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Steve French posted:I’ve never understood the idea of standups being for sharing blockers. If I’m blocked on something I’m sure as hell not waiting for a meeting to communicate that This is how the conversations typically go for me at $org: Me: Hey I'm blocked on this thing Boss: Wow that's a lot of words and I'm stuck in meetings all day so let's just talk about it at standup
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Nov 2, 2023 10:54
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Steve French posted:I’ve never understood the idea of standups being for sharing blockers. If I’m blocked on something I’m sure as hell not waiting for a meeting to communicate that Right? I am pretty antisocial, but even I can send Slack PMs to people.
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Nov 2, 2023 12:17
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You all haven’t seen someone be blocked and just try to fix it themselves for days and eventually work into a stupid solution from Stack Overflow that they open a PR for and immediately get told the right way to do it?
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Nov 2, 2023 12:26
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Obviously we have, and I am pretty sure everyone was that junior at some point. I just think that standups are lovely solution for that problem, especially with how easy it is to turn them into "justify why you haven't finished all your tickets yet" by mediocre managers.
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Nov 2, 2023 13:02
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Steve French posted:I’ve never understood the idea of standups being for sharing blockers. If I’m blocked on something I’m sure as hell not waiting for a meeting to communicate that Maybe you didn't see it or my misunderstanding, but op posted "weeks". Getting that to a day seems like improvement.
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Nov 2, 2023 13:02
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smackfu posted:You all haven’t seen someone be blocked and just try to fix it themselves for days and eventually work into a stupid solution from Stack Overflow that they open a PR for and immediately get told the right way to do it? You don't need to talk about me like this 
Volmarias fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Nov 2, 2023 |
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Nov 2, 2023 14:10
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Yeah I saw the weeks thing, and yes I’ve had coworkers who are bad at communicating when they’re blocked on something. I still think that a team wide meeting is a brute force and lazy bandaid fix to the problem.
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Nov 2, 2023 14:37
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Finally manged to make a tiny bit of progress on my project only to be called into a status/planning/concerns meeting by my boss. Fully expected to be reprimanded for my seasonally affected sluggishness, but ended up being reprimanded for going to too far too fast. 
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Nov 2, 2023 14:38
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Steve French posted:Yeah I saw the weeks thing, and yes I’ve had coworkers who are bad at communicating when they’re blocked on something. I still think that a team wide meeting is a brute force and lazy bandaid fix to the problem. Do you have a fix for this that doesn't rely on the blocked person being good at their job or having the manager micro manage every ticket?
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Nov 2, 2023 14:59
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Aramoro posted:Do you have a fix for this that doesn't rely on the blocked person being good at their job or having the manager micro manage every ticket? This is going to sound unhelpful, unspecific, and maybe dismissive, but it's not intended to be: I think it's reasonable to expect the manager to help that person improve their communication, and to expect the person to demonstrate improvement there over time. Maybe in some teams/orgs using a standup as a forcing function to mitigate poor communication and bringing up blockers at most a day later is good enough; I don't personally consider it to be, and setting aside for a moment any other desired outcomes of a standup I don't think by itself is enough to justify the interruption and time spent by the entire team; I don't view it all that much different from other job performance concerns that I would approach by trying to coach the person to improve, rather than just deal with it using a meeting. So in short, no, because it does rely on the blocked person getting better at their job, but I'm a pretty firm believer that most people can and do improve with appropriate help.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:08
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If you aren't using standups as mini-retros for the past 24 hours, you're wasting everyone's time Lemma: If your product or project doesn't need mini-retros every 24 hours, and you're doing standups, you're wasting everyone's time
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Nov 2, 2023 15:12
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Vulture Culture posted:If you aren't using standups as mini-retros for the past 24 hours, you're wasting everyone's time Pumping lemma: If you're doing standups, you're wasting everyone's time.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:14
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The best part of standups is when everyone learns to just tune their coworkers out and you can reference tickets that don't exist or learning to divide by zero because people would rather leave than ask a question. The worst part is how they're designed to be the most efficient way for a manager to put pressure on a team. I don't even think about doing fast standups because we have some real talkers on the team, and I'd rather just check in with folks one on one than try to turn that ship around.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:23
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Aramoro posted:Do you have a fix for this that doesn't rely on the blocked person being good at their job or having the manager micro manage every ticket? Why should I not rely on the blocked person being good at their job, or at least the manager pushing them to get better over time?
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Nov 2, 2023 15:28
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StumblyWumbly posted:The best part of standups is when everyone learns to just tune their coworkers out I used stand-ups to relearn how to play the banjo.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:51
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Pumping lemma: If you're doing standups, you're wasting everyone's time. StumblyWumbly posted:The worst part is how they're designed to be the most efficient way for a manager to put pressure on a team. I really don't have a horse in the race, and I don't care what work structure anyone chooses, but I do see the value. Capital-S Scrum fucks it up almost across the board, like most agile concepts it misappropriates. There are two reasons to bring up blockers in a standup format.
