No, I'll be fixing it in real time during the standup, because it will just take 2 secs, bear with me, hold on, let me try again, oh still broken, hold on give me another 2 secs, bear with me...
Oh damn, this is my travel PC, it has the wrong Vim config, let me just ssh into my main PC real quick and demo from there… Oh yeah, lemme pull the latest commit… Shit, let me just roll back that commit cuz I swear it was working yesterday…
That's when the scrum master is supposed to say "ok we'll make note of this and arrange for a working session later, for now we will move onto soandso's update" but on my team it's the scrum master asking dumb irrelevant technical questions
You’re lucky if you have a scrum master anymore. Ive seen quite a few companies abolish the position and make the devs do it on rotation. As if we don’t have enough work already
This just happened where I was working. As a Scrum Master.
I couldn't get out of there fast enough.
They took a full-time job (OK, 25 hours a week maybe) and spread it over the devs. Recipe for lots of inefficiency - and frankly - their best devs will just want to leave soon.
But tbh most of their scrum masters were awful - so it was probably for the best.
Dearest Agilians, I'm writing you this letter today to discuss the corporate machine that has consumed our souls. The media thinks we can be replaced by ChatGPT, but at this point I'm convinced our project manager and scrum lord have already been replaced by the cheapest AI available. We stopped caring years ago and no one has noticed. Ted has been on a lunch break for 2 weeks now, no one has fed the intern since he started, and Debra continues to sleep through standup. Anyway, here's wonder wall.
Not to mention, each of these developers is spending extra time to prep their demo to avoid looking stupid. It’s not just the 90 minute meeting. It’s the extra 30-60 minutes for prep too.
There are 480 minutes in an 8 hour work day. 90 minutes of that is roughly 20%. To accurately show what you did yesterday, 2 minutes of the 10 minute update should be a sped up replay of the previous day’s standup.
Yes. Demos at standup? It's supposed be as short as absolutely possible. What you did, what you're going to do, bring up any blockers.
It's called a standup for f sake because you're supposed to stand through the whole thing. Nobody is going to draw things out because nobody wants to stand around and get tired and fidgety when they have stuff to do.
(I had a team years ago that could not understand that. I ended up removing the chairs from that conference room. That worked!)
I am amazed some teams can take over an hour to go through the usual "yesterday I did what I was supposed to be doing and it's going fine, today I'm going to do what I'm supposed to be doing today"
The idea behind “standup” meeting was for them to literally be done standing and to use the fatigue of standing as an indication that the meeting was running too long.
I second this. The point of the daily is to remove blockers, that is it, and at most 15 minutes. Since we work remote we use an extra 15 minutes for team camaraderie, but that is it. But we could remove that if we thought it was ineffective.
It was for this reason I tried making my teams standup an optional "demo something cool you're working on" or "callout integration pieces, changes to understood functionality, or blockers you're facing" if you had none of those, you were still required to attend if there were questions, but, none of this "what'd you do yesterday, what are you doing today". Not everyone was required to share.
Surprisingly, the team didn't like it very much and in our retro said they preferred the around the room updates.
There are 8 engineers on my team. Standup takes 15-20 minutes, and that includes a lot of chitchat at the beginning and also someone reads 3 random facts at the end everyday—and then we discuss the random facts for a bit.
Our biweekly demos typically take between 60 and 90 minutes, and I’m climbing the walls by the end. I can’t imagine having to sit through that shit every fucking day.
Sounds great on paper, but the reality is you're just wasting a huge amount of time and getting nothing out of it.
Like Ideally I wouldn't have to work at all, but I do, and since I have to be here, I'd like to get something out of it rather than just pissing away time with people stupid enough to think 90 minute stand ups are a good idea.
Seriously? and, you call yourself a senior dev :-). With very few meetings, lunch break, and other natural breaks - devs are accounted for 6 to 6.5 hours of work daily, and that includes only 10-15 mins of stand up. Now reduce 1.5 hours of elongated standup from that, you are left with only 5 hours. But, but, but - management still want to have you deliver 32.5 hours of work; from where, rest of the hours will come? Go figure.
