More content like this in Taro: joinTaro.com/: code review, compensation, 1:1 meetings and more!

This is a great way to spend an extra hour at the standup seeing who talks the most jargon.

I actually disagree quite strongly. The standup is primarily for visibility...primarily for blockers. I think 'veteran' guy rambled too much. If you have feedback about the wireframes? How would they know in standup what they look like? This obviously requires an email. The part of this that needs to be said at stand up is... "I sent an email about the wireframes for this new feature, making sure you all saw it/plan to take a look". "The 30% slowdown bug" is the same thing... how in the world can they comment on the bug? It requires an email. Again, "I ran into this bug and emailed about it, let me know". The framework issue also should be an email, so people can make sure that bug doesn't, maybe currently invisibly, affect current systems of their ownership. "I found this framework issue and fixed it, sent an email detailing it. Let me know". Content should be in emails, standup should just be notifications and double checking everyone's on the same page. All veteran engineer's spiel begs is for people to ask for follow up. 'What component exactly was the bug in'... and that's how your 2 minute notification becomes a 15 minute discussion.

I’m the noob. Every standup my coworkers talk and talk about “all the problems” they are having with their work and later during the day they are just watching KZfaq, on their phone or talking to coworkers while I’m doing most of the work. Thanks for the tips. I’ll make sure to improve my communication skills.

Today I learned: I'm a total stand-up noob! 😅 I gotta remember that over-communicating is a usually good thing when working in teams.

my standup ends up turning into a 30 minutes meeting when someone mentions a blocker. Lmao

The shortest one is best! Quickest way to allow the team to go get on with some actual work instead.

I really like when a team member shares a piece of information during standup, like the best way to test or troubleshoot a particular service we own. I always write down my standup notes and read them off. During the day, I'm summarizing what I'm doing in the 'yesterday' section so I don't have to try and remember.

This was a great video. One of my pet peeves with standups is when teams default to rattling off ticket numbers. It quickly leads to everyone being disengaged and not getting anything out of the standup. Your veteran engineer update was a great example of what to do instead.

Your channel is EXTREMEMLY helpful for organizations where the owners are not technical and also for new teams. I would imagine there are so many organizations where probably no one truly knows what's going on....you're saving me!

This is amazing. Tysm!

Looks like i'm currently a n00b... one of my teammates was quick to point out that I should be giving more details/be more descriptive during my standup. Will definitely follow some of this advice.

Great video Rahul, these videos are helping me a lot as a sde1 at an unicorn startup. Hopefully will be able to incorporate some of these advice and move to sde2 soon :)

This is absolutely helpful!

Awesome as an intern I always did the noob one but realised that I had an intuition I could do better. This can take me to next level

So relatable 😂. I used to be a noob. I thought it isn't important to go into details as Scrum master did not have technical knowledge.

Rahul, thank you so much. My stand-up updates kind of sucked now it would get better.

Dude I really really appreciate this advice I feel like this is the kind of thing I have had a really hard time finding resources for so I really appreciate these videos thank you

Your videos are super helpful!!

❤️ 💯👍 Thanks "Provide value to others. " Amen to that 🧑‍💻

“Font size of the period…” - you’re killing me 😂

That’s informative to hear. As a new grad at Amazon, I’ve been intentionally formatting my standup like the noob in order to be concise as I felt my project is pretty independent from others(unless I do have an issue I think others can help with). I almost felt like others were bloating their standup with problems solved that no one has context on anyways just to make their work seem more impressive lol. Come to find out that my attempt to be concise comes off as…lazy? I’ll have to reevaluate how I approach standup from now on.

I'm not even in the tech industry and have zero intentions of going into this industry, but man do I find these videos motivating.

This is very good advice on how to perform and play the game of pretending workers are doing anything of value. Most devs are just keep the lights on workers and don't have fancy things to say they are working on. Stand ups make them feel bad.

Just had my daily standup meeting after watching this video!!

There are a couple schools of thought here. One option is to provide an update to what you did yesterday and what you're planning on doing today. And you can provide two minutes worth of context that you feel is important to the rest of your team as you did in this video. And that's good but I'd hesitate to say that it's the only way to do it. Another option is to run the standup in such a way that you only talk about blockers and really important issues. In some cases this may even mean that you won't hear from every team member during standup. This can work well too assuming there are other avenues to convey information throughout the day. For example, if you're pair programming then your pair can be made aware of the concerns you have and you can discuss it together. Also you can call a turnaround with your team if you want consensus on a technical decision.