Lots of companies try to left-shift the resolution of blockers onto whichever IC is closest to the blockage. If this is your situation and it works, you probably don't need standups. If you have the chaos of a sketch comedy show where bits are being written until the moment the actors are on stage, and you have lots of different external inputs to collect on work in progress and next steps, and you have someone who's really good at wrangling those, this is the small process that lets you weaponize that person.
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Nov 2, 2023 16:23
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Xarn posted:Why should I not rely on the blocked person being good at their job, or at least the manager pushing them to get better over time? Because if a ticket takes 3 days it's hard for someone to know if it took 3 days or it was blocked and the engineer sat with his thumb up his rear end for 2 days. If an engineer is blocked and no one is around to hear are they even blocked? Also junior engineers don't always know when they are blocked so it can be helpful for them to articulate their issues to people regularly.
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Nov 2, 2023 16:27
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StumblyWumbly posted:The best part of standups is when everyone learns to just tune their coworkers out I always consider this to be a clear signal that the team shouldn't exist in its current configuration
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Nov 2, 2023 16:27
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Just to clarify some of my smart-assery: - I manage a hardware-firmware-software team. Folks are generally working on very separate parts of a project. We've tried using standups for folks to stay in touch, but it ends up being a time waster because folks are generally on very separate parts, and we have a few folks who like to talk. - Other folks in my company use standups as meandering, unplanned meetings, as if calling them "standups" made them efficient and useful - Forcing people to communicate and coordinate is important, I think standups generally try to push this onto the Engineers and force them to interact in the standup. It's trying to solve the problem where an engineer leaves a piece for someone else, and they need to know to pick it up. It's a valid problem, but if people aren't handling that on their own, I don't know if the standup will fix things better than talking to people directly.
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Nov 2, 2023 17:19
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If your standups involve more than like, 6 people, they're rapidly departing from the realm of "standups" and turning into "meetings". If your team is bigger than that and is working on several wildly distinct things, you're often better thinking of it as two or more different teams that happen to share a manager, and just have separate standups for each of them.
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Nov 2, 2023 23:26
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Jabor posted:If your standups involve more than like, 6 people, they're rapidly departing from the realm of "standups" and turning into "meetings". If your team is bigger than that and is working on several wildly distinct things, you're often better thinking of it as two or more different teams that happen to share a manager, and just have separate standups for each of them. yeah but what if you have like 100 developers working on a project? obvious we need to split them up into teams. but wait, how do we get the teams to communicate with each other, etc... let's have another meeting, call it "scrum of scrums." wait, that isn't working, I know, I've heard about this thing called SAFe, the scaled agile framework... *shudder*
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Nov 3, 2023 16:49
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I am currently working at a company that uses SAFe and it's honestly not that bad. I know it's popular to poo poo on it but quite frankly if your company is at a certain size you will end up reinventing the wheel regarding alignment and processes anyway, so you might as well pick a framework to help you do so. My previous job was at a company that was much larger and tried to come up with their own agile processes and it sucked to get people to align across domains. Of course, it's also a scam to help sell trainings and certifications and so on, but I'll ignore that whole part of it for now.
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Nov 3, 2023 17:24
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There isn’t any real way to reconcile “we don’t like to plan far in advance because we want flexibility” and “we need to plan far in advance because we have dependencies on other teams.”
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Nov 3, 2023 18:08
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Exactly, so whatever you're going to do will be imperfect but having _some_ structure for longer term planning is quite useful.
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Nov 3, 2023 18:13
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My company is in that weird place just now. My dept has maybe 100 engineers over 3 locations and timezones. Although were part of a larger engineering org. There's a desire for the teams to produce things quickly in an iterative fashion, so Agile. We have scrum teams sprints etc. But at a top level theres quarterly planning which is planning on feature delivery in 6-9 months time, usually to meet immovable deadlines. That top level vision kinda leans towards just doing Kanban and bashing stuff out but that's not ~*Agile*~
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Nov 4, 2023 12:31
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There’s this big dead zone in between executive leadership team and Agile. At one end the CEO needs to go the board and say X will finished in 6 months, and at the other end are small teams using Agile and saying “we have no idea what we’ll be doing in six months” while gesturing vaguely at a backlog, and inbetween are middle management scrambling to hold the whole place together. But it always kinda works.
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Nov 4, 2023 13:04
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lifg posted:And it only kinda works. Fixed
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Nov 4, 2023 15:35
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Aramoro posted:Because if a ticket takes 3 days it's hard for someone to know if it took 3 days or it was blocked and the engineer sat with his thumb up his rear end for 2 days. If an engineer is blocked and no one is around to hear are they even blocked? Presumably you estimate tickets, so if someone always takes 3x as long, they need either extra help from their manager to get better, or be shown the door. If it happens only rarely, does it matter much whether the ticket was misestimated, or they went off a weird tangent and now know waaaaay too much about the internal details of how Windows handles paths? In both cases they presumably learned something (in the former, what to look for next time we are doing estimations, in the latter, waaaaay too much about Windows paths), so it's fine. Obviously there is a spectrum and the manager should help people move to the "happens rarely" side. Now if someone is the type to just sit on their hands for 2 days waiting on an external input instead of picking up a different ticket from backlog, that's a different problem. Aramoro posted:Also junior engineers don't always know when they are blocked so it can be helpful for them to articulate their issues to people regularly. I agree and I think that the manager (or TL, depending on how you split this in the team) should keep up with the junior engineers much more tightly than with the more senior ones. Again, I don't think you should just let people do whatever, I just think that daily standup is a terrible way of keeping tabs on what's happening, and encourages bad managers to be bad at their jobs.
