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Comment by jrib | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Both times there was zero value in them. People won't read them.

Daily stand-ups provide zero value in my opinion, asynchronous or not. If one has a blocker then it should be raised to the team in slack/email as soon as you realize you need help from the team. Waiting until daily stand-up doesn't seem sensible to me.

Paying attention to conversations the team is having in slack, the ticket tracker and pull requests gives a much better sense of progress than stand-up in my experience.

So I have mixed feelings. For people who don't want to invest in paying attention to PRs and slack, synchronous stand-up seems to provide more value because they are forced to listen. Personally I'd rather not have stand-up, but if it's required then I'd rather do it asynchronously so it minimizes my time wasted.

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> If one has a blocker then it should be raised to the team in slack/email as soon as you realize you need help from the team. Waiting until daily stand-up doesn't seem sensible to me.

The point of the daily stand-up is honestly more for identifying when people are struggling but not reaching out for help. A lot of people have a lone wolf attitude towards work even if they have a team so spotting when someone is avoiding asking for help is important.

Ideally you wouldn't waste everyone on the team's time every day just to suss out individuals who potentially can't ask for help. A competent lead or manager should be able to identify those kinds of team members without a standup, and address the issue 1:1. If the lead or manager can't do that, why have a lead or manager at all?

I'm actually struggling to think of how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.

By asking people what they are working on all day? "Hey can you tell me the status of xyz please" type things?

Wander by the cubicle and peek over the shoulder?

Feels like stuff that would get people accused of being micromanagers. Honestly far better imo to just have a pre-set, teamwide thing set up.

This also involves the whole team in identifying and solving blockers rather than everything going through a lead, who could then just become a bottleneck (or a human-shaped blocker)

> how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.

Notice when things aren't getting done by the time they were estimated to be done, and notice if the person seems to be continually pushing back completion dates. After a day or two of "thought I could get it cone but couldn't", it's negligent to _not_ dig in to _why_ the person is struggling. Really not meaning to be snarky, but if a manager isn't doing this, I'm not sure what exactly they are doing.

IME most solid engineers prefer autonomy and trust over schedule and process, and would strongly resent having to spend their time in a meeting because their manager was unable to do people management.

doesn't matter what the point is, 5/5 companies i've worked at it's simply repeat what's already visible on trello/jira board to people who can't care less. Every time hated hearing scrum master talk on and on about random stuff.

I feel if your team has more than 6 members standup is anti pattern at that point

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