I agree this is a great question. Maybe more for managers, but it let's people think "This is day 2 of that blocker, I need to step in". Sometimes junior devs will let external asks sit too long and write it off as "blocked on another team". Managers can manage this.
These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven't, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks.
I purposefully schedule meetings after our standup to make sure I cut it off after 30 minutes. Our team of 11 will go for almost an hour if nobody cuts people off.
I had 8 people in standup today, the whole meeting took 4 minutes - mostly because of 2 people who had some after meeting news to share. As the team tech lead I need to keep track of what everyone is doing and just looking at stories in progress isn't enough to know if they are making progress or I need to jump in. (most of the time they are or they ask questions after the meeting). There is value in everyone knowing how the current story is progressing, but it should only be a few minutes. I run my standup 3x week as I don't need this daily, but I need to keep track that things are happening.
Ouch. 15 minutes is the rule. 30 minutes is way too long. I was in only one team that followed the rule, and after 15 minutes people would start leaving the room regardless of whether others are talking. If someone had a habit of speaking too much, he was coached.
When we were on site, we would try to schedule the room such that someone else had a booking at the 15 minute mark - so you had no choice but to keep it in that window.
This is easily solved by just having a facilitator who actually facilitates. Whether that's a scrum master, a manager, a team lead, or just a member of the team who isn't afraid to cut people off, it really is not that hard to keep standups to 15 minutes, maybe 20 for a team that big.
I started doing the listen-only as well! By this, I mean I just don't look at the screen, I'd love to know if there is a way to setup a listen-only option.
I've also used Jumpspeak, which is an AI conversation partner. It works ok, but the speech recognition is... not great. But you can have a conversation and practice listening and responding. I was able to treat the AI as an uber driver and ask about places to go in Peru, and how to get there, and why they were nice.
Our team had so many planning poker sessions where we spent 12 people * 2 dev hours trying to figure out whether stories were a 2 or a 3, management finally said it is always a 3. We were literally spending more aggregate time trying to decide effort, than the actual effort it took to complete these tasks.
2 and 3 are equal. 5 and 8 are equal. The question is simply "Is this a couple days, the whole week, or the whole sprint?".
I completely agree with these levels, but disagree with mapping them to “small, medium, and large.” That’s a lossy compression if you will, and the heart of the problem. A shorthand might start with good intentions, but rapidly is muddied by conflicting interests.
Almost 25 years ago I worked at a little startup. I started to build a network management system using ..... tcl/tk some open source HP Openview, what was the name?
Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down.
I think it was from the movie industry - just something in the background shot with lots of blinking lights and occasional beeps was known as an EBG, or "electronic bullshit grinder". They do tend to impress investors as well as audiences.
This is something my company's internal RTO channels seem to have missed. What if large corporations really *did* collect enough data during covid to justify working from home? Now faang can justify outsourcing the rest of US based jobs.
Force RTO in the US, replace those who leave with less expensive resources.
This is actually a brilliant bit of insight/tinfoil that I'd totally missed, largely because all the things that FAANGs have been saying to justify RTO have been so daft.
You're totally right, though. If the data shows that RTO has negligible benefit — or even, say, just a marginal 5-10% benefit — then the logical move is to force RTO for the most expensive headcount (since a 5% boost there will be the most valuable) and then hire globally-remote headcount for all the rest.
That... really feels quite grim, the more I think about it. Time to go stare at my early-retirement spreadsheets and see where I can squeeze out some more velocity for myself, I suppose.
lol what are they doing? Staring at the ceiling? What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home? How is this still a thing being discussed? Perhaps, at home, they are actually able to get some work done.
Again, this is my office. I'm sure there are some offices where people legitimately aren't doing much of anything at home. Statistically, that just has to be true. Maybe this is the wrong company?
> What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home?
I remember, way back in like 2012? 2015? Not sure when exactly, but we visited the office of a contractor we were working with, and they had a flatscreen on a stand in a public area with their lead developer on webcam, working from home. I don't know how everyone gets so utterly myopic that they forget you can just login to a videoconference (or IRC in the olden days) and just be available for these "quick chats" Bonus, if you need uninterrupted deep focus time, you can turn it off at your end.
And email, did we suddenly conveniently forget about that? LKML and countless other FLOSS mailing lists are proof positive that 100% remote can indeed build any scale of software.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.
The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.
If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.
I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.
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> I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online
I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.
I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.
Yeah I guess the difference is that at my workplace there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Even when there is a design document it often hasn't been updated or requires nuance to interpret that's only really in one or two peoples' heads. Often the question/discussions is about engineering priorities, some discovery was made during coding that would alter the design, and half the time simply bringing up the topic with them for 5 minutes brings new information to bear that produces a superior result.