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Nov 4, 2023 15:48
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Maybe just have a high tolerance for bullshit, but I don't mind my current team's setup, and we don't really have an aggressively efficient standup, but I also have enough different things I'm working on that I'm not being knocked out of the focus zone by having to go. We have standup 3x a week and skip it on our team meeting day, and it's basically 'what are you working on and what are you blocked by' - I generally find it useful to know what my coworkers are working on, and sometimes people think they aren't blocked until they bring up their plan and then people chime in and go 'wait whoa that's a problem'.
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Nov 4, 2023 20:56
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smackfu posted:There isn’t any real way to reconcile “we don’t like to plan far in advance because we want flexibility” and “we need to plan far in advance because we have dependencies on other teams.”
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Nov 4, 2023 23:46
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My standup is always about 3-5 minutes of actual updates and then 30-45 minutes of my PM talking about whatever is on his mind and me doing something else for that time It kind of really peeves me off that he always hijacks standup but I just tune it out and he already doesn’t like me so I don’t want to make if any worse and call him out
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Nov 10, 2023 06:25
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Macichne Leainig posted:My standup is always about 3-5 minutes of actual updates and then 30-45 minutes of my PM talking about whatever is on his mind and me doing something else for that time I'm glad the people on my team that talk too much are fine with (and openly ask people) being told to table it until the end of stand-up.
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Nov 10, 2023 06:38
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The worst part, perhaps, is that we have a dedicated Scrum Master and he is complicit in the standup takeovers, insofar that he doesn’t even say “Hey let’s table this until we get through status updates” or anything like that. The audience also has grown significantly so maybe I’ll just plant the seed in everyone’s mind like “hey we should refocus the standup meetings to be… standup and just meet ad hoc with relevant parties afterwards if necessary”
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Nov 10, 2023 15:38
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Macichne Leainig posted:My standup is always about 3-5 minutes of actual updates and then 30-45 minutes of my PM talking about whatever is on his mind and me doing something else for that time I don't know if I've had a non-regular work experience or if I'm just singularly gifted at malicious compliance and rear end-covering but I go through PM's like red-shirts on Star Trek - went through six of them in two years.
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Nov 10, 2023 18:03
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:I don't know if I've had a non-regular work experience or if I'm just singularly gifted at malicious compliance and rear end-covering but I go through PM's like red-shirts on Star Trek - went through six of them in two years. God, I wish. This guy is definitely an SME in the field but once you apply any of it to software or technology in any capacity it goes out the window completely. Lots of just "why can't you just do X..." types of conversations. And that's part of why the conversations drag on so long, too, as it's almost akin to explaining to a brick wall.
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Nov 10, 2023 18:06
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I understand the need for documentation, but I'd sure like to know what the point is to sit down with a project lead and be like "This is how you set up Node.js, and npm i is how you make my project runnable after pulling it from the repo, and npm start would be the easiest way to start it." (I'm not IT, we're an outside department doing dev.) They should give us access to their wiki, so I can write it up myself, which would be a more efficient way than chaperoning some guy, who then notes it down and sends the document to me to revise it or whatever. But their wiki is based on XWiki, which seems to be a clusterfuck, while mentioning getting a Confluence and Jira setup soon, where "soon" moves up another month or three every time I ask when the gently caress it'll be done.
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Nov 11, 2023 12:11
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Combat Pretzel posted:I understand the need for documentation, but I'd sure like to know what the point is to sit down with a project lead and be like "This is how you set up Node.js, and npm i is how you make my project runnable after pulling it from the repo, and npm start would be the easiest way to start it." This is the kind of instructions the VP guy was asking me about 2 or so weeks ago. Like documentation is absolutely important, but you shouldn't have to explain the industry standard stuff to someone like that
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Nov 11, 2023 17:39
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Ok, gotcha. sudo npm install...
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Nov 11, 2023 18:14
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spiritual bypass posted:Ok, gotcha. sudo npm install... You know what, it's stupid but I think it will work and that's what matters
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Nov 11, 2023 18:22
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Combat Pretzel posted:I understand the need for documentation, but I'd sure like to know what the point is to sit down with a project lead and be like "This is how you set up Node.js, and npm i is how you make my project runnable after pulling it from the repo, and npm start would be the easiest way to start it." Macichne Leainig posted:This is the kind of instructions the VP guy was asking me about 2 or so weeks ago.
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Nov 12, 2023 05:21
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