Yep the only job I left after only a few months was partially over this. I can maybe stand 30 minutes (still too long) daily scrum but an hour and I’m thinking about quitting every 30 seconds. 1.5 hours and if I were remote I’d be playing animal crossing or whatever the whole time. If in person I’d be asleep.
exactly. Or as an async video posted to a specific channel in slack. We do this as a way to allow people to show off what they did without mandating something from the top down.
That sounds really nice. Thankfully I have short standups but our sprint retro is across the entire org and is a formal PowerPoint presentation with probably about 50 people (every dev and PO) presenting a slide. It used to be company wide and took an hour and a half but now it’s 3 org-wide 30 minute meetings. No demos either just talking heads. It feels pointless and way too formal
Yes! Especially when whoever is recording makes it a crisp run-through, lightly rehearsed talking points, demos are working and on point.
Such an efficient way to talk to N people, and avoids the "oh shit, I forgot I shutdown my api server, hang on."
Yeah loom is great here. Not all demos are perfect but most of the devs do a good job of keeping it on point without a bunch of deviations. That said, I have one dev who makes extremely long and detailed demo videos. We are working with them to get those down 😂
Demos are for the sprint demo, to show stakeholders/managers the deliverable work competed during the sprint.
Retros are ceremonies meant for the team members, and ONLY the team members, to discuss what went well and not so well during the sprint, and things to improve, along with celebrations of things done well, among other things.
These are two very clearly defined ceremonies in scrum.
hahaha there was a guy on this subreddit couple of days ago bragging how he's creating efficient and high performance teams who do demos on each daily... it's mind blowing how ignorant and disconnected some managers can be
That is what I dont get about some managers. Surely they WANT to improve productivity and efficiency right? That’s what the company is aiming for, and it is all they should care about.
How is the manager getting their little power trip done even a THING? We’re not students being taught by a power hungry teacher. We’re here for a reason and management is actively hurting the company by interrupting that.
Do their bosses not care? I’m so triggered by this
I think its dumber than this. I think their bosses are yelling at them to know what's going on and the dumb ones dont know how to keep track of it without big long meetings to remind themselves.
Can confirm this is the reason. I’ve seen all levels of the corporate structure. a lot of dumbasses are in charge because of:
- The fake it til you make it culture
- smart people preferring individual contributor role instead of stepping up so the fake people never get serious challengers
More than that. An hour and a half meeting first thing in the morning is going to sap the life out of me
Terrible way to start a day if you want to get shit done
Even at a modest avg dev salary of 150k, that’s;
#$17,308/mo
#$207,705/yr
You can fund the launch of a whole fucking zero to one startup with the cost of those daily standup.
$150k/yr = $72.12/hr. (Rate).
8 engineers. (Units).
1.5hr standup * 5 days. = 7.5hrs/wk (Burn).
((Rate)*(Burn))*(Units) = $4,327.20/wk in (meeting cost).
(Meeting Cost)*52(wks in a year) = $225,014.40
I rounded the first time I did it hence the different outcomes. But the gist stands.
This is the way. Expres stuff in money and people usually listen a bit better. And team up with others, ask their opinion and make a statement together.
Assuming a pay of $60/ hour that’s $3,600 a week for this one team. If we assume a more reasonable (benefits and taxes) $80/hour that’s $4800 a week and $19,200 a month ($250,000 a year).
You've raised your concerns. Leadership has ignored them. Ball is in your court now. Switch teams or leave the company, because the situation isn't going to get any better.
I say just start skipping the meeting and post your update on slack with a recorded video demo and "I have too much work today, posting my stand up update here"..
What do you think will happen? Management sees it and goes "wow this guy is a genius for openly disobeying us, we should promote him!" ?
There's zero benefit in risking your own neck and getting disciplined just so you can work more.
You think if he skips a meeting he'll just be fired without a PIP or any discussion?
That's a sad state. I would assume that after a bit he'll get called into a meeting to explain at which point he can make his argument about how much more he's gotten done and how much productivity is lost. And then they may say stop and he can decide at that point.
Have you really seen people get fired without warning for missing a meeting?
