It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering.
It is not a daily status meeting!
If it has turned into this then it should be scrapped because as you say it'll lead to people leaving as they feel they are being treated as low skill staff.
Btw I wrote this in a DSU that had non-tech people yabbering and which was basically a daily status meeting.
If in the course of one's work one becomes blocked, would one really wait until the following day's stand-up to tell anyone about this?
If so then I think both the worker and the company have bigger issues than whether the stand-up itself is a good use of time.
The mind boggles.
There is hard block and soft block. Hard block means you have no clue how to continue and so of course you should get help right away. Soft block means you have ideas and are working on it, but - unknown to you - someone else on the team knows exactly how to solve that problem and could solve it for you in a few minutes or you can spend all weeks working out the answer. The soft block is a lot more common - engineers are smart people who can solve complex problems, but we often fail to use the help of someone else who has already solved it. Thus the standup should be able airing problems that you just need to finish typing the solution in. Sometimes someone else will say "I can help you do this faster", others it is just keep working until you get it.
However 99% of the time what I see in Real Life is even when it's just devs talking they aren't offering up enough information for either of those to happen. Either imposter syndrome kicks in and they don't want to look stupid in front of their peers, or they're just annoyed at having a meeting. So it just becomes a status update meeting anyways
This to a T. An awful lot of stuff coulda gotten crushed, quickly, if I'd just asked for help ASAP instead of siting on it and feeling dumb.
edit: to be clear, I think they're good definitions, just never heard a definition
BS "can I pick your mind", chit/chat, questions that could be Googled, and of course, micromanagement BS are interruptions.
DSUs themselves are also interruptions -- it's just that they're scheduled and not event-based.
In other words, necessary communication is not interruption. Accidental communication is interruption (to be read as the same concept as necessary and accidental complexity).
Sometimes stand-up for me means 'remind myself what I was doing'; if not that then I've certainly not got far past it, haven't had long to get much done or be stuck. I'm unlikely to say in a stand-up that I'm stuck on something, I'll have a(nother) crack at it and perhaps ask after lunch if necessary.
https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-daily-scrum
From the horses mouth:
"The Daily Scrum is Not a Status Meeting"
Or maybe see about getting him certified.
They go around the room and everyone has to say something and it ends up being a status update.
The whole process becomes a micromanagers wet dream.
As long as you complete what's "agreed" to (which is transparently a conflict of interest: engineers stating what can be accomplished; the ones who have to do the actual work), then everyone seems bizarrely happy.
The reduced working hours I qualify as increased salary, which prevents me from jumping ship for a better salary. I also qualify the reduced work as metal health recompense for perpetually dealing with scrum narcissists.
It's Putts Law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Success... - but somehow management's impotence is becoming increasingly transparent.
A lot of `Agile` material is just doublespeak meant to sell consulting hours and training.
kick them out.
"Hey you know your morning check in, this is the one true holy way that every company in the world should do it"
it's not even that it's not probably a good way to run stand-up. But the hubris is pretty extreme.
If this works for you then this is good.
But I think these meetings are not for devs or something is very wrong with the setup. If they are Devs are are in the same team and working on the same project then I assume they have access to version control => no need top update on what everyone is working one. Instead teach them to do small commits and to write better commit messages.
If the meeting purpose is to communicate what is blocking someone => this again fails IMO because then someone might wait 1 day blocked? And if they don't wait that much and do an action about it what is there to communicate about in a daily meeting?
Devs on their own could do that, and do it better, before such BS like DSU was invented...
I think this has a lot to do with the office culture of software being figured out at the same time as the professionalization of Management and the trend of "methodologies" to give a veneer of objectivity to the managerial class. Combined with FOMO about the fortunes being made at certain other companies, whose whims and experiments are then followed.
Whereas the other professions you mention had their office cultures defined in very different times. Once defined, these tend to be sticky.
For example the extended hazing ritual by which we mint medical doctors in the USA is completely insane and would not be tolerated by doctors in most other countries, much less by non-doctors. Or for scientists, the amount of time many of them have to spend on acquiring funding for their employers instead of doing actual science, not to mention the very broken world of peer review.
