bureaucracy instead of following tried and true management techniques of having a synchronous meeting lasting 15 minutes every morning?

This whole thread is about how standups are not “tried and true”.

Ignoring the basics of a simple process doesn’t make the process “bad.”

Over the years I've moved away from thinking of the daily standup as being a way to update everyone on what we're doing. The value in it is having a daily time when everyone on the team sees each other's faces and has a brief conversation. Sometimes it'll be a quick hello, other times we'll talk for half an hour about nothing in particular, but that's valuable on a remote team where it's all to easy to forget that everyone else is a real person.

That's what happy hours and optional team activities are for. After hours gaming groups, book clubs, hobby groups, etc do this much better.

That seems socially punishing for people with other obligations (parents) and anyone who’s just not interested in the activities.

You don't have those things when working remotely. You need to foster social relations at work too; after-work socializing is not a substitute for a collaborative work atmosphere.

You don’t “need” to foster social relations at work. They will naturally arise as people work together. This idea that we need to turn the workplace into a big “family” is nonsensical corporate propaganda pushed by HR departments primarily staffed by women. I promise, most men don’t give a single fuck about “fostering social relationships” at work. The guys I have respected and became the most friendly with at work have been the ones I’m in the trenches with, designing, building, etc. I don’t need to know what Susan in HR’s kid did over the weekend, it’s legitimately useless information to my entire life.

I’ve got ~90 years on this planet at best. I’m not interested in wasting 1/5th of my working career in meetings, listening to people I don’t even know, telling me personal details about their lives I will not retain for more than 5 seconds. To me, it’s genuinely insulting to my time to waste it with these pointless fake displays of familiarity instead of getting to the work at hand and ending the meeting early.

Why would they want to be in trenches with you, collaborate on a project, start a company, or otherwise stick their neck out for you, if they don't know you? They'll pick someone they enjoy rapport with.

No thanks, I have my own hobbies and friends. Activities that primarily benefit work, including team building exercises, should be during paid company time.

People are real whether or not you see their faces or chat daily. Framing daily standups as "humanising" can end up dehumanising those who find enforced face time and small talk uncomfortable or exhausting - especially neurodivergent team members. Inclusivity means recognising that not everyone bonds the same way.

Surprised by the downvotes, honestly. Inclusivity isn't about asking everyone to conform to neurotypical norms - it's about creating space for different ways of working and communicating. If even mentioning that feels unwelcome, that says something worth reflecting on.

I think the issue it that you're speaking to an ideal that doesn't tend to stand up in reality. The reality is if people stop seeing your face in meetings people are less likely to think about you. This may feel good to the stereotypical introvert who just wants to get things done and be left alone. But it can be a career killer. This is very apparent in hybrid companies where folks in the office with incidental face time have an easier time advancing than remote employees regardless of value added. We can state that it's not fair and things should be different and more inclusive but that doesn't do anything to actually make environments more inclusive.

Calling it a "career killer" to avoid constant face time ignores the reality that many people are masking disabilities just to survive daily interactions. Burnout from that kind of masking _is_ a career killer - just a quieter, slower one. We wouldn't tell someone in a wheelchair to "get more visible by taking the stairs." Yet we build ramps, pat ourselves on the back, and ignore invisible disabilities entirely. The fact that this kind of exclusion is still seen as normal - even strategic - should be a source of shame, not resignation.

In my company the career killer is being an immigrant lately.

Whoa! Mind sharing the company?

Yes, I haven't found a new job yet.

Imagine working in a team where you have never seen the face of your coworkers...

Don't even be sure they're real; there are increasingly people who outsource their work to bots these days.

You're looking at this through a neurotypical lens. I've worked in teams where I never saw most people’s faces, and yet we had genuine camaraderie and trust -built through shared work, not video feeds. For many neurodivergent people, faces and expressions aren't sources of connection - they're noise. Video calls can turn into a performance: "Does my face match what I'm saying?" "Did I laugh at the wrong moment?" "Is it my turn to speak yet?" That constant second-guessing burns cognitive energy that could go into actual contribution.

When we treat visible presence as a proxy for being "real," we exclude people who can't - or shouldn't have to - mimic neurotypical behaviour just to belong.

It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting.

Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.

Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.

It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time.

This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating.

On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.

>This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously.

Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you?

Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.

Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever."

A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!

It appears you didn't read my comment, here's the relevant part:

> But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams

Hope this helps.

Oh I read it.

If you're the manager, YOUR job is to figure out how to get the information from the people who owe you a report, not weaponize my presence at a meeting to ferret out people you can't manage to reach.

But honestly the condescending tone of this whole exchange tells me everything I need it to about why you struggle to get information out of people.

Okay, well, if you read my comment saying that sometimes meeting with people outside the team is useful, then you start writing about how I'm wasting the time of people _inside_ my team, then I must have miscommunicated something.

You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there.

My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out.

I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.

> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status

Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?

To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?

Are you intentionally describing having a Slack chat for a project and asking for status updates there?

You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.

You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence).

If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).

> And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.

This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help.

This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.

I've worked with people who want you to put the effort into writing a document or proposal, or even just answering a question on Slack or on Linear, but will spend zero effort themselves actually reading what you give them.

Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part.

In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.

I think this is normal for most people, but I've found that one-on-one's are a way more effective tool for revealing these sorts of situations. A good manager, though, is very rare. Maybe there's some surface area here for AI, to identify landmines workers are stepping on. Who knows, maybe AI should just be the ones attending meetings.

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