Although Agile has merits in its own right it is largely a corporate tool now to put developers on the treadmill to work harder to produce more in less time for the same salary. You, as i have said before, have just got to understand Marx's surplus value theory of labour!

Lol, that's a very bleak view.

Thanks for having the courage to share that. It's absolutely true. I hope management that are still learning to understand what agility is really about, will eventually realize how these twisting of practices are making it hard for people to have the honesty and safety to take the risks needed to be successful. I talked about that some in one of the other videos on the channel that might be relatable based on your feedback, "Is it Safe to Make Mistakes on your Software Project?": kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Y8qYf9h_yLO5eaM.html

I know the feel

I can relate to this word for word. Such a terrible feeling man.

omg i felt this so hard man... its so annoying and unnecessarily stressfull, id rather code as a hobby just because of this

Wow You put this feeling in words perfectly. I would probably screenshot it as a reminder to myself.

indeed. And the idea of having managers just call you into their office if they think you're "too slow" makes any one on one with your manager a communist style struggle session where you're being accused of laziness and incompetence and basically won't get out until you acknowledge that you are indeed lazy and incompetent. I've sadly seen that on all too many projects.

This is most likely what we also do but meh .. 10mins is still a long time for me lol

@@Yoonalayciangelo I'm also not a big fan of meetings, but I believe that a well-conducted 10-minutes meeting is still important, as some people tend to not communicate when they are stuck, which ends up being much more costly in the long run. If these meetings are conducted well, you should only have to talk about 30s as a developer, at most.

@@andrearmstrong3715 i agree with you, but man i don't know why others cannot admit that they are having a hard time implementing something. If it's because of pride then that sucks.

If the point is just to answer those question why do we even need a meeting. Most of the time I feel like I could just send a message with the answer of those questions. The 3rd questions is pure bs, if anything reporting "blockers" only makes you feel and look bad, since 99% of the time nothing can be done to help and if nobody can do anything about the problem, why bring it up.

@@allancg1022 well the point is also to say good morning to everyone (in my case we all work remotely with almost no meetings so its often the only time of the day when I "see" my workmates) Also what I mean by blockers arent things like oh theres a bug I havent figured out, more like team wide issues like this might be a data concern, turns out this is harder so priorities might change for product team, etc. Definitely only things that actually other people should do something about, otherwise nobody cares what you are saying and I just say "working on it" Also I dont think being afraid of "looking bad" is a healthy mindset, if you are stuck on something you should ask for help rather than develop sub optimal solutions because you want to look smart, Just my opinion

@Mesophyl why? I have perfect knowledge of what everyone in my team is doing. If they're blocked, I know that way sooner than earliest stand up meeting. I don't need those meetings to get this information, there are other channels for getting it.

@Mesophyl I don't understand, but OK 🙂

It depends on the group dynamic of the developers and how they communicate their current work. This might be the case for a team that regularly bounces ideas off one another, or where everyone uses the status tools actively, or if pair programming is a regular and shuffled thing. But there are teams where some or even many of the developers aren't keeping track of what everyone's doing for whatever reason, and especially if there's a lot of interdependency between the items different team members are working on, then scrums can be a useful tool for everyone keeping up to speed on what everyone's working on and how it affects one another.

You've never had a case in a standup where you've said "today I'll be working on the widget" and another developer has said "wait, I was about to work on the widget too" and you've said "oh right, let's get together after and make sure we're not treading on each other's toes"? If you've never had that, you've either got a quite extraordinarily efficient team and it's true that you don't need standups - you don't need anything - you have reached a level of development that mere mortals cannot hope to match; or your team is not using the standup for its intended purpose, and are probably tripping over each other in ways that could be avoided if they were.

@@BittermanAndy I wouldn't say never, but it is certainly rare. Most of the time I resolve these things in a group chat. Basically I prefer group chat to a stand up.

Great addition. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself. It’s hard not to feel pressure to “toot your own horn” with management present. I much prefer giving managers a landing page or view in a tool so they can stay out of these meetings. They are so valuable when focused on developers!!

". I can't concentrate when I know I'm going to have a forced break." true, why to dive deep into something if you know you will be interrupted and have to reset almost from the beginning.