The thing that makes our situation special -- and which these people were probably reacting too -- is how transparently ridiculous, toxic, and demeaning a lot of it is. From open-plan offices to stand-ups to pair programming and on and on.
I think we put up with this stuff because we are convinced we should be thankful for our fat paychecks and fear the Barbarian Hordes waiting to take our jobs for cheap in Elbonia.[0] That both of these things are objectively false has not made much difference in the last decade, but the salaries have gone up, so...
I married a doctor. The "hazing" is slowly going out of fashion as older doctors retire.
What they do have is a very nice licensing procedure. Yes, it's annoying, but it works a lot better when a doctor needs to get a job, because their interview process is much smoother than in the software field.
What a concept.
In case anyone wants a glimpse of how bad medical school could be:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch...
It's a pretty old site, no idea what it's like now.
Glad someone else is mentioning this, about 10 years ago it seemed like it was the hottest trend and that anyone (meaning any programmer) not willing to adopt it was either too lazy or had something to hide, or, most probably, both.
Here in DR docs get hazed out the Wazoo-being told they don’t have the status to look at the head surgeon in the eye or being tasked to get coffee.
I'm sure there is a lot of status-related meanness everywhere but I was thinking in particular of the US practice of intentionally and radically overworking people (to a level dangerous to both them and their patients) in order to prove they can take it, which is pretty much classic hazing. Wouldn't be surprised if it's copied elsewhere but I know it's not done everywhere.
Standups with more people working on separate projects are useless*.
My most recent standup with a group of 8 who were working on many separate projects spread across mobile, front-end and server. In this meeting, even if I did share some details about what I was doing, no-one else would have the context to help me. Also, it feels disrespectful to go into detail about something highly specific to my work while 6 other faces stare blankly as I waste their time. Ive heard stories from a friend's company of a standup with 30+ people across product, engineering and management. Could you imagine going into detail about your choice between an abstract class and interface on the call?
In such standups, the only sane action is to give a quick, high level update and mute yourself and go back to work. Standups like this should be ruthlessly dived down into several smaller meetings of people actually working together.
*Interestingly though, most people on my team love the standup for another reason - human interaction. Folks simply want to tune in and say hi to their team. In my opinion though, this isn't a good enough reason to keep unproductive standups, and the meeting would be better replaced with an optional 15 minute "coffee and chat" meeting. If folks want to tune in and chit chat, great - let them do it! But no need to waste people's time with mandatory "agile" ceremony.
I've never heard opponents go "communication doesn't matter", yet the moment we talk about taking down these meetings, that's the first kneejerk most proponents I spoke to reach for. As if being against standups is indicative of thinking poorly of communication. Same goes for specification of goals, cooperating to keep everyone going strong, and improving to make things less of a drag. Is there so little faith in basic human intelligence and cooperation, that this one method is the only way we silly developers can be redeemed?
Now we have a bunch of people who haven't touched code in multiple years parroting what the consultants sold them and trying to talk their way out of aforementioned proof. Or they make claims like "well but it is better now!", as if their previous methodology wasn't so horrible they could've thrown a dart and very likely get a better result.
Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management.
I think other professions may do the same.
Maybe, but it is removed.
From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report.
If software development followed that sort of practice, we'd have problematic issues added to a pool that gets discussed once a week. What we have is micro-management of each individual. Doctors most certainly aren't being micromanaged like that (well, not the one who I was socialising with, and not any of the others I've socialised with).
So they'll co-opt any newfangled trend into plain old serfdom. And they do.
As another commenter said, we should take page from the lawyers. A lot of them manage to convert bosses into paying subscribing customers.
In fact many of the teams I’ve working are fine with people skipping standup if they have any reason to. Currently I skip like half of my teams standups.
So yes they do say a lot, maybe not what you believe but they still do say things.
Isn't this what standups should be for developers too? It's not supposed to be a daily status report, but a discussion about blockers and an exchange of knowledge from other devs that might be able to unblock you.
It could have actually inspired the daily standup. With the tradition of taking inspiration from surgical teams and everything...
