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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

The only metric that matters is - "is anything getting done". And this is why Scrum exists. Engineers hate scrum because it knocks us out of the zone in the morning, as it's yet another meeting to pop into.

But Scrum is not there for us, it's for the managers to know "what up". It's the visibility overhead SPECIFICALLY for this. I don't know why we have to invent other things on top of it.

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The irony of course being that the official scrum guide, however much weight you out on that, says that managers and PMs only attend standups if they actively contribute to the sprint. I have found daily standups that are mainly for the managers benefit incredibly annoying and unproductive. Maybe in teams with more junior people that don't speak up/actively reach out it makes sense but in my current team we talk all day on slack/meet. It makes much more sense to give the manager a weekly report on how the projects are progressing instead. This is much more outcome focused instead of trying to keep the manager abreast of every small step of solving a ticket.

There was a time I was running a 10+ team and was executing scrum by the book, not really understanding much of it at start. Meetings felt weird and generally it was very intense time. But after some time a few things clicked in my head: I could plan with some certainty without bothering people, and execution was falling between min/max planned capacity, everyone was aware of pretty much everything, even in 'other places' where they were not actively contributing, everyone learned to estimate their work based on complexity. And above all, after leaving the place and working in a few different shops, when I look at the code quality produced in that place I'm still impressed (not brownnosing myself, really). We executed ~50 2-weekly sprints, I miss that time.

> it's for the managers to know "what up"

If a manager wastes 30 minutes of their teams time every day because they can't figure out 'what up' from their task management software or quick 1-on-1 meetings, I can confidently assert they're a shit manager.

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