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Comment by cesaref | Hacker News Reader

Breaking news - introverts don't want to have daily stand ups, whilst extroverts think it's fun and useful.

I personally found them quite helpful to ensure I could help out team members who had got stuck. It's sometimes lonely debugging a complex system, and people can appreciate someone else to either confirm it really is what they think is going on, or maybe bounce some ideas off. It's a great way for the more experienced team members to find places where they can make a significant difference by contributing a bit of their day to helping out.

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If your team is waiting until the next stand-up to get help to get unstuck I think that's a cultural problem, they should be reaching out at any point during the day.

I feel like the existence of daily standup has influenced this for my team. There's a lot of, "well I could reach out about this now, but I'll just bring it up at standup and then I'm not interrupting anyone"

Yes. The existence of the meeting makes people delay solving their problems until the next one.

This is not something that make teams agile.

The solution? Hourly scrums, daily retrospectives.

More meetings: both the cause of and solution to our problems!

And reporting up to someone whose sole responsibility in the interaction is to detect stuckness or the hint of stuckness or to offer referrals to someone who might make you go faster is tiring as hell.

It's quite transparent and grating.

I recognize that often there is a good outcome and it helps. People can spin on issues poorly. (And I definitely am a person who from outside appearances sometimes resembles that, although usually it's me becoming the only expert we have in the domain & seeing how systems really work, not just closing the ticket asap.)

I wish we had async/offline systems to follow each others course & suggest some steering rather than being beholden to daily cross examinations where managers get to decide to redirect us off the path we've chosen.

stuck doesn't mean twiddling your thumbs wondering what to do next - i'd certainly expect someone to ask if they were in that situation.

No, stuck can often only be observed by looking in, the person or team may think they are doing useful stuff, but someone coming to it fresh can see that they have missed something obvious, hence why recreating the problem seems to be impossible, or why the fix seems very involved.

So a standup can allow you to see that someone is stuck, even when they don't realise it themselves.

And now you have people complaining about getting interrupted all the time and breaking their flow.

> I personally found them quite helpful to ensure I could help out team members who had got stuck.

So talk to people. You can even do this every day.

But you can't do that on a meeting with close to ten people, all stopped there waiting for you to finish your speech.

In other discussion, people complain about the "flow" and how they should not be interrupted.

I guess different people works differently.

If everybody posts in a shared channel when they get stuck and ignores that channel when they're heads down on something, then you get zero interruptions, flow is preserved, and people get helped when they need it.

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