Didn’t see what community I was in when I read the post and thought there were just a lot of people here who hate stand up comedians doing crowd work
I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.
Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.
It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.
I hate crowd work. Getting called on while on a night out is my worst nightmare
Just don’t answer the comedian, or don’t sit close lol
The purpose of stand up is to not listen to anything and say a sentence that no one listens to. It’s like a Buddhist meditation.
Yeah - it’s an art to find the perfect mix between “sounds complicated enough that they zone out”, “sounds like stuff gets done” and “not making people ask if you need help with that”.
Lemmy keeps it real.
lol I hope your standups are not actually like this! The purpose is to, as a team, plan what the team will do today to achieve the Sprint goal
I’m not actually a programmer (/engineer) I’m just a hobbyist. I work in supply chain, have worked at 4 companies in 8 years - all had stand ups, all of them are like this.
Err… Is your team doing planning during standup? I’ve never heard of that, from either people who are on teams that use standups, or from any of the Agile/Scrum literature that I’ve seen. In my experience, standups are typically about either a) coordinating the execution of work that has already been committed to, or b) whoops just a status meeting and everybody’s tuned out.
Ah, I see how my wording was confusing. I mean planning in the sense of “How will we complete the work that we already committed to?” and “What will we do today to achieve our Sprint goal?”
I arrived at the word planning because Scrum is sometimes described as a planning-planning-feedback-feedback cycle. You plan the Sprint, you plan daily (Daily Scrums), you get feedback on your work (Sprint Review), and you get feedback on your process (Sprint Retrospective).
Thanks for explaining. I still think “planning” is a weird way to think about what’s supposed to happen during standup-- It seems to me that the whole purpose of working in sprints (and the rituals that that typically entails) is to plan ahead so that during the week you can execute on well-groomed, properly-scoped work. Of course when you notice something is wrong, or needs to be reconsidered, you might need to pull the brakes and realign mid-sprint, but my sense is that if you’re doing planning every day, that might mean that your work isn’t groomed well enough beforehand, or you’re not locking in important decisions during sprint planning.
But it might depend on the work, and it might depend on what you mean by “planning.” If your planning just looks like “Hey are you free to pair on issue 123 this afternoon? Okay sweet, I’ll throw a meeting in your calendar,” then yeah sure-- I wouldn’t use the word “planning” for that, but it’s not crazy to. Or maybe the work is different than my work, and actually does warrant some amount of day-level of planning that wouldn’t make sense for teams I’ve been on. I’m open to that, too.
(Btw I tried to look up this “planning planning feedback feedback cycle” thing and the only search results I got were THIS LEMMY THREAD, lol… Cool to see Lemmy show up in search results)
If this actually rings true, there’s something pretty wrong in your team.
Stand up should be a quick and uncontroversial meeting talking about what you’ve done, what you’ll do and anything you need help with, plus maybe a couple of minutes of small talk before you start.
You mean you’re not actually supposed to spend 2 hours daily unfucking everyone’s shit during the standup turn by turn?
We waste the two hours doing code reviews that only three people actually need to be present for, I always appreciate the chance to zone out and do something else for a big part of the day. Follow that with lunch and I’ve just done half a day’s work by watching TV
My team does this for the first ~15 minutes and then we move to “group think” for any tough problems or “water cooler chat” for the remaining 15. You’re allowed to leave if it’s just water cooler chat, so I really like it
That sounds about 25 mins longer than i’m willing to call a standup.
if it’s not wrapped up within 10 mins of the scheduled start time something has gone horribly wrong
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Real. Or in my case I’m depressed and fucked up and just haven’t found the motivation to even open my IDE…
Problem is in practice, I suspect something is pretty wrong in most teams.
Some common examples come to my mind:
- Management hears “talk about what you’ve done and what you will do” so great time to sit in and take notes for performance review, and it becomes a “make sure management knows you spent all your time and did really impressive stuff” meeting. Also throws a kink in “things I need help with” as there’s always the risk that management decides you aren’t self sufficient enough if they hear you got stuck, so you also need to defend why you got stuck and how it isn’t your fault.
- The people who feel like everyone needs to know the minutia of their trials and tribulations including all the intermediate dead ends they went down on the way to their final result. Related to the above, but there are people who think to do this even without the need to impress management.
