Is It Time For Stand-ups to Stand Down?

According to the Stack Overflow’s Workplace Satisfaction Survey, 80% of professional programmers are unhappy. But the problem isn’t AI, and it’s not coding.

Many developers start off their day with a “stand-up” meeting, which is considered a standard part of an Agile development methodology.

Unfortunately, many companies do a pale cargo-cultish shadow of a stand-up, which wastes everyone’s time and saps the energy out of the team.

The problem with stand-ups as practiced by many companies is that people don’t actually know what the stand-up is for. They’re treated like a daily personal status report. If that’s what they were for, a message in a slack channel would be more than enough, and there wouldn’t be any reason for a stand-up.

In fact, I worked at a few places where we had both a daily status slack thread and a daily status stand-up. Sometimes we layered in a few more status meetings, just to make sure everyone had a chance to be in that coveted 80% unhappy group.

Here’s what a daily “stand-up” meeting sometimes looks like with remote teams (it’s not much different with on-premises teams):

• people gradually filter in to zoom. A few people are on time, but several people are consistently a few minutes late, so everyone gets to wait.
• some people never turn on their video and stay muted except when it’s their turn to talk. Because nothing’s more fun than talking to a black square on your monitor.
• even people who turn their cameras on look like sullen teenagers summoned to a “family meeting”. What’s the point of being unhappy if you can’t look unhappy? Another advantage of turning your camera on is that you can clearly be busy doing something else and paying no attention to the meeting, just to show ’em.
• each person takes turns saying “what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and whether they have any blockers”.

You couldn’t drain the energy out of people faster if you dipped them in a vat of leeches.

I’ve also been in companies that do stand-up meetings the way they were probably intended to work. The team goes through a list of all the things that the team is currently working on (e.g. features, improvements, and bugs) and decides who can help with which thing. Many teams use a “scrum” approach since having a common deadline for an iteration helps simplify decisions about who should work on what.

There’s a really fun collaborative board game called “The Crew” that reminds me of agile done well. Players have a set of tasks to accomplish each round and a set of cards in their hand that only they can see. The tasks each round are unevenly distributed among the players, but everyone can see what they are. For example, one person may have a task that says “win more pink than green cards” and another person may have a task that says “take a trick with only odd numbered cards.” Everyone tries to help everyone else complete all the tasks. Communication is very limited – you don’t say which cards you have out loud, but once each round (usually) you can show the other players one of your cards.

It’s often really hard for the players to finish all the tasks. If you fail, you can either try the same tasks again with cards dealt out in a different order, or you can try a different set of tasks.

Agile software development, done well, is a really fun and very difficult collaborative game.

However…

Most companies have a zero-sum culture, where everyone plays status games and tries to get the promotion or the better raise. Helping someone else can come – literally – at your own expense, unless your company (and your manager) values collaboration explicitly. (Since most executives got where they are by being highly competitive, you can guess what kind of behavior they value.)

That brings us back to stand-up meetings:

If your group is treating them like a daily status report, just do everyone a favor and move it to a slack thread (or equivalent). Otherwise, you’re just adding to the unnecessary stress that people are already coping with.

If you have to have meetings, make them about the things you’re working on, not the status of the people working on them.

And if you’re one of the unhappy 80% and you can’t control what meetings you have or how they’re run, just focus on the things you can control as everyone from Epictetus to Victor Frankl has said. Or as Garrison Keillor tells us, remember that cheerfulness is a choice we can make each day, regardless of our circumstances.

Be cheerful! It’ll drive them crazy.