Engineering project teams doing Scrum struggle when tasks need to be initiated and completed at a faster cadence than their sprint cycle - for instance an engineer doing development work planned monthly gets 3 calls a day asking him to reboot a server.
There are apparently better ways of managing operational work - for kanban (with or without a board), ticket systems and queues and processes and dashboards for managers to spot bottlenecks live and re-alocate workers to solve them.
I know (from TV docs) that ERs here generally have a "morning meeting" where the manager briefs people and talks through throughput statistics and demand estimates.
I don't know how to manage an ER department, but I'd understand a lot of work has been done in that area. What I could say is that it isn't project work you could plan on a monthly sprint cadence.
Burger bar workers will also generally be executing operational work according to a clear process that involves tickets and ownership of a problems (tables). I've also seen IT help desks run like this.
What I'm saying is, Scrum is one possible way of running things, but it isn't one size fits all for all kinds of work. But just people are not doing Scrum does not mean they are not working within a detailed process where they may potentially be micromanaged to the same degree.
Scrum dailys are very clearly based on those, despite the fact that development work is neither operational nor shift-based. It's cargo-culting all the way down.
Even so, the long work hours of younger doctors are infamously sub-optimal. We shouldn't submit to the assumption that something is right because everyone does it and they operate in a free market.
If we need to analogise it, I'd say it's more like sprint planning - discussing what's to do on each ticket (patient). Except it's longer and more detailed, and the work that's left is much more like grunt work in a way - book the scan, take the blood, chase results, etc.
I think it’s a reference to the Mayo Clinic team-based model [1].
For simple stuff, a single doctor executing a textbook is fine. For complex cases, doctors of different disciplines meet to discuss, create and keep track of a care plan. The analogy being most problems a programmer is tackling are assumed to be novel cases.
[1] https://catedradecronicidad.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Ma...
Otherwise we can say any team sport discusses tactics for a game and this is a daily stand-up and it works for them so why not software.
Pursuing a common goal. But working on different problems. (Is it a blood pathology? Is the immune system misbehaving?) If a team doing a stand-up isn’t working on any sense of a common problem, they aren’t a team and aren’t working efficiently.
Software engineering/IT RUN and SUPPORT activities MAY fit there too, but that does not even mandate a daily review. BUILD activities definitely don't.
And worse, teams mixing RUN and BUILD roles... definitely don't.
Trello and a standup among teams would immeasurably improve things.
(Source: I know a bunch of big firm lawyers - and ex lawyers who said "Fuck this" and quit)
So, software development in a nutshell? Maybe I only have seen bad examples, but I've never seen the agile/scrum/whatever-of-the-day stop these things from happening. You have these things and at some point they add the process on top cause "we sure do need a process".
Such entitled garbage. Restaurants manage people much more tightly, and often with very abusive practices and wage theft added in.
Stand-up is nothing compared to having an underpaid alcoholic yell at you because you leaned against the wall 2/3 of the way through your second double shift in a row.
It's harder to get much sympathy from others as well if/when you're paid much higher than many other averages. Using the term 'wage theft' - normally used in discussions around minimum wage job abuses - for someone who's making $80/hr, (and may get some stock/bonus) doesn't get the same sort of reaction. The term doesn't even feel quite right, but that may be just because I've heard it so often relating to the lower end. I'd imagine it's not even about money so much for many folks as much as it is about time.
Actual wage theft is very common in food service. As in, you earn the money and someone else takes it.
It's essentially legalized wage theft.
Thankfully I get paid hourly, but still when I do overtime it's only paid at a x1 multiplier because the dinosaurs in office deemed 'computer workers' [1] are exempt from fair labor regulations. Likely, those in power guessed that they could safely chip away at more worker's rights because most of the voting base won't feel solidarity for highly paid salary positions and 'computer workers'.
[1]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
I don't agree with that point, especially since food service has the most toxic management of any industry.
Yes I’ve done it. It’s not the worst job I’ve had but my current job affords me the opportunity to type this from a vacation house on the beach in Hawaii. When I told the people making my lunch last week that I was headed to Hawaii they said they always wanted to go there and hoped to do it in a couple years, like it was a once in a lifetime trip for them. And it probably is.