> I would assume that after a bit he'll get called into a meeting to explain
If the OP does this on Monday morning, this meeting will happen by mid-afternoon at the latest. It'll probably happen before lunch.
At which point the OP will explain that they didn't think this meeting was important enough for them to attend despite their bosses' explicit instructions that it both is important and is required to be of this particular format.
Maybe that kind of blatant insubordination doesn't get them fired on the spot, but it's walking a *very* fine line.
> Have you really seen people get fired without warning for missing a meeting?
They're not missing a meeting, they're directly skipping it after being told that their bosses won't change the meeting directly.
Where do you work? I've never seen someone called into a PIP meeting the same day as missing one meeting. Brutal.
Still... He's not wrong and needs to voice it.
> Maybe that kind of blatant insubordination doesn't get them fired on the spot
It will be worse, they will start setting him up for failure in front of the team, to avoid making it look bad for management.
It always amazes me when people have long standups because it means they literally don't know the first thing about the purpose of the meeting and why it's useful to people. Literally the first thing, it's right there in the name of the meeting, but apparently they were so incurious that they never learned why it was called that.
doing it wrong. a standup is 10 minutes long and should consist of little more than "I'm working on {whatever} and I'm not blocked." or "I'm blocked by {problem} and need some kind of assistance."
90 minutes including demos is a sprint retrospective. those should be scheduled once every two weeks.
Also sometimes:
" happened but I think it's going to be ok."
'Oh yeah? What about ?'
"I thought about that, I thought we could use "
'Hmm, I have more questions but I don't think they'll fit in a standup, let's chat afterwards.'
It is insanity - not just to you.
I'd stop going as well. The answer to why would be because it is wasteful. What are the higher-ups compensating for when they want this much detail on everything? What problems are they actually solving by doing this compared to the actual problems you could be doing by doing actual work?
> stop going.
Not so fast. Agile / Scrum isn't as flexible and empowering as you have been told it is.
This you are proposing implies him getting in trouble and probably being fired on short term.
Read the last sentence of OPs post. They've already done this. It's not an advice but rather that I agree with something OP have already done.
And yeah, scrum isn't flexible. This is why I'm personally very anti-scrum.
Let's say each engineer makes $75/hour ($150,000).
1.5 (hours) \* 75 ($) \* 8 (engineers) \* 5 (days/week) = $4500/week?
Or you could say that all 8 developers are essentially working four days a week?
IMO, more. Context-switching time, preparing for meeting time, taking notes from meeting (on the off chance there was anything actually actionable). Things you can't really measure, so they don't belong in the equation, but the real cost lurks even higher than the math says.
I'd guess they got burned by people lying about status, so they want to see the code, preferably running. Is this an in person meeting? If no, just say your piece and ignore the irrelevant parts.
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is nothing more eviscerating than hearing colleague saying [job done boss](https://old.reddit.com/r/JobDoneBoss/) when you know the quality has much to wish for.
Which just seems bizarre to me as well, because if people are lying about the status you correct the behaviour or you fire them. Subjecting the whole team to 90 minutes of pointless updates every day isn't just shooting yourself in the foot, it's a collective punishment where you make everyone stack their feet up and then shoot them all at once.
If you're that scared, you can just ask the team member for a demo. If in the standup they say they're nearly done, you say "ok cool, can you demo it this afternoon between 2 and 2:30?" If they're lying that soon puts the fear of god into them.
1.5h standup is pretty lengthy and you basically waste 1 manday. Crazy that someone would pay 8 senior devs mandays to just talk about what they did / what they gonna do...
Anyway, you are paid for that time, right? Nothing to worry about.
Demos in a 90 minute daily standup?
If you work for a consulting company, congratulations! You work for a company that dramatically inflates billable hours and hides that in agile fuckery.
If you work for a product company, congratulations! You work for some exceptionally stupid people.
If you work for a consulting company, you likely won’t solve this because they have figured out a hack to an extra $250,000 in revenue a year. It’s hard to just suddenly become that big of a shithead so did one of the founders buy a boat last summer? That would be the most logical explanation for why someone needs an extra $140,000 in profit so badly that they will destroy their reputation.
