[helge9210]

> I know that most feel that they absolutely HAVE to do these things, since there are part of the business process/ definition of done/company guidelines etc...

Anecdote: at current position I've noticed 100% of my team time goes to "these things". As a team lead I tried to figure out the actual necessity. After I've "lost" the half of the team insisting on doing all the rituals the remaining half started to deliver actual value with much less stress.

[hbrn]

As the company gets bigger, it naturally starts doing more rituals. Some are justified, most are a cargo cult.

The sad part is that since rituals are an inherent to a big company, following (and enforcing) rituals is synonymous to being professional. And fighting them is often seen as amateur.

No, I'm not doing performance reviews and weekly 1:1 with each team member. Not because I'm an amateur, but because I'm in the trenches with them every day. Maybe I'll start doing those when we get bigger. But let's get there first.

[helge9210]

> As the company gets bigger

In first startup I was working we were four engineers and our whole shared context could fit into two whiteboards and Kanban board in GitHub.

Next one was a couple of hundreds of engineers and a lot of coordination activity directed by iron fist of program managers.

Next one was fifty engineers but with the same amount of coordination activities (for the sake of the process) and much less progress.

And the current one had ten people in engineering, three chapters (backend, frontend, DevOps), incident board, 1-1s, retro, planning, refinement, weekly, quarter retro and planning and sprint review.

Fun fact: at current place no one knew the term "cargo cult". When I explained the meaning some colleagues considered it offensive.