- The people who cannot stand to “take it offline” and will stop everything to fully work a problem while everyone is still ostensibly supposed to stay in the meeting despite having nothing to do with the two people talking (sometimes even just one, a guy starts talking to himself as he tries to do something live).
- Groups that are organized but have very little common ground. An “everything must be scrum” company sticks a guy who does stuff like shipping and receiving into a development team and there’s no ‘scrum-like’ interaction to be had and yet, there he is wasting his time and having to talk about stuff no one else on that meeting has a need to hear either.
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Once, if it’s Ricky Gervais
If I ever was in a room with him, I’d ask if he thinks there’s ever a situation where a comedian should have priorities beyond getting a laugh. He seems to operate on the assumption it’s a no, and I want to hear him openly say that, or else have the opportunity to call him out.
Hm. Might not be standup that’s the problem. Might be a company culture thing. But only you know that for sure. Good luck op! Disassociation can be a life saver.
Yeah but then I’m up and sitting there like “oh shit, what the hell did I do yesterday?”
Stand ups (as originally described) shouldn’t be about what you already did, but what you are going to be working on and if there is a need to collaborate.
Most people got the concept wrong and turned them into mini status meetings.
Yepp, and no one really listens to the others, just trying to remember what you did and make sure no one dumps more work on you.
True. I’ve worked in pretty small teams with usually 2-4 devs paired, so it kind of worked out as both what we got through, what’s next priority, and how we plan to split out that day. Especially if we were light on stories.
According to the PMBOK (7th edition) by the Project Management Institute (PMI), daily standup is a “brief, daily collaboration meeting in which the team review progress from the previous day, declares intentions for the current day, and highlights any obstacles encountered or anticipated.” Source
To be fair, daily standups are defined however your group collectively decide to define it.
For those who decide to report the work from previous day, it’s expected that you would have made your list before the meeting, not during. It’s a practice I too struggle with. 😊
Thanks
This post is creating company culture by its promotion of ditching coworkers and seeking validation through memes. Disassociation is the problem!
Counterpoint: If you’re working from home it might be the only people contact you get for days.
Supposedly talking to people and touching grass is healthy.
My fear of working full-remote. I mean I got enough friends, but still that’s significant less social time, when not being in something like a coworking space… Although other benefits are really tempting (like 2 to 3 times the salary)
Wait, you earn more to not commute?
I mean I can just take a job in the states, they pay quite a bit more there compared to Europe, and it can be even more targeted in the area of my interest (low-level stuff in Rust which pays even better than what I can find here)… Locally the jobs are pretty limited (at least those that interest me)… Everyone wants Java/C# or JS devs here (all languages I’ll try to avoid, and I suspect it has to do with maintaining old (tech-debt) code-bases which I try to avoid even more)… But I’m quite happy with my team currently and just have rant about JS everyday, but at least don’t have to maintain tech-debt (at least not something that I haven’t produced myself^^)… And I get great food for free… Hmm trade-offs.
Hmm, are they finally hiring internationally? Americans are historically funny about that.
I mean at least the jobs that interest me often are also (full) remote, but I’m mostly interested in start-ups, they seem to be more open with it (and the job descriptions sound more interesting). I think Covid did its job there, unlike it seems for big tech?
the more i learn about software development, the more i feel I’ve dodged a bullet by changing my major to electrical engineering.
Well, if you learn about software development from reddit and Lemmy, that’s one thing. Not always representative of the real world.
its the things I hear from real software developers that concern me:
- You will spend your entire career chasing trends.
- The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.
- Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.
- Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.
- Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.
- You will spend your entire career chasing trends.
Depends on the language, that’s mostly a JavaScript/typescript issue.
- The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.
Depends on the country, where I’m from there has been very few layoffs.
- Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.
Not sure what to say, I haven’t felt my value decrease. All I see are bubbles saying they will replace me… and then they burst.
Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.
Agree but that’s more of an engineering wide problem, specially when you get managers with very few engineering experience. Take the Apollo landings as an opposite example: great managers that were great engineers.
- Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.
This is a bit too generic to argue against. You can get that in electrical engineering no? If you take more time designing that PCB because you want to better place the components to improve heat dissipation, will your manager care in the end?
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Just send the robot instead!
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My boss doesn’t do meetings. Every once in a while he approves my vacation request and I get notified it’s approved. Sounds better than it is, but it is better than pointless daily meetings. Adult daycare crap.
