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It's odd, because I've known folks who 'wait', but most of the time, when I hear someone voice a blocker in a standup, it's notice that "this is already something I've tried unblocking by ABC, and have talked to persons XYZ, and it's still a blocker". Or sometimes, people saying "I was blocked yesterday on X for Y hours, which is putting things back a bit, but now moving forward again".

So yeah, waiting until a next meeting to get announce that you're going to start working on a blocking issue is nuts, but I don't actually see that specifically all that much.

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alistairSH a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is what I see as well.

"I ran into X, tried Y and Z, then asked Bob, Bob wasn't sure, anybody else have ideas?"

"We discovered a dependency on Team Z to complete Q, Mr Bossman, can you talk to their manager, as the engineers weren't sure what to do?"

And yes, both of those could be handled in Slack. But, as a manager at a medium/large company, the amount of Slack messages I get daily is MASSIVE (both direct and in channels), so a face-to-face has some value in getting the issue front-and-center (and not lost in a pile of clutter).

Yes, in a perfect world, there isn't all the clutter in Slack. But, in 25 years in industry, that's rarely true.

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lucyjojo a day ago | parent [-]

slack is a slug

we need to reduce the number of slack messages. not increase the number of meetings.

i want to build something like that at some point.

	▲	dijit 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Zulip has been extremely effective in eliminating the need to read every message for my team. Clear public and private team channels and general “feature” channels too. Might be a few too many; but an interesting fact: in most companies there are as many channels as there are employees!

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rendaw 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't?

The other case is you're saying it's a reminder. But that should be obvious from any ticketing system - the issue for what you're working on should be set to Blocked and the manager should get a status update email or be able to check it next time they're free.

I think the answer is some managers prefer to have people tell them things in a call.

	▲	mgkimsal 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't? Going in to huge detail about it, not much, really. A quick "hey, hit an issue yesterday with ABC, Kris helped me out - thanks Kris!" does a few things. It reminds everyone we all might need to ask for help now and then. Gives a bit of public recognition to Kris who might not otherwise get it. Also lets people know Kris (and now you) know a bit more about issue ABC in case they might have a similar issue. When I hit weird snags, they're not always things I'd detail out in a ticket, especially if unrelated to the specifics of the ticket. "Add links to help documents" as a ticket doesn't benefit much from me documenting out that I hit some weird issue because the security team didn't add accounts to a new policy group, meaning my emails to the accounting team were bouncing. "Kris confirmed it was an issue for her as well, and reached out to Kevin's group to let him know, and we got things resolved yesterday". Yeah, you could add that to a ticket, but feels useful to mention that in a status meeting. Larger discussion about the process behind those changes or scheduling impact should be taken offline outside the meeting. "...should be set to Blocked..." do you do that the moment you aren't making forward progress on something? It's something I wouldn't typically do until after some amount of time understanding why I wasn't making progress, and trying to 'unblock' things first within a short period. Days of unblocking attempts without raising a flag are generally not good, but 3 minutes of 'being stuck' before pinging others is also not great imo.
	▲	addaon 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't? Pattern detection. As a coder, your job is to get past blocks and deliver features at quality and on time. As a manager, your boss's job is to take information in from their directs, synthesize a picture of what's actually going on, and work to make your life easier (and thus, you more productive) in the future. "I was blocked for four hours yesterday because <x>" isn't a big deal, for you; but seeing the commonalities in <x> across the whole team, and over a longer period of time, motivates action to understand the /underlying/ problem and improve it in the future.
	▲	swiftcoder 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't? It tells management why a task is behind schedule, more or less.