1MinuteFlipDoc same for me

It always makes me happy to hear when someone has a bad experience with some agile or scrum practice but then gets an opportunity to do it right. Nice!

Couldn’t agree more

Unless developers in a so-called team work solo on separate projects, manager is interrogating individuals and at the end of the scrum devs need to write explanations why some tasks will be moved to the next sprint... mind, no customers are involved in any planning, no planning whatsoever, no demos whatsoever.

@Johnny Five those are worded perfectly, and technically to boot! The way these people keep saying they were clueless about anything more complex than a Jira ticket -- is laughable.

Must have had some awful Scrum Master(s)

@@flowers7fun I wasn't aware there were other kinds.

Good insights. I think the original daily standup meeting questions were good for developers who didn’t always work with each other every day to sync up. Of course we know the management side of the industry shifted the intent and focus of them (unintentionally?) over time. I’m not sure if you watched my interview with Woody Zuill yet, or the second interview I did with Scott Nimrod right after. We get into some of the side effects of teams that do mob programming. There’s really no need any more for daily standup meetings on these teams. I realize this is only a very small percentage of the industry today, but it looks like a promising direction to explore. YMMV

questions relevant to developers are those that are precisely forbiden: documentation, design, interfaces, algorithms, debugging, testing, tools, etc.

Bummer :(. Yeah project managers can fall into the trap of thinking the work actually gets done in these meetings...

Thanks, I never felt I had the option to quit since I was supporting a growing family and honestly still love it. Dealing with the expectations is the hard part, just trying to help people not lose hope. 👍

You have no idea how much that means to me. Thanks for the support! 👍

I completely agree. It's also content that stands the test of time. I'm watching this 2018 video in 2022 and every bit of it is more true today.

Also I have hypermobile joints, so standing up for long durations (as stand-up meetings always devolves into 30-40 minute time wasters all the time), really hurt my knees. So I always sit down, on the floor if they insist on having the stand-up away from the chairs. I also have auditory processing issues, so I have a hard time hearing what the others are saying, and I forget most info I get verbally right away. So if they need me to know something they better send it to me in writing anyway. So for me it's just a huge waste of productive time with no benefits whatsoever.

I find asynchronous like email, or optionally asynchronous media like text chat (you can chat to someone offline and they can respond later) is a good thing. That way I can report whatever I did and am going to do as soon as I start working and the other developers can report whenever they come in to work, and I can read that after lunch or before leaving without it interrupting my flow. I'm an early riser, at least compared to most developers, so I will start working about 8:30 or 9:00, while most others I've worked with starts showing up in between 10:00 and 12:00, and I eat lunch at 11:00. So when we had physical stand-ups, it usually was scheduled at a "compromise" time like 10:00 or 10:30 meaning, I got "nothing real done" before lunch (as less than 3 hours is too short to really get into flow. And also at least a couple of developers was always late. (And of course that also means those who are actually on time gets to hear the rant about being late at least twice a day, while those who are late may only get this lecture only once a day. That's just unfair).

Had to take a hiatus to get my life back in order. I will be back this year! Thanks for the support.

@@HealthyDev Hope everything is all well on your end. Please do take care of yourself in these troubled times. I appreciate all those videos you have created thus far and am looking forward to your return if you choose to do so. Stay safe

@@HealthyDev Glad to hear you're coming back. Just discovered your channel and it's been great to show me I'm not alone in the stuff I've noticed as a novice dev. Best dev channel on here, hands down. Hope you're doing well

@@HealthyDev is 2021 the year you'll be back? Miss your insights. Hope life is better.

You can do the equivalent of the “let me google that for you” website. You send them a link to the tool filtered to your status. If they don’t get that after a while you should probably take them out to coffee (pre-Covid) or a meal and help them understand how they’re contributing to work delays. If they still aren’t receptive, there’s only so much you can do for people who won’t help themselves! 🤷‍♂️

I appreciate that! Thanks Nick.

Happy to help. After working with so many broken teams as a consultant, I took my message to KZfaq to try and reach more people. If you have any other feedback or ideas for future videos, feel free to hit me up. I hope things get better for you!