My boss is usually doing WFM and HR duties instead of her own, so no meetings for me either! So far I have a perfect performance record!
My new boss just cancelled all of our daily standup meetings that were introduced by the previous management. Reason given: “I have seen nothing valuable here during the last two weeks.”
I like him.
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Lol our standup+parking lot is scheduled for an hour. Kill me.
I’ve fought this battle so many times.
My most recent battle was being told to implement Scrum and agile practices. When the subject of standup NOT being a status update came up, and I forcibly told people to keep their updates brief, it was changed to a “Sync Meeting” that lasted over an hour. Apparently, despite delivering stuff faster, being able to track velocity and ensure we’re not overextending ourselves each “sprint”, and actually knowing what we’re delivering through actionable tasks - we’re not doing agile any more…
It took me a year but I broke my team of this habit. The trick was to remind them that the parking lot shouldn’t be scheduled. The whole point is that you continue conversations organically so that it’s more like the beginning of a working session instead of the end of a meeting.
*more than 30 seconds to a minute?
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I’m happy when it just takes that amount of time, because everything else is just a waste of time…
The stand-ups at my job have turned into sit downs
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That’s the exact problem I have with it
I get every week or so, but every day is just way too much. I’m a big kid, that’s what you hired me for, let me work.
Also then there are Jour Fixes and standups for the side projects you got rented out too and and and
Jour Fixe
I don’t think they use that term in English. And even more surprising, they don’t even use it in French. It’s a French loanword that somehow only exists in German.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I love these linguistic quirks.
It absolutely gets used in English speaking companies. I’ve got one in my work calendar as a reoccurring event.
I’ve lived in the US for about half a century and have never heard this.
Just to be sure, who created the invite? A German native speaker by chance?
The first page of results when I deliberately google in English “what is a Jour Fixe” are the following:
- Blog entry in English written by someone from a Liechtensteiner Organisation
- Blog entry in English written about the German usage of the Term
- English Wiktionary entry
- German Wikipedia article
- Blog entry in English written by someone from a German Organisation
- Translation website treating it as a German term
- Blog entry in English written by someone from Austria
- Translation website treating it as a German term
- Blog entry in German
- Blog entry in German
Some of that may be personalized to me as a Swiss user of course. But it seems a bit much to be a coincidence. Maybe it is a loan word making its way from German into English now.
I speak a little bit of German, but no, the guy who created the series is a native English speaker with Afrikaans as his second language.
If I was a in charge of a business I would put a hard email filter (including externally) on corporate jargon because it is too vague and people just use it to seem smarter than they really are. The no-reply would give a lengthy explanation on why it’s bad practice.
Hmm, I wonder how often it would generate a false positive and force someone to reword something innocuous. My guess is that it would be relatively rare.
Dope. Put garbage language where it belongs.
Most standups are bad because they’re not used as a quick collaboration tool, they’re used as a demonstration to prove you’re working, and then the least productive people talk the most because they’re the most desperate to prove they’re working.
Right along with story points.
Not meant to be a measurement of time, but of effort. But everyone ends up using them as a measure of time because that is what the MBA at the end of the tables wants.
My current company treats effort the same as time. I can appreciate that they’re at least honest about that lol
But stand-up comedy has something for everyone!
Oh, this is about the depressing nexus between programming and corporate culture. Carry on.
I called in sick today so I could skip all the meetings lol
I love how bright bulbs have utterly perverted the spirit of agile development into something so horrible that people are memifying ignoring it rather than trying to fix it.
Repeat after me: If standup takes any more than a minute or two per person you’re really really doing it wrong and it isn’t standup anymore and needs to be staked, buried and the earth salted that it may never rise again.
For an act of socially immature but oh so satisfying passive aggressive resistance, leave a copy of the Agile Manifesto on your scrum master’s desk :)
(Or, if you think they’d be receptive, talk to them about moving long form reporting to any other medium so stand-up can be a simple meeting where folks give blocked/not blocked status and, where blocked, resources are directed to help.
that’s it.
Stand-ups where Mortimer from the Front End team gives a 30 minute treatise on why react is a horrible fit for your application ARE IN FACT NOT STAND-UPS.
They’re just poorly run meetings in an agile trench coat.