I try not to waste their time and develop my questions as much as possible on my own, but I'm not going to risk several hours of wasted work going down the wrong path when a 5 minute discussion with a SME would confirm something.
And it is an RTO discussion, because in the office they're available to some degree. WFH that availability drops off a cliff, and these are questions about the inner-workings of proprietary software, if the answers were on Google there would be legal action.
That again sounds like a problem with your company's knowledge sharing culture, not with the industry at large. Silos exist even when every butt is in an office seat, that's a well-known issue that far pre-dates pandemic remote work moves. The answer isn't "make everyone defenseless to random interrupts from other people" but "learn how to actually document things so you're not a company full of points of failure".
It seems like what you really want is for others to treat your emergencies as theirs. They're not, they're yours. If you can't wait 15 minutes for a ping back without being completely stuck, you aren't planning your work correctly. That's nobody else's fault.
So this is such a good example of why the office is actually a major liability. Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist and that tapping people on the shoulder is more efficient. Everyone will be better off if instead knowledge is shared efficiently.
A good analogue is the culture of "the smoke break"(see the Friend's episode The One Where Rachel Smokes for a funny example). It's easy to say "the best decisions are made during smoke breaks therefore smoking is necessary for efficient businesses." Clearly that's absurd. It's not the smoking that makes good decisions, nor does the ability to tap people on the shoulder make for good documentation. Depending upon an accidental formation of office culture is never going to go well in the long run.
> Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist
Viewed a different way, it allows a team to spend less time documenting and more time on other things. Increased documentation could be seen as one of the costs of working remotely.
Increased documentation is a cost you pay no matter what, you just pay it later in other formats when in-office - when the SME you treat as a guru finds a better-paying gig you have to scramble to rebuild their expertise from nothing or hope they are nice enough to do a thorough knowledge transfer. That kills productivity far worse and for longer than taking 30m at the end of your day updating some shared wiki.
All this to say, the trade-off you're proposing doesn't exist. You're arguing for paying twice instead of paying once - twice in the sense that you lose productivity now via random interrupts, and in the future when your siloed knowledge leaves you high and dry. Hope the "other things" you got done instead of documenting were worth it in that scenario.
I had never heard the "superman" part of that, I always thought it was Stussy. But I knew exactly what you meant! Turns out both were accepted origins, but not necessarily true.
I'm just moving into this phase as well. The same parents that said it was ridiculous kids have phones, are now getting their kids phones. I've heard that not having a phone is essentially like knowing the whole school is invited to party, except you. I'm really not sure what to do.
It's definitely a coordination problem. While all the kids might be better off without access to social media, the one kid who doesn't when everybody else does gets a significant alienation downside, probably more than cancelling out the benefits.
It’s not a fault of their peers to be so easily addicted, rather the blame is on engineers working hard to make 2d images and text into dopamine drugs. Otherwise you’re right. People are so oversocialized that the very thought of alienation scares them. As if today’s society is the absolute pinnacle of goodness and everyone _must_ indulge in it as much as possible.
Humans are social creatures. Loneliness due to be alienated from your peers puts you at risk for mental health issues, potentially more so than the social media you alienated yourself from your peers to avoid. Hence the coordination problem.
Nearly half of all possible human actions puts one at risk for mental health issues, to varying degrees, so that doesn't seem like a sufficient justification for intentionally addicting oneself.
My little cousins first started with an LTE Apple Watch. This allowed them to use iMessage to call/text friends and family, but prevented the use of any web browsing/social media. The downside is Apple Watches only last a few hours on LTE.
They are now ~12 years old and just received their first iPhones. Parental controls/screen time is used to limit their access to social media.
I personally refuse to use TikTok. But I know that is the main App children use today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to handle that situation. A teenager without access to TikTok today is absolutely going to be mocked by others.
How old are kids these days requesting social media? I think at some point it's inevitable that they'll figure out a way on, so it's probably better to allow with boundaries and teach healthy habits early-ish. It can start getting socially detrimental to be completely off social media too, e.g. missing invites to larger gatherings.
But I have no idea how young we are actually talking here, my experience with this like a decade ago (so also not quite as harmful platforms) was handling the topic at around 13 yo.
At that time though completely restricting seemed a real gamble, some of the kids with no access snuck around and were the ones behind irresponsible shit that became school gossip. For example one kid without a Facebook made an account impersonating one of his teachers, used it to friend other teachers and see their private-ish info. Got easily caught because he also friended some of his real friends with the same account and even made some timeline posts back and forth, narrowed it down real quick.
