I called in sick today so I could skip all the meetings lol
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 hate crowd work. Getting called on while on a night out is my worst nightmare
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but I’m retarded and don’t want my team to know I’ve been struggling to make a proper AWS SQS topic policy for the past three days
Real. Or in my case I’m depressed and fucked up and just haven’t found the motivation to even open my IDE…
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
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.
My first and third job had daily standup, my second and fourth job don’t have daily standup. I’m on my fourth job. I love not having standup.
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.
Thanks
This post is creating company culture by its promotion of ditching coworkers and seeking validation through memes. Disassociation is the problem!
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.
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.
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.
I like stand-up. It’s probably the only time of the day I see my coworkers. Also we don’t do status reports or anything so maybe I’m just lucky ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
The worst thing about standups is that about once a month I catch a problem early because of what someone says. The tradeoff doesn’t feel worth it time-wise. But it keeps me from skipping them.
You could also see it as you preventing someone else from learning from their own mistakes. Maybe reframing it like that could help with skipping :)
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
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.
Not attempting stand-up, too
