[casion]

> Reframe the purpose of the standup so its not purely about work but about catching up and hanging out as well.

I like to chat after work, if I have time. I like to joke, laugh, have idle chatter with co-workers if/when we pair on things. (especially during deploys or compile cycles)

I do not want to be forced to schedule "social time". Social activity is fluid for me, and I can 'fake it' if necessary, but needing to fake it 4/5 days is just silly.

I'm not a cave-dweller either. I was an educator (teenagers, then graduate level), I've spoken at dozens of conferences, I run two active local clubs.

If a company forced "rallies" on me, I would unequivocally leave.

[blowfish721]

Couldn’t agree more about scheduled social time. Our standups are usually kept short (15 min or less total) which is usually more than enough and if there’s anything that needs more time then the ones who needs to be involved schedule their own meeting outside of that. We do however have an open Teams chat where people jump in and drop out all through the day just to hang out or throw out simple questions. Even had some nice chats and laughs with coworkers while doing the evening chores.

[Ali_Jiwani]

Appreciate this comment. Can you tell me more about this open Teams chat? Is it a video/audio only chat or it's just a channel like #random or #watercooler?

[wildermuthn]

Great points. I’m the “Nate” quoted in the article, and I have a phrase for contrived social events: “scheduled fun,” which I and most of the engineers I’ve ever worked with have mocked and derided as both 1) not fun, and 2) a waste of time. Being professionals, we do give it our best effort, but a person can only do so many seemingly pointless icebreakers before going nuts.

I’ve been working as a team-lead on fully-remote engineering teams for about seven years now, at three different startups. I’m also a fairly strong introvert. Among my failings as a team-lead is that I would often find myself 5 minutes late to our standups (kids, other meetings, etc). But I noticed something: when I’d join the team would be bullshitting, talking about whatever: new tech, sports, tv/movies, etc.

So when I joined, I didn’t start the standup right away. I just let their conversation go on until a lull and then would say, “Ok, let’s do the standup.” Over time I began to be less worried about showing up late — I knew they would be bullshitting, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy it. I also started noticing side-effects: the team was becoming more open and transparent, willing to engage in needed conflict with less prodding. They were coming to trust one another.

I guess you could call this “unscheduled fun”, in the sense that it was unintentional. There was no agenda, no icebreaker, and no goal. But within a few months, during our retro the team debated whether to put what we literally called “bullshitting” before or after the actual standup. We also debated whether it should be 10 minutes or 20 minutes. No one debated stopping it. And these weren’t strong extroverts. They weren’t necessarily friends. But we had stumbled upon something we liked, all because my kids couldn’t get dressed fast enough in the morning, or my boss couldn’t end our 1-on-1 on time.

It kind of reminds me of my time in the military. I made some really close friends (“comrads” might be a better word) with people that I would never have thought I’d be friends with. Many were just really grating as people. But in retrospect, spending so much time with them in so many painful experiences bonded us together, despite our natural aversion for one another.

Like other commenters point out, with the advent of great tooling for backlogs and asynchronous communication, I really don’t see the point of Scrum standups for a team of adults who are disciplined in using those tools

My experiences are just anecdotal, and maybe aren’t generally applicable to other teams in other situations, but that’s why I recommended to Rally that we try bullshitting before doing our standup.

I honestly can’t say that if instead of being late I’d said “let’s try just bullshitting for 5 minutes before we start standup,” that anyone would have kept a straight face. I imagine 7 faces staring at me with mild to severe annoyance. But I’d say if you can figure out how to do an experiment with bullshitting for 5 minutes before standup (with whatever chat platform), you don’t have a lot to lose. And if what I’ve seen is true beyond my own narrow context, there might be a lot to gain.