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.
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.