[yakubin]

> Having to report every day during the daily stand up felt like micromanagement to me. But that's just me. Many people do like having this kind of daily routine so mileage may vary obviously.

Same here. I used to be in a team with daily stand-ups, reporting to the manager what work I did the day before, and they killed my will to work, consequently causing me to work ~3 times slower, which presumably is the opposite of the intended effect.

[ido]

The problem is that a lot of developers (especially junior ones) make shitty decisions and/or just work slowly without the accountability of having to say what they worked on (and having to explain why what they said they will “finish today” 4 times already isn’t yet finished for the 5th time).

They are not necessarily bad developers, just need the need the external motivator.

If you have 10+ years of experience and you repeatedly make shitty decisions or keep drastically underestimating your work instead of introducing accountability via daily standups you can simply be fired.

[roeles]

I have seen this happen to junior developers.

In hindsight I think it is much more effective to pair them up with a senior developer instead of waiting for a pattern to become apparent during the daily scrum.

[ido]

Ideally yes, but it’s also not that easy to find senior developers and a lot of them don’t like having to hand-hold juniors.

[BurningFrog]

The standups I've been in are about reporting to the rest of the team what you're doing.

This way, everyone has a clue what's going on, and can also chime in with advice and questions.

[yakubin]

I'm not against stand-ups per se, just against daily stand-ups. Currently I'm in a team which does three a week. That's at least tolerable, but if it was up to me, I'd opt for once a week. Daily made me feel that I had no agency over my work, that everything to the tiniest detail needed to be negotiated with someone, most often the manager. Less agency means lower engagement in work. At least for me. I do know that there is plenty of other people who are different.

[BurningFrog]

We must mean very different things by "standups".

My standup messages are mostly "I'm working on adding feature X, it's going well", or "I'm fixing bug Y, and I wonder how to handle Z".

Usually that's it. Sometimes there are questions or discussion about details. It serves to keep the team aware of what's going on.

If your team is argumentative it can drag out and be a drain. That's when it is up to the manager to break it off and move any needed discussions somewhere else. If your manager is the argumentative one... you have a bit of a problem.

[jraph]

This is also what I mean by stand-up.

These stand-ups get in the way. I'm bored when I need to listen to what people have to say, or worse, what they are making up. I'm stressed by what I need to say or make up. They take time. They often happen at a time where my productivity would be the best / when I'm in the middle of something, or else I need to rush to get on time. Or to watch for the time when we are close and interrupt everything I'm doing. This, every single day. It's fine for meaningful meetings solving real problems, but stand-ups are not this kind of meeting for me.

I very much prefer not having a daily synchronization point, and instead give status to relevant people when needed, or give my status when asked for (which is not too often, we can see what tasks is left for me in the bug tracker). If I'm blocked or if I have a question, I'll ask. If colleagues have a question, they'll ask. We have flexible hours, not at exactly the same timezone, some people are already full of important meetings. Not having a standup to babysit, to schedule, to watch for and to be stressed about is one less problem to handle.

I'm thrilled to be able to start my work day when I'm ready and not having to interrupt for this daily thing that does not seem to bring much value in the end. I'm happy to be able to have an unproductive day and make up for it the next day without nobody noticing it and without me lying about it, because in the end, it's none of nobody's business and it doesn't matter. And the day is just a bad unit of time for development tasks most of the time.

When I had to attend daily stand-ups, indeed standing-up (wtf!), I just had the impression we were (treated like) a bunch of children not able to be autonomous for a few days.

But then, it seems everybody in my current team is wired for working efficiently without this kind of things, so it works for us. We are also good at knowing what people are on to by the reading the stuff they are discussing on the chat, and the big picture, fast, weekly status update we have anyway. I don't need the details brought by the stand up, unless I do but then I will get them via efficient communication anyway.

[gravlaks]

Totally agree. And so does my team. We solve this by running daily Slack-ups, i.e. just tell what you're doing on Slack, which is much, much faster.

We only use daily standups when there are new people on the team.