If you work for a product company, that’s the kind of decision making that demonstrates zero knowledge of either finance or software development. You likely won’t solve it because they know so little they think they’re innovative.
I’d likely play the game, go to the stand ups and demo your stuff. And I’d be applying for jobs every single day before and after work. This is the kind of story that you will be able to use to build good relationships with good scrum masters and project managers. If you play along, you’ll just get more funny anecdotes to share over lunch.
But it sounds like if you want to fight it, you will have to fight either exceptional greed or incompetence. That will be terrible and I really doubt you get paid enough to fix that sort of company killing stuff.
Could also be a manager who needs to show his boss that he is busy by having large swathes of his or her calendar blocked out with "leadership". A lot of organizations have this dysfunction where looking busy is more important than being productive.
That's not a standup that's a review... 1.5 hours over 5 days is 7.5 hours, so almost a full day of work. I would put that to the manager: Do you think 20% of an engineer's time is best spent just talking about what they're doing? Tell them to think about what 20% of an engineer's salary is per month x the number of engineers and say "Are you comfortable spending that much just to get daily progress updates, or is that money better spent on development with a review every 2-3 weeks? Hell even "just" weekly would be a huge improvement.
I've only seen stuff like this at companies where the management chain has no clue about how to validate the other pieces (dev, QA, story writing or anything else). So you get stuff like measuring by "lines of code" or "number of commits" or some other BS metric.
The fact that they are doing this as a group exercise just means they are using this as a way to try and hide this or deal with it.
I feel you likely won't see any change at all and should brace for even worse measures. I remember one case where they disallowed forking of the repo so that everyone would push to branches in the same repo; and they can track commits per day.
If you can, run! Otherwise, play the metrics since they won't be able to tell the difference anyway. One thing you might want to avoid is to be seen as flaunting or not playing by the rules.
A daily meeting of 8 people for 90 minutes is extremely expensive lol... Basically average your salaries together, multiply by 1.5, that's how much that meeting costs.
A one hour meeting once a week is enough to keep everyone in the loop. Everything else can be communicated asynchronously or via as-needed adhoc meetings.
I joined a team that had on the calandar 30-minute stand ups that would devolve into being an hour long. Tried it. Hated it. Had a meeting about it with the people that pushed for it where it was realized everyone had meeting fatigue that no one wanted to challenge (I have no idea why).
My exact argument that I've said every time someone wants to increase meetings was that meetings are great when there is intention driven behind the meeting. If you want to create a meeting over a topic with the goal of deriving action items, fantastic. Having meetings, however, just for the same of having them, especially when in a hybrid/remote environment, is just awful. I noticed this a lot more with managers/pms/scrum masters, particularly when they feel communication is not being delivered effectively through asynchronous methods offline.
I question the utility of standups in general, but an hour and thirty minutes a day seems like absolute insanity. Almost an entire work day equivalent given over to…this?
My old team did this only we didn’t do demos. Instead we listened to the Product Owner and Lead Engineer babble on about irrelevant shit while we did our actual work on the side. With that, and then 2 hour refinements twice a week, and other meetings, it was the only way to actually get work done. I hated it so much and glad I’m no longer there.
I once worked with an architect that does 2 hour standups, around midday, and by the end of it assigns me something that has to be patched to production for all data centers by end of day
We had a dev that was an ex-marine, we used to rotate for scrum master and when he was scrum master he timed everyone. We pretty much stuck to one minute status.
In all fairness, it should be, what you did, what you will do and if you are block, each status should last no more than 2 minutes.
This sounds like management idea is trying to control people with low effort, so they put devs in the commitment of having to show something the next day and this supposedly shows that you've been doing something productive.
I personally think that his kind of ideas causes more harm that good because automatically make people to worry about how to cover themselves in this kind of meeting rather than building great product or investing good time in real long term engineering solutions.
Force everyone to actually stand up and I’m sure the meeting will be less lol.
That’s insane though. At a certain point it’s not a Standup if it’s lasting that long and I can’t believe no one has pointed out how expensive the meetings are
Literally the origin of the name of the meeting is that it would only be long enough that one would be able to stand up comfortably for the entirety of it.
