Comment by ralferoo
11 hours ago
> A short weekly standing meeting
The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH.
I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their reports actually doing the work. In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.
I've worked in exactly one place were the standups literally were a small group of engineers and one PM, and it was literally "I'm working on this, no problems" or "I hit this issue, I'd like to chat to X about it after the meeting" and the entire thing was over in 2-3 minutes - nobody sat down because there was literally no point. In that company, the manager would just catch up with each personal individually to find out what everyone was up to, taking maybe a minute or 2 each day AND after checking whether they were in the zone or happy to be distracted. In that place, once every 2 weeks we'd also have an hour scheduled 1-to-1 about anything the manager or report wanted to discuss about non-project things, but that could end early if nobody had anything else they wanted to discuss.
I manage teams and a standup with 20+ attendees sounds like hell to me. We keep standups to team scope and 10 minutes long (20 minutes in the case of our largest team, but it almost never goes the full time).
We have some larger meetings that are closer to what you are describing, but they are for higher-level management, not line engineers.
> management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting.
Only if you let them. We don't let management attend our weekly. They have nothing to contribute anyway. Just set boundaries.
In a lot (most?) companies, management serves as the bosses over engineers. So good luck telling your boss they’re not allowed in your meeting.
You don't tell them they're not allowed. You ask them what they need from the meeting and how so you can free up the time from their calendar, or what they need to comfortably delegate the responsibility to you.
Managers don't do this stuff for funsies they do it because they don't trust that their team won't go off track because of something they don't know.
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The small standup you describe works because it is basically an interrupt router: say what you're doing, surface blockers, then move the real discussion to the relevant people
In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.
Uh, I'm a manager and that meeting format gives me a visceral negative reaction.
I have a team of 15 directs (+ 2-3 on loan at any given time) and I would never require all of them to attend a single meeting with individual report-outs. What a waste of time for all.
Currently, the group is split in two. Out standup are are you describe in the last paragraph - what you did, are doing, and blockers. If there's need for deeper discussion, we table that to the end (or schedule a separate meeting), so anybody not required can get back to "real" work. On a good day, the meeting takes ~10 minutes (and that involves some chit-chat) and maybe once/week it take the full 30 minute block.
Maybe relevant - 4 of the 15 are right out of college, still learning the job, the daily meeting gives them an opportunity to discuss work without feeling like they're pestering anybody. If the team was more mature, I could see going to 3x/week stand-ups or similar.
> In general, [managers] prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing.
Most of the time they don’t even know what everybody is doing, or why, or how. But they like to fool themselves into thinking that, because ??? it given them the warm fuzzies, I guess.
Then they just wasted everybody’s time for absolutely no reason at all.
As a manager, I would hate that. Have small groups of 5-8 do standups. There's no reason to waste ten thousand dollars a day on that many people waiting for each other's status updates.