That sucks, I’m sorry. Classic misuse of the daily scrum. I hope you can find a way to detach from it, or educate some of the leadership on the purpose being for developers in conversations one on one.

People having thousands of years of familiarity with buildings certainly makes it easier for them to imagine and communicate what they want up front.

This is why I tell people scrum isn’t the problem it’s how widespread the abuse is. That’s sad :(

@@HealthyDev I known some people who, after having a bad productivity day, skip the the next mornings scrum out of embarrassment.

Yes! The only times i have found standups really useful have been at hackathon or startup weekend type events, when we needed to come together as a team to check in how it was going and help each other out. In reality in most companies, teams are much less tightly coupled than that, or try to multitask a lot. So coordinating tightly is not needed.

Haha yes. I just joined a team doing scrum and it's crazy how little time i have for writing code between stand ups, huddles, refinements, retros, increment breaks, chapter time and any other rituals i missed 😂

No problem, hope it helps down the road. 👍

+Sangeeta Misra thanks for the support! Really glad to hear they’re helping you. 👍❤️🙏

Ha!!! Nice ;)

that's pretty clever

How are you hoping a scrum meeting will keep a single employee who’s unmotivated engaged?

@@HealthyDev I am out of ideas. It seems like a good step other than separation, which is the next step.

That was the big problem for me. Like oh well I did the same shit i did yesterday and there is still a lot more shit to do. But I made progress....super annoying.

I worked at one company where not only were disparate teams all there, and it went well past an hour, but we all sat down around a table. And yet they called it "stand up"!

I'm often the oldest developer on the team, and I like to say "Long standup meetings are age discrimination!"

@Johnny Five Pay should be higher.

@Johnny Five I agree. I was airing my view that startup pay should be higher in light of the workload and instability of startups.

I will be back this year. Glad you’re enjoying them! 👍

Tacodeli is one of my all time favorite places in town since moving down here 13 years ago. The consultancy I used to work for took me there for lunch on my first day, and melted my face with the dona sauce. My wife makes it at home now. It’s not exactly the same, but pretty close when I can’t make it there or we don’t want to pay the high price they sell it for at Whole Foods. What are some of your favorite tacos?

It’s mostly a matter of whether the meeting is run by developers or management. If it’s run by management and you have to defend how it works, the best thing you can do is explain why it’s not helpful to do daily reporting (the focus of this video). If they still don’t care that’s a problem of trust that can’t be solved with an argument - only a better relationship where they trust you enough to override their initial instincts.

Thanks Alejandro! ☺️

The expression in Scrum used to be "chickens and pigs." If you're having ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is _committed._ In other words, only pigs (developers, testers, designers, the hands-on people) get to talk at the standup meeting because we're 100% committed to the project under discussion. Everyone else (the suits) has to listen-they're just "involved."

That’s a reasonable management strategy. And exactly the point, scrum was never intended to be a management technique it was supposed to be a way for developers to work with each other better.

@@HealthyDev I think the issue is more on the management level and above. like you know business and management quantifying tasks by using numbers, they wanna know the numbers if the numbers didn't change it means you have no progress, not growing i.e stagnant which is not always true. Many still believe that by throwing more developers in project, the timeline can be shortened and the task can be finished faster/earlier which is not always true as well. in my opinion, i think scrum started as informal way of doing things, and then comes in management to start formalize and quantify the process. It becomes hipster buzzword now, everyone standup everyday simply because that is part of scrum process "officially" and must be followed. remember when we are still in college or schools? teacher/lecturer give us group assignments? and you can see the pattern on each student group. 1. there are some group where everyone collectively do and finish with great result 2. there are some group where only one or two person in the group do the assignments 3. there are some group where nobody do the assignments. 4. there are some group where the tasks are not evenly distributed. I believe this is similar to work place. and depending on which group/team we are in, the management style must change as well. Not everyone as workaholic as management , not everyone as positive as management, and not everyone as motivated as management. Yet management believes otherwise, well because you are paid to work so you must have these infinite amount of energy right? of course not.

@@rhapps121 you raise some good points here. Unfortunately companies having the honesty to admit some of their employees aren't as engaged (and still do a good job) is a real problem with having transparency and realistic processes - totally.