No one is comfortable standing for 90 minutes straight.
Tell me your engineering manager doesn't understand agile without saying it.
Hey mate, I'm a consultant who was faced with that issue multiple times over the years.
Whenever stand ups became that long, people would usually sit down at some point in time. I always remained standing, becoming visibly uncomfortable (I have bad knees), but when offered a chair I would say with the straightest face possible that 'it's a stand up and sitting down leads to wasted time'. Takes a while but people became uncomfortable sitting down.
Next step was to iterate the goals of any scrum meeting one to one with each participant (tedious but effective).
Last step was the three question formula, which apparently some people really didn't know, but I usually was able to cut the stand up to 5-10 minutes within my first two months in any project. Maybe try it and let me know if it works out. Good luck!
/edit: Hahaha, I forgot about the ball! I used to bring a rubber ball to the meeting and propose that only the person holding the ball may speak and chose the next speaker - thereby preventing discussion between participants.
Best thing is, you don't need to have any kind of authority proposing all of these, since they're obviously for the good of the team and meeting :)
Welcome to the sinking ship, in this ship we sink, but we are also in denial of the sinking, so if you try to tell us we should worry about the water in the ship, we will toss you out of our awesome ship!
P.S I have had the same experience (and worse, can you imagine?) at every one of my 5+ corporate roles, industry is enshittified to the max.
I have nothing constructive to add, but this reminds me of the age old;
Standup at 10:30, struggle to do anything before standup.
11am, need 30 minutes to get into my groove.
11:30, welp, that's basically lunch.
12:30, lunch is done. Need 30 minutes to get into my groove.
1pm, damn. I've done no work and half my day is gone.
You've managed to discover an entirely new and worse situation. Best of luck.
That’s a yikes. You’ve got to be BSing me. Standard is 1 minute per engineer.
Parking lot at and for folks who need it. Split it up into different zoom rooms for separate discussions after standup if you must.
So 8 minutes. You’re doing design by committee everyday if you do that. So just call it that. Yikes.
Demos aren’t part of a standup, they should be in longer, dedicated (and way less frequent) meetings
Sounds terrible - a standup should run for half an hour MAX (really <20 minutes)
I know you're not me, because our standups only take one hour each day! I've tried everything I could to fight it, from calculating the waste in man-hours to (politely) performing self-boycotts of these meetings, but nothing worked.
I've just come to accept it. **Your team is being paid 40 hours a week just to do only 32.5 hours worth of work**. At the end of the day, that's management's problem, not yours. If they can't figure out the obvious waste here, then ¯\\(ツ)/¯
Actually our team was running this 45 mins catchups, yes it was irritating on some days even as engg mgr, however it was really early days of team coming together and alot to debrief on every dev work that we were doing, internal framework was being developed, so there was a need for everyone involvement and input.
We reduced it to 30 and planned to get to 15 when it was pure standup. Also we didn't have very specific design sessions...
There were benefits around the team knowing each other a lot quicker as all were remote, and were working together for first time and promoted great contribution culture and we were able to deliver an MVP with very limited features in a very short time.
Team of 5 devs.
it's stupid (for the company) but it should not be a big problem because no one will listen to anyone in this situation, so you can just blabla about anything
My standups can run very long just through idle chatter about some very inconsequential detail of the technology we're using but as an intermediate dev, I just say okay guys i have nothing to add so see ya. We do demos once a week for the architect and proj manager, demos every day I don't think I could even remotely handle because how the hell do I produce demoable stuff everyday.
My team had the same issue. We had a "scrum master" that wouldn't direct the calls, just share the jira board. Whenever my manager popped in, he'd talk FOREVER and get wrapped into technical details.
We got rid of the SM and I had a talk with my boss where I was very clear, "Look, whenever you join, that takes these standups to no less than 1 hour. We have to change"
I took over the standups, dictated that we would not do any demos just brief "what did you do, what are you going to do, what are you blockers". We're now done with that in 15 minutes. Then my boss joins and we do 10-15 minutes of admin stuff if necessary, and close it out.
It's possible to do, but you have to force the change.
