Why do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.

Just my experience. A work culture where people approach each other without somebody telling them to do so is much better. Respect of each others time is also crucial. Get the motivating factors right and you dont need to bore the x out of everyone.

Indeed, and I would even say that this applies to any meeting you can think of.

However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.

depends on the place of work. mine is also useless. the manager is clueless so some team members just tells every single thing they did for 15 minutes for clout with the manager.

Discussions that should be 1:1 become 1:N, wasting the time of (N-1) people.

Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.

That’s the problem. Most teams don’t have stand-ups. They have gigantic status meetings on a daily basis, which is rarely valuable.

Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).

Anyone who cares what you’re working on can look at Jira. And if you’re stuck you shouldn’t be waiting for a meeting to tell people this. Standup are a total waste of time.

Many are. But I've been in more than a few that resulted in discussion that ultimately saved many many hours of time that would otherwise have been spent on something that wasn't necessary.

Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).

Jira never tells the entire story. And of course you can also reach out to people outside of the standup meeting, but that doesn't make them a waste of time. They can be quite effective, and they really do not take much time.

> Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting.

What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:

(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,

(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)

As others have pointed out, that's not what a standup should be for. Any tool, process or structure that is not being used properly tends to be annoying and useless.

The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.

Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.

I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.

Mine are also useless. Communicating with your team is super important but the mandatory status checkin when team members are working on unrelated things is pointless and draining.

That's a definition of "team" I've never heard before - "people working on unrelated things".

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing.

Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team. And, exactly, now tell that to our managers.

Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.

Sure, my own team work on multiple products, but it's all the same codebase and all of us share the work for all products between ourselves. There is another team in the company that works on an entirely separate product with a very different codebase (different tech stack entirely) and upper management seem to have this idea we would work better as one big "team" - thankfully so far we've managed to persuade them it would make little sense. I'd probably be looking for alternative job options if we had to do daily stand-ups with that many other coworkers, half of whom I'd never have reason to engage in actual teamwork with.

Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a traditional operations role, I suppose.

And exactly, ask that to our managers.

If you're all picking unrelated tasks off the same kanban board I would think a quick daily stand-up would still be worthwhile then. Just needs to be sensibly run so individuals don't get bogged down in describing every little detail of what they'd been working on.

Group of people == team because all report to same manager.

Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.

Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.

> team because all report to same manager

That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...

I have to admit I like these meetings. Yes, today I work on an autoscaling runner but tomorrow I'll be working on CI pipelines so it's (mildly) interesting to hear what is going on and specifically what kind of problems my colleagues are dealing with. And, last but not least, usually I can cover a few miles on my stationary bike before the meeting ends.