Great helpful video 👍🏼

Wow Wish I could get this pointer 3years back then my professional life could be so much easier

What if my colleague hasn't listen carefully. IMHO, a lot of people are doing the noob update and people just has stopped listening. How can I engage the team more?

I prefer the n00b method with maybe an extra 10-20 seconds of details. I find people stop listening if you take more than 30 seconds, and then that person develops a reputation for taking too much time during standup and just starts to get tuned out even before they start talking. The most important thing imo to bring up during standup are blockers and then parking-lot the discussions for after standup. I find that juniors spend more time during standup providing too many details because they are trying too hard to show off their ability to speak in a technical way. Of course there are exceptions, like if you are working on a story that's a dependency on someone else's story and you want to provide details that helps or unblocks their work, but I find overall standups are more enjoyable when everyone keeps their updates short and sweet and at a high level.

OMG...I'm making pretty much every single one of these mistakes!

If this is standups are in person, then I'll forever prefer zoom calls

If we're a team of 8 and everyone talks about what they did yesterday in that detail.. you don't think that's stretching the standup too much?

I use the same techniques naturally.

I usually prepare and write my standup.

The testability speeds up, looks like you're introducing the whole story to your team during standup. This is fine for today, tomorrow you'll still be working on that and that's where you become a noob.

Not gonna lie it’s not easy to give a good update

Nah the shorter one is better. Leave room for the end for people to discuss real issues

I have to strongly disagree. Standup meeting, especially if you have larger team, should not be turned into "all problems" discussion. It should be just that, quick concise update. A standup should be 10 min for 10 people. If everyone has to go into such a great extend explaining what you work on, it will be impossible to keep track of things. It also makes me wonder if you work on 10 different things yesterday and 10 different things today, how do you get anything done? Sometimes a single task can take days to complete.

How would a veteran engineer communicate their blockers? 🧐

If I wanted to learn how to speak better, I would've been a lawyer

You drive some great points that demonstrate why standups are a micromanagement tool. The subtext to what you're saying is about proving you are working and one upping the other engineers to the degree you "work" and make "impact". Standups should never be for management. They should be so engineers can coordinate and unblock each other. Bringing judgement into stand-ups is toxic. Someone working on the same task for two stand-ups doesn't indicate an incompetent engineer. But I'll tell you what. I'll play the game. Because at the end of the day, in practice, it's another meaningless management exercise.

How about when ppl go into too much detail? Then it drags and drags way too long...

Standups better be short imo

Damn ! I am a pure noob 😥

Disagree with this one. We should be communicating status of our work and what our blockers are, not drown everyone else in detailed descriptions of tasks they have no context for. The "veteran" made me feel like he just wants a manager to notice him, speak as much jargon as possible. How is everyone in the team supposed to focus on every detail of every task's description of every teammember? That would at least require a prior email with the context. Everyone has their own things to do. Also, what's the point of explaining myself why exactly am I spending a lot of time on a single task? This sounds like I am to be micomanaged if I am actually doing my job instead of wasting hours away. If I am stuck on the same issue that means I am trying various approaches, reading through the documentation, waiting for a forum's members to answer my question, trying to solve it myself while at it. What's the point of saying it all during a standup? This should be inferred. If it's not - that's a team's issue because I am clearly not being trusted to do my best. If I am expected to proclaim what steps exactly I am taking to solve an issue - that's me being controlled, not me providing any meaningful update.

wow I'm a noobie

Disagree. Short updates or even 'no update' should be normalised and not looked down upon as being nooby.

I found that skit insulting. Seems kinder to not take up time & idk why the noob has to look insecure. People should feel comfortable giving feedback without you having to mention it every time, too. If you think your team will feel uncomfortable and would want to give feedback, just mention it once at the end edit: why is this about impressing people? lol... working in your own bubble not bothered by other people is how work gets done... your work impacting tons of people is clout chasing and makes fragile software... Your work should be self contained as much as possible to reduce complexity & dependencies. the only reason to uselessly mention impact of things, is again clout. Are standups just 2 minute sales pitches for clout then? Standing in the way of people succeeding at their task is not a way to make friends. You are holding other people's reputations hostage. You're also not technically asking for help in that meeting, you're making others look bad if they don't care to work on your issue instead of their own by setting up the assumption that they should care about your work (over theirs). People work on things not interesting or impactful because that's what ships software. Plumbing may not be glorious but it has ROI.

What if the team you are working with is noob to understand such things : |

Why is the Veteran spending all this time investigating things not planned in the Sprint? Of course people will talk to you about something. Repeating that every stand up update is massive filler and font size increase. Jesus christ, talk about level inflation. This guy is L3 at best