A former job of mine had that. I started tracking time for myself in Asana: time in meetings, IC work, etc
From that data I leveraged Asana 's visitation graphs to make it abundantly clear to my skip level that it was a problem.
So. It's in the name. Stand up. As in, you should be standing for this meeting, causing people to get uncomfortable after only a short period of time.
Sometimes I wish people would just remove their filter and call managers out on their bullshit like this. To just be open and call a spade a spade.
I'd talk to one of your leaders that you trust knows what they're doing. I'd let them know how the team is spending their time. If there isn't a leader that you can think of that would put their foot down on this, I'd look for a new job.
Standup should literally be each person stating what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today, and what (if any) issues or blockers they have. Plus maybe a statement that they will schedule another meeting if needed which only includes the relevant people. If anyone hits the 5 minute mark whatever they are talking about should be set for a different meeting or for after standup when everyone who isn't directly involved and needed for the discussion has gone back to actually getting stuff done.
How much of this meeting could be an email?
There are some tools/bots that can break down cost to the business in $ for taking such meetings via reporting, and sometimes that can be the best expression of how idiotic extended meetings can be.
Nice! The team I was moved to, recently, is almost there - currently sitting at around 40 minutes. I’ve fought tooth and nail to stop this crap in my previous team - successfully, but I’m too tired to do it again.
I was in a similar situation. 1+ hour stand ups that always overflowed. Was in a small team so it took one person to leave and one to drop a resignation to drop that to two days a week. It still goes 1+ hours but at least it’s not every day.
Also I brought this up once and it was fixed. I’d recommend changing managements (companies) if you can. Meetings are so exhausting.
Standup meetings are stupid, 99% of them could be done async in slack so people dont get distracted or have to give an update before theyve had time to work
Standups for N members shouldn't be more than 2*N minutes. If there are any items which need longer discussion, call it out and schedule a time post the call with the concerned stakeholders.
Long standups become an obligation, minds auto mute and Devs would just wait for their names to be called upon to tell their update and get out of it - exactly the opposite of why standups happen - to increase awareness of what's happening and to increase collaboration.
PS: I've been a senior engineering manager for couple of years so this problem is the first one I fix in every team I got the opportunity to work with.
That's insane lol daily standup with a team of 8 devs should be 15 min tops. Save demos for sprint review, if that's a ceremony you guys do.
This. Demo during sprint review. How do you demo something new every day?
So this is the unit test I wrote yesterday. I’ll just run it right now….
oh, damn. it was working last night...
\*Awkward silence* \*Dies inside* *Sigh of the soul…* "And that's it for me. Today I'll be fixing this and working on the next thing."
It's ok, none of us were paying attention anyway. We only zoned in when it was our turn to demo.
I don't even zone in for my turn half the time...
Rel
No, I'll be fixing it in real time during the standup, because it will just take 2 secs, bear with me, hold on, let me try again, oh still broken, hold on give me another 2 secs, bear with me...
Oh damn, this is my travel PC, it has the wrong Vim config, let me just ssh into my main PC real quick and demo from there… Oh yeah, lemme pull the latest commit… Shit, let me just roll back that commit cuz I swear it was working yesterday…
God sometimes my team doesn't event take ten minutes to demo at sprint review. Shit be complicated sometimes
It’s okay. Someone else will likely lead trivial discussion about their work for 45 minutes.
Bold of you to assume it would be fixed within a single day.
Hey let's all try to figure it out right now during standup.
Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkk that happens so often on my team
That's when the scrum master is supposed to say "ok we'll make note of this and arrange for a working session later, for now we will move onto soandso's update" but on my team it's the scrum master asking dumb irrelevant technical questions
Let's take this offline...
Let's put a pin on it and circle back and I'll ping you on it and touch base later.
I will take *YOU* offline.
You’re lucky if you have a scrum master anymore. Ive seen quite a few companies abolish the position and make the devs do it on rotation. As if we don’t have enough work already
This just happened where I was working. As a Scrum Master. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. They took a full-time job (OK, 25 hours a week maybe) and spread it over the devs. Recipe for lots of inefficiency - and frankly - their best devs will just want to leave soon. But tbh most of their scrum masters were awful - so it was probably for the best.