People need to actually pay more attention to the world around them and have some conversations to realize how well we’ve got it.
I did have some really good managers though, people I couldn’t believe weren’t doing better things (and some real bad ones, too, of course).
Firstly the error rate. We make 'mistakes' (bugs) all the time, how many other professions have a dedicated QA department dedicated day in, day out entirely to catching error. Yes there's audit, but most departments only even talk to them a few times a year.
Then there's the issue that the problem domain, and the design you're trying to implement, is often very poorly understood or at least documented and specified, even by the domain experts commissioning the project. This is the whole reason we have agile.
Between squashing bugs and constantly course correcting on the direction of development, I think some of the micromanaging makes sense. There's a heck of a lot of very unstable micro that needs managing. As has been mentioned already, the nearest analogy I can come up with is medicine, particularly for critical patients with poorly understood conditions. I think a great, if completely fictional example can be seen in the frequent discussions going on between the medics in 'House'. They're constantly putting their heads together and white-boarding cases, though in reality such discussions are I'm sure much rarer than the show makes out.
A lawyer, accounting, or doctor will typically have their own clients that they focus on. They may ask for advice on occation but generally one of those professionals will handle many customers completely unique needs.
Lets look at an accountant for example, they will have multiple clients each of which take up a small portion of their day / month. Each has individual needs and rarely will they have any real relation or crossover in their work. It'll be even less rare that your client has anything to do with another client of your business which may be handled by another accountant. The same is the case for doctors, and lawyers as well. You have one professional serving a multitude of clients.
Programmers work differently, typically we have multiple programmers to a single client. That client may be internal or external. If your particular case needed 7 accountants, or 7 lawyers you'd be damn upset if they weren't in regular communication about the work they're doing towards your case. If they all came back with totally different suggestions that completely clashed you'd be shouting at them for not communicating together properly.
Engineers are the only ones where I think there's a stronger relation. You might only work with one engineer for a small change to your house, but on big infrastructure projects there had better be regular communication between related groups or you end up with your designs failing ragulation.
Daily standups are for the programmers in the team to get together, to de-conflict, and understand what's changing around them. If Janet is about to make a big change to the auth system and you're working on a new api endpoint you probably want to know and make sure you're not causing problems for each other.
If your daily standups are actually just 15 minutes each day where only 1-2 managers are benefiting from a statud update from everyone, then sure that's micro-management and probably wasting a hell of a lot of time. Suggest changing it to a weekly call, or having everyone email a summary each week. It's important to report status on a regular basis just as you'd be pissed if your accountant didn't let you know once they'd filed your tax returns or if your doctor had your blood test results back a week ago.
Conflating a daily standup with a daily status report though would be frustrating and probably does need challenging, but it's not easy to compare across professions like that. Their workloads are completely different to ours, and so need a different approach.
Your conversation above just sounded arrogant for me.
And they're totally right. I don't tolerate to be treated like that and nobody treat me like that.
> "I mentioned how stand-ups ... might not be a bad idea"
That's what the other professions are taking issue with: the way software teams communicate.
Stand-ups are a terrible idea. Imposed superficial questions with rarely any nuance or relevance while eating at productive time. We need proper measured processes rather than the agile/scrum/random voodoo of the day.
My experience when I was a tax accountant, we have a weekly status checks for around 20 people which took 1 hour, different seniors and managers breathing down your neck everyday on the progress of their projects.
As a junior, I have to manage the expectations of these managers competing for my time to prioritize their client. Sure we don't have daily standups, but I will choose daily standups over this.
This just isn't true. Semiconductor process engineers and manufacturing technicians have stand-ups twice a day. I'm sure most if not all of those other professions have ~daily alignment meetings as well.
This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development.
I mentioned how stand-ups work briefly, and that it might not be a bad idea to adopt for (for example) an accounting department to keep things on task.
The response was both extreme and universal: How the hell do you all accept being micromanaged to such a degree? Don't any of you have any dignity?
Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper.
No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress.