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0 pointskaratestomp6y ago0 comments

> If you tell engineers that standups can go async or be cancelled if they're ineffective, they will find creative ways to make the standups ineffective.

What the hell? Have you actually seen this happen? I can't imagine someone jettisoning something that makes their work-life easier and is an extremely low time commitment, just because you tell them they can. I can imagine them changing it to something else if that's more useful and cheaper, time-wise, or getting rid of it if it's of very low utility. Lots and lots of standups are the latter, from the IC's perspective. A lot of "talk to the manager who's the actual audience for the meeting, everyone else dozes off" standups. "Ten people and only two others are actually on my project, and we talk all the time anyway". That kind of thing. Plenty of that out there. I could see them wanting to get rid of those. I mean if people are putting so little effort into the standup that it makes them bad, and the standup is for them, supposedly, then maybe that's a sign it isn't valuable to them?

> If you tell people the standup can go away if it's bad, you've accidentally incentivized those people to make it bad enough to get it cancelled.

Again, this makes no sense unless from their perspective it already is bad and they just need to convince you it is, too.

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PragmaticPulp6y ago· 2 in thread

> What the hell? Have you actually seen this happen?

Yes, this is from personal experience.

> I can't imagine someone jettisoning something that makes their work-life easier and is an extremely low time commitment, just because you tell them they can.

Look at it from a different angle: If you tell people you're thinking about replacing standups with something more efficient, you've tipped your hand that the current situation might be inefficient. Suddenly, people lose interest in participating in the status quo because even management doesn't believe it works, so the quality of preparation and engagement goes down. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the standups become more and more useless over time.

On a similar topic: I worked in a department that tried to adopt a version of Elon Musk's famous "If you're not adding value, walk out of a meeting" rule. The people who hated meetings made it a point to not add any value in meetings, so they could get up and leave as soon as possible. This forced everyone else to have followup 1:1s with the people who walked out so they could be essentially re-capture their required meeting participation.

> Again, this makes no sense unless from their perspective it already is bad and they just need to convince you it is, too.

Two different topics. People can still dislike standups even if they're helpful.

A lot employees are drawn to work concepts that reduce their workload at the expense of their manager's. It's less efficient to make a manager play a game of telephone to spread information around than it is to get everyone together for a 15-minute standup, but if someone thinks they can reclaim those 15 minutes and force their manager to bring them any relevant info, it's a net win. In the real world, this becomes an inefficient and lossy system, but it sounds good if all you see is an extra 15 minutes saved in your day.

gowld6y ago

That's hugely backwards, sacrificing 10 people's time to help 1 is what's inefficient.

karatestompOP6y ago

> If you tell people you're thinking about replacing standups with something more efficient, you've tipped your hand that the current situation might be inefficient.

Oh, well yeah, if you put it like that you might have a problem. "These processes are for you, if they're not serving the team or if you think something else could work better, let's talk about it and fix it" as a blanket policy for agile policies (which is supposed to be the norm in agile) is another thing entirely.

> On a similar topic: I worked in a department that tried to adopt a version of Elon Musk's famous "If you're not adding value, walk out of a meeting" rule. The people who hated meetings made it a point to not add any value in meetings, so they could get up and leave as soon as possible. This forced everyone else to have followup 1:1s with the people who walked out so they could be essentially re-capture their required meeting participation.

I have a feeling better meeting planning & pre-meeting communication would fix that and let you retain the "walk out if you can" rule, if desired, but it'd probably have to be so good that it'd far exceed the norm for that sort of thing, so yeah, probably impractical most places.

> A lot employees are drawn to work concepts that reduce their workload at the expense of their manager's. It's less efficient to make a manager play a game of telephone to spread information around than it is to get everyone together for a 15-minute standup, but if someone thinks they can reclaim those 15 minutes and force their manager to bring them any relevant info, it's a net win. In the real world, this becomes an inefficient and lossy system, but it sounds good if all you see is an extra 15 minutes saved in your day.

Yeah, that's probably true in some cases. I still think if you're having 15 minute standups and cutting that doesn't reduce total time for the process, that's strange. Though, yes, it might cause your manager to spend a little more time on it, personally—but taking two or three minutes to scan standup messages and make sure followups happened where relevant (most days this ought to be basically no work) seems like team lead stuff anyway, not manager stuff, which can just mean "whichever developer you've told to do that" if you don't have a designated lead (~every developer I've met over age 25 is very eager to do anything that can be described as leadership on a résumé so finding someone to take that on ought to be easy) and I'm not sure why a manager'd need to be involved most of the time chatting with anyone but the lead over standup stuff, and then only if their input's needed to unblock something or bring in someone outside the team who's too far above the lead's "pay grade" for them to do it themselves, which'd usually be a "let's talk after the standup" conversation anyway (though maybe not, I guess, if they're taking more than five minutes flat).

overgard6y ago

As an IC, I've honestly just not attended many (any?) standups that provided value to me. I understand if it's for someone elses benefit, but that someone else is most assuredly not me.

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