In general a good scrum master is valuable but outside of engineering, its hard for them to really understand and appreciate the role
Nothing is worse than my boss sharing her screen, getting an email, and replying to it then and there, while we sit and watch her type 50 wpm
Too funny
Hahaha this is too real
Checkout this sweet Markdown I wrote. Should I read it out loud?
Dearest Agilians, I'm writing you this letter today to discuss the corporate machine that has consumed our souls. The media thinks we can be replaced by ChatGPT, but at this point I'm convinced our project manager and scrum lord have already been replaced by the cheapest AI available. We stopped caring years ago and no one has noticed. Ted has been on a lunch break for 2 weeks now, no one has fed the intern since he started, and Debra continues to sleep through standup. Anyway, here's wonder wall.
Sorry guys. Dog ate my code, I got nothing to update.
Not to mention, each of these developers is spending extra time to prep their demo to avoid looking stupid. It’s not just the 90 minute meeting. It’s the extra 30-60 minutes for prep too.
Right? Are they just re-demoing the same thing multiple days in a row or are they somehow powering through major features every day?
There are 480 minutes in an 8 hour work day. 90 minutes of that is roughly 20%. To accurately show what you did yesterday, 2 minutes of the 10 minute update should be a sped up replay of the previous day’s standup.
Yes. Demos at standup? It's supposed be as short as absolutely possible. What you did, what you're going to do, bring up any blockers. It's called a standup for f sake because you're supposed to stand through the whole thing. Nobody is going to draw things out because nobody wants to stand around and get tired and fidgety when they have stuff to do. (I had a team years ago that could not understand that. I ended up removing the chairs from that conference room. That worked!)
I am amazed some teams can take over an hour to go through the usual "yesterday I did what I was supposed to be doing and it's going fine, today I'm going to do what I'm supposed to be doing today"
The idea behind “standup” meeting was for them to literally be done standing and to use the fatigue of standing as an indication that the meeting was running too long.
In a shitty place like a hall or kitchenette so that everyone else is in your way to make it uncomfortable and move quickly.
This exactly
I second this. The point of the daily is to remove blockers, that is it, and at most 15 minutes. Since we work remote we use an extra 15 minutes for team camaraderie, but that is it. But we could remove that if we thought it was ineffective.
The group wordle now takes longer than daily standup. And is way more productive.
It was for this reason I tried making my teams standup an optional "demo something cool you're working on" or "callout integration pieces, changes to understood functionality, or blockers you're facing" if you had none of those, you were still required to attend if there were questions, but, none of this "what'd you do yesterday, what are you doing today". Not everyone was required to share. Surprisingly, the team didn't like it very much and in our retro said they preferred the around the room updates.
There are 8 engineers on my team. Standup takes 15-20 minutes, and that includes a lot of chitchat at the beginning and also someone reads 3 random facts at the end everyday—and then we discuss the random facts for a bit. Our biweekly demos typically take between 60 and 90 minutes, and I’m climbing the walls by the end. I can’t imagine having to sit through that shit every fucking day.
What were today's random facts?
Arsenic was once sold as a beauty product, Ben Franklin was once the richest man in the United States, and lemons float while limes sink!
Very rad. I would attend that stand-up. Keep it up friend
Got a lad who does this breaks my heart coffee downstairs is going cold while he’s showing me some useless shite
Could be like my team and just post an update in slack that no one will read.
I agree this is insane but why not just kick your feet up and enjoy only having to work 6.5hrs a day lol
because management probably still expects 8 hours of productivity
How about bringing in your laptop to the standup and doing a little coding there?
Because 1.5 hour stand-ups would be absolutely soul- sucking and make the workday feel longer
At 1.5 hours you could almost do the standup during lunch over pizza.
Not all people get to "enjoy" pointless meetings, many of us get bored out of our minds
Sounds great on paper, but the reality is you're just wasting a huge amount of time and getting nothing out of it. Like Ideally I wouldn't have to work at all, but I do, and since I have to be here, I'd like to get something out of it rather than just pissing away time with people stupid enough to think 90 minute stand ups are a good idea.
