Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place.
Other than that, your points stand.
To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that boundary. Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)
Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends?
> Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)
So it's not okay to intrude on "work" by playing an occasional basketball game, but it is okay to push mandatory work activities that eat up one's personal time? Also, if you think those activities are not work, you are deluding yourself -- no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.
It sounds to me that you are the one trolling. It should be quite clear that when someone who has power over you "invites" you to do an "optional" after work gathering with other people (who are often your direct career competitors), it is not really an optional thing.
> game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other
And I am not sure what's your point here. It sounds like you are misunderstanding what I am saying.
I've been at many workplaces where I've enjoyed hanging out with coworkers for fun at the pub. Granted, usually complaining about the company and boss.
Oh, there absolutely are people who like to do this, but their intent is not at all altruistic.
We picked those numbers based on tradition (and complaints from unions about the 7x12 schedule) well before software engineering was a career. Companies that do 5x6 or 4x8 seem to be doing fine.
You can use scihub to get the paper or here's a secondary pop-sci source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190912-what-wartime-m...
Intramural stuff is usually scheduled DURING work hours - so people are at work for this stuff to happen.
If you schedule an intramural basketball game for 5:00 a.m. in the morning or 8:00 p.m. at night - nobody is going to make it - just like if you schedule a standup during those hours - no one is going to make it.
It's expected that you either can do your job in less than 8 hours on some days - or you work extra hours to make up for enjoying your life doing things like playing basketball.
Most adults can be adults.
Being able to schedule out of work things during "work" hours is amazing too! I've been able to have a level of involvement in volunteer and community projects that is not really possible on a nights & weekends basis. Maintain relationships with my friends and family who don't work 9-5s, watch their kids regularly. Go to those odd-hours sparsely attended religious services and grow different connections in that community too.
To me this is all much more sustainable than having a relationship to work where I grind away at it waiting for it to be over so I can live my life. There are risks here too, specifically boundaries as you mentioned. But when managed well it feels like work is just one of my obligations among several, rather than the time I suffer through so I can do worthwhile things instead.
To the grandfather commenter: I still agree that you weren't missing anything about your parent company. Work needs to happen and it needs to be aligned with a market and be profitable or have a strategic advantage (to make the company desirable).
Standups are also (rarely) recorded, and therefore unsearchable.
Have you ever thought - maybe an email process can also be done well?
Maybe the majority of your email threads are terrible. That doesn't mean they have to be. Maybe you think all of your meetings are well run - it doesn't mean everyone else thinks they are...
And no, email processes cannot be well done. You may think your's are, but that doesn't mean everyone else does.
If I had my druthers I would ban email for all in-house communication and do everything verbally, via chat apps, or workflow management tools. Anything that needs more thorough elaboration should be written down as a thoughtfully articulated memo. If you feel the need to record the contents of a 20 minute group conversation to search it later that probably means you need to focus and take better notes.
I will say it is truly a wild claim to assert that an intramural basketball game is more conducive to team productivity than a stand-up meeting though.
In my experience, the very people who think these cross-team sync meetings are a waste that they don't need to be a part of are the first to make noise that they weren't consulted or included in a discussion that actually doesn't impact them.
I like in person updates myself, but it's not as obvious of a cost calc as you present. There is definitely a place for async, written updates
I find bad managers usually can't grasp the cost of interruptions from meetings - because their work isn't interrupted from meeting - because their work IS meetings.
I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering.
That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting
Everything else is fun for memorizing what everyone's doing so I can respond immediately to random questions, but the value is questionable. Everyone else on my team would be better off if I didn't know everything off hand, and instead relied on the proper sources of truth
Related to a comment further up the thread about fruits, a close friend of mine told me some time ago how one of his colleagues was complaining in the company chat about the kiwi fruits that were being given by the company as free perks having too much of that “hairy” stuff on them (I’m on my phone, too lazy to search for the exact English term), and how he preferred to be served “lean” and “shiny” kiwi fruits instead. Said friend works at the local subsidiary of a big US tech company of which everyone on this forum has heard about.
A team standup has close to no value.
Having a high quality of life has a lot of value (including increased work productivity).
As the California Milk Campaign went - happy cows make quality cheese, and happy workers make quality work...
Again - one can be moved, the other cannot.
But in most companies standups are just agile cargo cult. Nobody knows why they are doing standups, so naturally they turn into "I publicly report to my manager and pretend I work really hard, because everybody else is doing that".
People forgot (or never realized?) that standups are not for the manager, they are for the team.
(Not to hate on balls: it was great playing volleyball in grad school. After 5pm. A couple of $B companies came out of that group.)
Standup everyday with people burnt out and depressed due to a lack of excercise and poor nutrition is a recipe for failure too.
I'll deal with exercise and nutrition on my own time, thank you very much.
{soapbox}
I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work.
Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine...
These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder.
It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space.
These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems.
{/soapbox}
Next, these things are to try to encourage the retaining of the college mindset. Aside form the "play hard" there's the "work hard" - the all night cramming that you had with college gets translated to working all night to meet some project target date.
Additionally, by establishing these pseudo-third places, it encourages the people who use them to be part of the work "community" rather than the civic community (where the hacker space or coffee shop is). This in turn makes the people who work there more isolated from the people in the community and has an impact on the third places there as there are fewer people in the civic community who use them (when they are provided free at work). Yes, you would rather use the local hacker space than the one that FB has for a woodshop - but that isn't true of a fair number of people.
