> 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?

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.

Right. This sort of blockage and spotting unnecessary/undesired rabbit holes are the value of DSU. It should be a pure dev experience.

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

> Either imposter syndrome kicks in and they don't want to look stupid in front of their peers

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.

Never heard those defined before. Is there a source, or is this just a pearl of wisdom?

edit: to be clear, I think they're good definitions, just never heard a definition

I don't know if I've heard it before, or made it up on the spot. Probably a combination: the ideas have been said before, but that exact wording is mine - maybe.

I hate DSU to be honest for this exact reason there's no way I'd way a whole day. I feel compelled to explain though that at the very least there is a definition of what you should be using it for and few companies I'm work with have ever used it for that. It's mostly used as a status meeting and becomes a micromanagers daily meeting to beat people up about poor progress.

On this same site you can read all day about developers complaining about interruptions. Now a company has big issues if someone puts a task aside to do something else until the following day where they will avoid interrupting someone?

I have come to realize as a senior engineer my job is to be interrupted. I'm equal to any better than any non-entry level engineer (and entry level will advance fast) at typing in implementations, but because I take interruptions from people I can tell them the part they are missing to solve their problem - 5 minutes of conversation with me can turn several weeks of trying to find a solution into 1 day of implementing it. It only takes a few of the above to make me a 10x engineer because I'm helping others avoid false starts in fixing their problems. (and of course when I interrupt someone else they in turn do the same for me - this is a two way street)

Somebody communicating about a blocking situation depending on your input (or output) is not an interruption.

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).

Stand ups are the bane of my life, interruption wise. Not everyone wants to work the same hours but we all have to set aside a mutually inconvenient time to distract from what we're supposed to be doing. Before the stand up, your mind's not properly on your work 'cause you know you're about to be interrupted. After the stand up, you have to get back into your work but now with less time to do it.

No of course not. In my experience standuos are best for encouraging accidental knowledge sharing - "oh I know what the issue with that is", "oh I think Dave in the other team has done that before", "I was planning on changing that" etc.

Agreed, and maybe this is more common than may impression & experience, but if that's the goal, wouldn't you prefer to do it in the afternoon? After you've spent some time on something, but perhaps still have some time left to shift approach or have a 1:1 call with someone who says they can help?

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.