[ravenide]

Why are standups even a thing?

Like, what is wrong with my reasoning here? Meetings are maximally efficient when the exact set of people who all need to talk to each other are present, and no more. In a team of 7, only 1 or 2 other people might be affected by what I’m working on. The other people are just wasting time pretending to care about what I’m saying.

My experience working at tech companies in SF has suggested to me that most meetings, not just standups, suffer from this problem. The time cost of a meeting grows as O(N^2), and yet we routinely have all-hands, weekly syncs, etc. Yes, some level of communication is needed but when the time cost of these things is so tremendous, it seems irresponsible not to at least ask if what we’re getting out of it is worth the cost.

Meetings are apparently the one thing that no one tries to optimize, in our industry ostensibly hyperconcerned with optimizing things.

Disclaimer: I hate most meetings.

[optymizer]

I've come to realize that stand-ups are generally useful. You're right that out of, say 15 people, only 2 care that you are struggling to import some dependency, but the rest overhear the discussion, they register some keywords and they know what you are working on. Maybe next month Joe Junior Dev goes directly to you with a question about that dependency instead of wasting half a day googling.

Then there is also the side effect of our monkey brains to give importance to people you see often. Stand-ups cultivate the feeling of "this is a team". It's important to show members what the team is.

Stand-ups however are not a requirement for a good functioning team. I'm leading a small team of senior devs and, despite my praise above, I decided against daily stand-ups. There is sufficient intelligence and communication, and just general professionalism in everyone in the team, that daily stand-ups are not worth the hassle and corporate feeling.

As a rule of thumb, if there are junior devs on the team, I would insist on having daily stand-ups on that team.

[g051051]

When the company I work at decided to become "agile", it all went to hell. Every "innovation" just makes it more and more miserable to work there. Standups are a real pain, and I have yet to see any value whatsoever from this daily ritual that interrupts key work time.

[raverbashing]

Because some people are luddites and cargo-culters and don't see the reasoning behind the actions

"Agile mandates post-it notes" kinda stuff

Standups could be very well replaced by a chat channel, for example. This way it's broadcast, recorded and can be a bit async as no-one needs their turn to speak

[denkmoon]

I find having context for what others are working is helpful. Not only does it mean I can help them better when necessary, I can be aware of what other people are doing in the project and head off any potential problems.

[aaaxyz]

Where I work, most people in management positions work 50-60 hours a week because most of that time is spent on meetings and they have to work overtime to finish their "real" work.

I used to enjoy meetings when I first started there because it felt good to have a break from staring at a screen all day but I quickly got tired of being invited to 90 minutes long meetings on project X where my input was only needed for one point out of the 12 on the meeting agenda.

[magicalhippo]

We have a weekly status meeting. Mostly it's about giving the boss an overview over workload and discuss prioritization of upcoming stuff, and that's usually the only time he'll actually manage me as such.

However it's also nice to discover if work done by other devs interact with what I might be working on. Maybe I'm working on changing some logic in a module, and some other dev is about to make an integration for a customer which will involve that module indirectly.

He might not be aware of this indirect dependency, so I can give him a heads-up and now we know we must keep in touch over this work.

It's also good in case someone else has any good ideas for solving an issue. Maybe someone knows of a tool or a service which can do the job. Maybe someone has experience on that sort of stuff, so the dev doing the work knows who to ask for advice.

This is the only regular internal meeting I have though. There might be a case-specific one or similar once or twice a month, the rest is just ad-hoc with 1-2 others as needed via Teams or dropping by the office (pre-pandemic).

[dionian]

Originally, it was supposed to be to minimize meetings and make them more efficient when they do happen.