Lastly, these perks aren't things that the company values too highly and thus is apt to remove them when times get tighter. Establishing those perks as the norm (see Basecamp with its combination of company forum pseudo-third places and perks) and then changing how they're done or making them location specific (FB employee in SV gets a woodshop, while the remote worker doesn't) will create discontent later down the road.
---
I believe that companies that are offering these perks and pseudo-third places (as perks) are finding that the trouble that they cause is more than the value they provide to their employees from the employer perspective but are having trouble withdrawing.
The SV style perk - I believe - is a liability to a company. While it may improve employe retention a bit while it is active (and I really question that in as junior dev tenure has been dropping combined with an increase in remote work), removing it can result in singicant discontent and hosting it increases the issues that HR has with maintaining it.
There are tech companies that absolutely print money and have those perks. There are also companies that grind and don’t turn out shit.
If fresh blueberries for software engineers are gonna wreck you, you aren’t in a business worth doing.
I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing that Work Should Be This Way For Everyone. Its not insane to want to work 20 hour weeks. Its not insane to think working in a concrete windowless office building is uninspiring (our species built twenty story cathedrals to celebrate God; architecture matters; outdoor space matters). Its not insane to want some snacks & drinks throughout the 8+ hour work day (at least until we solve, you know, that pesky human drive called Hunger).
Some of y'all would rather wrestle with pigs in the mud than recognize that, maybe, there shouldn't be any mud at all. But, after all, capitalism is brain worms which convince you the system is optimal when everything sucks for the very people who keep it going. Rest assured, the CEO has a secretary who will go buy fresh blueberries on the company card the moment he desires them.
It is telling when small perks that don’t effect the bottom line are cut.
If you want a chill work life balance, 20 hour weeks, etc. then you can have that. But maybe you won't have the $400k salary that big tech pays anymore.
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-...
https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab...
> Staff said they were expected to frequently work more than 12 hours a day, starting early to accommodate calls with China and ending late
According to what I see on Blind, this is still the case, so clearly the reporting has not done anything. On the other hand, FB and Google are ramping up their intensity. It's almost like if you have a lucrative monopoly, people are incentivized to work really hard to disrupt it, and you have to work really hard to defend it.
Yes, the failure to kill TikTok was a leadership failure by Zuck. But you need good leadership AND good execution to win. The latter means hard work. Ask yourself why Europe has far fewer major tech companies and startups than the US, even though the EU economy is almost the same size.
It seems like management was aware their employees were bums, and needed your companies energy to infuse some productivity into their lifestyle.
Looks like it failed though.
Yes, that's how it usually works out.
By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.
In general, if you chose a usage that generates discussion about your language choices, and there was another option that would convey the exact same thing and not generate discussion, it's best to regard that as a mistake.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq
Perhaps, it is British English.
The downside to my approach is that I super burned out. I had "strongly exceeding expectations" for 2 quarters, then my project was cancelled so I switched teams and went on a PIP. Indeed, I flat up stopped showing up to work. (I was so bitter about the fact that I lined up a new job immediately, but people that didn't do that got 6 months of paid vacation to explore other teams. I got nothing, and I needed it bad. The company doctor did give me antidepressants and some unpaid leave though. Thanks for that, turns out antidepressants don't treat burnout.)
I didn't even know that burnout was a thing back then, but if I did, I would know that making sure that you jam in 40 hours of programming and meetings into every week without taking a break isn't that healthy or productive over the long term. All these people chatting in the lunch line or playing ping pong or doing an aggressive workout and then showering in the middle of the day were optimizing for their long-term productivity. 1 hour less task-doing today, 10 extra years in their career. Not a bad tradeoff at all.
At a startup, you might not be able to afford that; by the time you're burned out, you've already sold your company and are retired, so it's all good. But at a big company, it makes a lot of sense; talent acquisition is expensive and if you can get 10 years out of someone instead of 6 months, you're going to be a lot more successful. And there's that uncomfortable medium where that extreme productivity didn't actually make a business that can afford to not burn people out, but now everyone's burned out. A lot of companies are in that state, and there isn't an easy way out of that without a time machine.
Engineers that call you out on you burning them out are absolutely right to complain. The basketball game is a much better use of their time than the standup. Standups only matter to people organizing the project; the meeting is only for your benefit. It saves you the time of reading their commits and design docs, sitting in on their engineering discussions, soliciting feedback when writing performance reviews, etc. The actual creative work of software engineering is done when your head is free from distractions and anything you don't need to know about. A walk around the quad or a basketball game is a great way to chew on the ideas, discard all that's unnecessary, and set you up for the 4 hours where you physically translate a quarter's worth of thinking into code that can be checked in.
At the end of the day, it's not really the software engineer's fault for the company losing money. Businesses fail because there is not a plan for making money and the actual engineering tasks are irrelevant. "Sprint 12323: rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic." is what 90% of software engineers are doing right now. They are right to go elsewhere when your business plan is so bad that the company can't even afford blueberries. Do you really think that if people just sat in front of their computer for 30 more minutes a day, or provided better updates in their standup, that the bad idea of a company would be saved? Some companies just weren't meant to be. VCs are very bad at not giving these companies money, though, so there are a lot of people running in circles doing nothing as they slowly realize they never should have started the company. Ultimately, you can't blame the nice campus or intramural basketball league for that.
+1 to the rest of the post. Very well said.
... and the 10 years before that...
https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos...
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course.
I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will."
On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.
Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.
I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.