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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Standups are for "weakest" devs, to break silo of "I am working on my thing don't bother me".

"weakest" devs - you know not everyone is outspoken and will communicate without issues, new young devs will be afraid to ask an experienced guy. Some experienced guys (also "weak") will be assholes to young devs for asking questions. Just getting team to talk to each other at least once a day is positive. Unless you work only with senior people who are experienced and don't have any issues talking to each other, I would still try to get people to gather for standup.

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The best dev on my team is also a very reluctant communicator.

This guy is a beast at getting things done, and is a good communicator once you get him talking. Overall, a joy to work with. However, you do typically have to make the first step. He kinda stays dark without scheduled meetings.

To me the key is to keep the daily standups VERY brief. They help the "reluctant" communicators. And they don't cost the "active" communicators very much time.

I am a fairly "active" communicator myself. I'm gonna spend 15 minutes talking to my freaking team every day anyway. So a brief 10-15 morning standup is no problem at all.

Weaker? Senior? We have something to learn from every one.

Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone.

Both of these are great ways to create a really toxic working environment, please don't perpetuate it.

How would you express that thought, to get through to a person I replied to who wrote he has 15 years of experience and he did not see any value in standups?

Do you think he is not a senior person? Is he a bad person for pointing out his years of experience? Maybe I am bad person trying to express in BOLD that there are people with less experience, social anxiety, assholes and we have to work with all those personalities. With strong emphasis that standups are good tool for getting rid of toxic work environment and getting teams together.

Counterpoint: comment was fine and non-toxic, describing siloing as weak no matter who's doing it is an accurate and a pretty tame criticism, and ensuring that's not happening is indeed the only real point of scheduled daily stand-ups. As long as we're gonna have the term "senior"—and we do have it—I'd abso-friggin'-lutely reserve it for people who can avoid siloing without a formal, daily ritual, and a team of such folks don't need stand-ups. Don't worry about it, ozim.

> Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone.

Ozim advocated neither being an asshole nor working alone, so is perpetuating neither. Standups have a place and it's to fight both of those problems, when some ICs on a team can't handle it on their own.

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