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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens.

Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

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Making classic standups useful and comfortable definitely requires psychological safety. You need to feel like you can occasionally say "worked on X, didn't make any progress", and a manager or a rival isn't going to pounce on you for it.

If you don't have pervasive psychological safety, there's a lot of stuff from XP that isn't going to work.

Exactly what I was about to say. There are many things that are dismissed in team culture because of the fear of feeling exposed or blamed but that is an issue of culture and/or insecurity, not a disadvantage of using agile methods.

This reminds of this scene:

https://youtu.be/OMDQzITWJyU?t=204

From "The Dictator", where Nuclear Nadal is reporting on his progress.

My 2c - the key is that the focus should be on delivery and not some justification for the work you did yesterday. The idea being that you are standing up looking at the work in front of you and the TEAM itself should be focused on how to move things across the board (ie delivering it to whatever definition of done makes sense for you)

> Focus should be on delivery

But if I wasn't productive yesterday, I'm not delivering today...

Also, the fact that someone _says_ the focus is on delivery doesn't mean the dramatic focus of the situation is not on whether or not you've "been good" yesterday.

>Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations

What do you mean by this? Are there significant issues with the management or other devs? This really should be a time where you bring up the issues you're having, and options for others to help you.

Sometimes, tickets just get way underpointed, and I've definitely felt the "on trial" frame of mind, but that's more me putting more pressure on myself. It definitely helps when the rest of the team is asking "ok, you're in a rough spot. What can we do to make it easier?"

> Are there significant issues with the management or other devs? This really should be a time where you bring up the issues you're having, and options for others to help you.

Any issues with the management an engineer brings up are issues readily solved with a pink slip for the engineer. "Reading the room" is essential -- understanding the company culture -- before you speak. And even then, you might be wrong.

Wow, I really feel sorry for whatever situations you've found yourself in.

> What do you mean by this?

I mean, if there isn't a manager who can give you orders and personally decide whether you get fired or not. Of course that's not very realistic in a privately-owned, hierarchically-managed commercial company.

I skipped some meetings randomly (I was busy on the phone), so that's the escape hatch. But alternatively one might argue that if it's mandatory nobody will come.

I don't have a good argument for the second part, except that I'd attend it to be up to date whenever I could.

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