| ▲ | dgb23 2 days ago |
| But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day. Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details. |
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| ▲ | rTX5CMRXIfFG a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether. Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs. |
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| ▲ | poincaredisk a day ago | parent | next [-] | | >async doesn’t go well with scale, Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me. >you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist. >structural strategy to keep everyone accountable Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit. | | |
| ▲ | 2muchcoffeeman a day ago | parent [-] | | The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them. Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup. Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script? It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec. You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr a day ago | parent [-] | | Now you need three managers. The reason for the 20 person standup is to save money and give lip service to the standup trend. | | |
| ▲ | Talanes a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Same manager with right-sized stand-ups wouldn't cost anymore money, unless that manager is making many multiples over what any of their team makes. It seems more like a kneejerk reaction to not "waste" the manager's time at the expense of the actually-more-important-but-hierarchically-less-important employees. | |
| ▲ | 2muchcoffeeman a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Easy. Have another team member run the stand up. Again the problem is that no one is interested in processes to make things better or more efficient and then people blame the process. The process might have plenty of short comings, but we’ll never know. |
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| ▲ | izacus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Essentially the old "This meeting could be an email. Yeah, but would you actually read the damn email?" thing. | |
| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether All of that can happen just fine in a real-time team chat as well - and give people the chance to provide actual context and links, and also check back at the actual discussion later. | |
| ▲ | portaouflop a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm.
I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time | | |
| ▲ | scott_w a day ago | parent [-] | | When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that. |
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| ▲ | jon-wood a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Over the years I've moved away from thinking of the daily standup as being a way to update everyone on what we're doing. The value in it is having a daily time when everyone on the team sees each other's faces and has a brief conversation. Sometimes it'll be a quick hello, other times we'll talk for half an hour about nothing in particular, but that's valuable on a remote team where it's all to easy to forget that everyone else is a real person. |
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| ▲ | CuriouslyC a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That's what happy hours and optional team activities are for. After hours gaming groups, book clubs, hobby groups, etc do this much better. | | |
| ▲ | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That seems socially punishing for people with other obligations (parents) and anyone who’s just not interested in the activities. | |
| ▲ | account42 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No thanks, I have my own hobbies and friends. Activities that primarily benefit work, including team building exercises, should be during paid company time. | |
| ▲ | esafak a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You don't have those things when working remotely. You need to foster social relations at work too; after-work socializing is not a substitute for a collaborative work atmosphere. | | |
| ▲ | gunsle 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You don’t “need” to foster social relations at work. They will naturally arise as people work together. This idea that we need to turn the workplace into a big “family” is nonsensical corporate propaganda pushed by HR departments primarily staffed by women. I promise, most men don’t give a single fuck about “fostering social relationships” at work. The guys I have respected and became the most friendly with at work have been the ones I’m in the trenches with, designing, building, etc. I don’t need to know what Susan in HR’s kid did over the weekend, it’s legitimately useless information to my entire life. I’ve got ~90 years on this planet at best. I’m not interested in wasting 1/5th of my working career in meetings, listening to people I don’t even know, telling me personal details about their lives I will not retain for more than 5 seconds. To me, it’s genuinely insulting to my time to waste it with these pointless fake displays of familiarity instead of getting to the work at hand and ending the meeting early. | | |
| ▲ | esafak 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would they want to be in trenches with you, collaborate on a project, start a company, or otherwise stick their neck out for you, if they don't know you? They'll pick someone they enjoy rapport with. |
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| ▲ | varispeed a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | People are real whether or not you see their faces or chat daily. Framing daily standups as "humanising" can end up dehumanising those who find enforced face time and small talk uncomfortable or exhausting - especially neurodivergent team members. Inclusivity means recognising that not everyone bonds the same way. | | |
| ▲ | varispeed a day ago | parent [-] | | Surprised by the downvotes, honestly. Inclusivity isn't about asking everyone to conform to neurotypical norms - it's about creating space for different ways of working and communicating. If even mentioning that feels unwelcome, that says something worth reflecting on. | | |
| ▲ | tstrimple a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the issue it that you're speaking to an ideal that doesn't tend to stand up in reality. The reality is if people stop seeing your face in meetings people are less likely to think about you. This may feel good to the stereotypical introvert who just wants to get things done and be left alone. But it can be a career killer. This is very apparent in hybrid companies where folks in the office with incidental face time have an easier time advancing than remote employees regardless of value added. We can state that it's not fair and things should be different and more inclusive but that doesn't do anything to actually make environments more inclusive. | | |
| ▲ | guappa 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In my company the career killer is being an immigrant lately. | |
| ▲ | varispeed a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Calling it a "career killer" to avoid constant face time ignores the reality that many people are masking disabilities just to survive daily interactions. Burnout from that kind of masking _is_ a career killer - just a quieter, slower one. We wouldn't tell someone in a wheelchair to "get more visible by taking the stairs." Yet we build ramps, pat ourselves on the back, and ignore invisible disabilities entirely. The fact that this kind of exclusion is still seen as normal - even strategic - should be a source of shame, not resignation. |
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| ▲ | esafak a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Imagine working in a team where you have never seen the face of your coworkers... Don't even be sure they're real; there are increasingly people who outsource their work to bots these days. | | |
| ▲ | varispeed a day ago | parent [-] | | You're looking at this through a neurotypical lens. I've worked in teams where I never saw most people’s faces, and yet we had genuine camaraderie and trust -built through shared work, not video feeds. For many neurodivergent people, faces and expressions aren't sources of connection - they're noise. Video calls can turn into a performance: "Does my face match what I'm saying?" "Did I laugh at the wrong moment?" "Is it my turn to speak yet?" That constant second-guessing burns cognitive energy that could go into actual contribution. When we treat visible presence as a proxy for being "real," we exclude people who can't - or shouldn't have to - mimic neurotypical behaviour just to belong. |
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| ▲ | randomcarbloke a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| async scales better than sync in this context as on larger teams you might need a queue. |
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| ▲ | scott_w a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops. Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack. |
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| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent [-] | | >Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack If a second "please respond, I need the answer now" Slack message is not enough, you have bigger problems | | |
| ▲ | scott_w a day ago | parent [-] | | So add yet more process and bureaucracy instead of following tried and true management techniques of having a synchronous meeting lasting 15 minutes every morning? | | |
| ▲ | laserlight a day ago | parent [-] | | This whole thread is about how standups are not “tried and true”. | | |
| ▲ | scott_w a day ago | parent [-] | | Ignoring the basics of a simple process doesn’t make the process “bad.” |
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