Agreed! That's a big reason why I don't like having the business in the daily stand-up. If only developers and the scrum master are there (as stated in the scrum guide) it's more obvious that devs should be talking to the PO separately.

You got the point. It doesn't matter if it lasts 10, 20 or 90 minutes. You ARE being micromanaged and monitored 1984-style. Period.

Hey good question. I’ve got a playlist of videos on the channel about my career journey: kzfaq.info/sun/PL32pD389V8xsqw7G1p-Yx8opbgxjoTt0g The short version is I got really bad insomnia and lost my job. When I got better, an old client I helped at my prior company reached out for help and I contracted with them. Then the same thing with 4 other clients.

Exactly. There used to be advice related to scrum that if you weren't on the dev team and attended, you couldn't talk. That one got thrown out real quickly in most companies lol!

Agreed. We have to educate management on why status can be gathered as often as they want using tools and how the benefits to the daily standup improve communication with developers instead!

They aren’t bad in all situations. I’ve just seen them used for the wrong purpose too many times. Syncing up when there’s safety to be honest is a good thing. I was on one project where some newer scrum masters created a dashboard they would bring up to have the meeting with colors that would light up next to someone if they reached a certain threshold of being “late” with a task. The director on that project was great and referred to it as “the wall of shame” privately. As you can guess the meeting became completely political with nothing of real substance discussed, and people slowed down collaboration for fear of their own status.

Exactly. I talked about this on another video, "Is It Safe To Make Mistakes on Your Software Project?": kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Y8qYf9h_yLO5eaM.html

My colleague always says he will finish some work in half an hour whereas he always take 3 days to complete. I say 3 days in the beginning itself and iam frowned upon

It's funny how these people use the most damaging phone apps and think a status is an indication of anything other than them not having a single clue of what's going on. Plus they appear to rely on their phone to be annoying nitwits.

Your team is lucky to have you. Nice!

Standup are bad, but having no contact, no having an idea where others are at in their work, no "touching antenna" is even badder.

It is like doing the work for a project manager, but not get the pay.

​@@DrunkenUFOPilot Imagine your manager being a tech person, who instead of doing stupid meetings with devs and wasting their time (they usually never listen what other people say anyway), just ask each person separately how they are doing in separate time when it makes sense and it will probably be not every day.

You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately many companies get this completely wrong, hence the video. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Thanks, I’m glad to hear it’s helping you! 👍❤️

Healthy Software Developer it’s extremely helpful to know the big picture, and the greater experience of the whole developer community...

Thanks I’m happy when I can help people avoid pain by sharing some of my mistakes and the areas I see companies need some help. As far as the general community definitely check out dev.to if you haven’t already. Reddit is okay but I feel like the community over at dev.to is more positive and encouraging. YMMV

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@@HealthyDev Well, you know what they say 'Little water makes a mighty ocean'.. Unsubscribed!

@@mannietayo2723 Good bye.

Not as many as I’d like. I still write songs and practice singing and writing several days a week but it’s purely for enjoyment. Since I work as a consultant in the morning and do career coaching on the afternoon, music has to take a bit of a back seat for now. But that’s okay I’m sure it will always be part of my life - it just ebbs and flows.

I'm one of those multi-talented people, though some may say that "talented" isn't the right word. Being an OK musician is great fun, but I use my talents/whatever for church performances, where the range of skill is astonishingly broad. I make my own music and graphics for videos. In the rare occasion I actually finish a video, I claim that I'll upload it to KZfaq. Someday... As for software, I write plugins and filters and whatnot to manipulate video, audio, whatever to show off to my digital artist and video and musician friends and followers. I'd like to say I impress them, but I haven't completed that many plugin/filter/whatever projects and put up on github or make available to the artists/musicians, due to time sunk into full time work and commuting. But what I have done, is good. In short, my software work is better than what most artists can do, and my art work and music is better than what most software developers can do. I ride happily in the middle ground, making shaders and filters and tools for that overlap zone. I'm not sure I kick anyone's ass, but when I can spend full time on this sort of work, maybe... maybe.