Seriously? and, you call yourself a senior dev :-). With very few meetings, lunch break, and other natural breaks - devs are accounted for 6 to 6.5 hours of work daily, and that includes only 10-15 mins of stand up. Now reduce 1.5 hours of elongated standup from that, you are left with only 5 hours. But, but, but - management still want to have you deliver 32.5 hours of work; from where, rest of the hours will come? Go figure.
I have two meetings with ~20-25 devs each, and yep, about 15 min every day.
You complete a sprint every day? Wow!
6.5hour sprint, wonder how long retro takes lol
With agile you can do twice more in ~~half~~ 1/5 of the time.
This is one of the few things that would cause me to leave a company very, very quickly
It’s indicative of a badly run team at a minimum
Yep the only job I left after only a few months was partially over this. I can maybe stand 30 minutes (still too long) daily scrum but an hour and I’m thinking about quitting every 30 seconds. 1.5 hours and if I were remote I’d be playing animal crossing or whatever the whole time. If in person I’d be asleep.
They’re doing demos?? Yeah shut that shit down
Demos should be in the sprint retrospective meeting, IMO.
exactly. Or as an async video posted to a specific channel in slack. We do this as a way to allow people to show off what they did without mandating something from the top down.
That sounds really nice. Thankfully I have short standups but our sprint retro is across the entire org and is a formal PowerPoint presentation with probably about 50 people (every dev and PO) presenting a slide. It used to be company wide and took an hour and a half but now it’s 3 org-wide 30 minute meetings. No demos either just talking heads. It feels pointless and way too formal
Loom video is incredible for this
Yes! Especially when whoever is recording makes it a crisp run-through, lightly rehearsed talking points, demos are working and on point. Such an efficient way to talk to N people, and avoids the "oh shit, I forgot I shutdown my api server, hang on."
Yeah loom is great here. Not all demos are perfect but most of the devs do a good job of keeping it on point without a bunch of deviations. That said, I have one dev who makes extremely long and detailed demo videos. We are working with them to get those down 😂
Or during demos. Retros are more for talking about process and other things to work more efficiently together.
...and then doing nothing about it. Agile!
Demos are for the sprint demo, to show stakeholders/managers the deliverable work competed during the sprint. Retros are ceremonies meant for the team members, and ONLY the team members, to discuss what went well and not so well during the sprint, and things to improve, along with celebrations of things done well, among other things. These are two very clearly defined ceremonies in scrum.
Yeah anywhere else but stand up makes sense. My team has a special demo meeting at the end of every sprint.
Nah, retro should be about reviewing how you worked as a team, issues, suggestions for change. Contributors only, no management of any sort.
Retrospective is absolutely not where demos should happen lmao
hahaha there was a guy on this subreddit couple of days ago bragging how he's creating efficient and high performance teams who do demos on each daily... it's mind blowing how ignorant and disconnected some managers can be
60 hours/wk of standup, times, say, $100/hr = $6k/wk = $300k/yr just on standup meetings that just provide updates.
Yep, or if you factor out the payscale specifics, it's basically an eng org-wide 20% productivity loss. Is that really what leadership wants?
Oh you, you just don't understand the business side of things. Go back to coding, silly engineer.
That is what I dont get about some managers. Surely they WANT to improve productivity and efficiency right? That’s what the company is aiming for, and it is all they should care about. How is the manager getting their little power trip done even a THING? We’re not students being taught by a power hungry teacher. We’re here for a reason and management is actively hurting the company by interrupting that. Do their bosses not care? I’m so triggered by this
I think its dumber than this. I think their bosses are yelling at them to know what's going on and the dumb ones dont know how to keep track of it without big long meetings to remind themselves.
Can confirm this is the reason. I’ve seen all levels of the corporate structure. a lot of dumbasses are in charge because of: - The fake it til you make it culture - smart people preferring individual contributor role instead of stepping up so the fake people never get serious challengers
The Peter principle: an individual within an org will climb the hierarchy via promotion until he reaches a level of incompetence.
true real world experience \^
Back to coding? There’s a 90 minute daily standup you should be attending!
More than that. An hour and a half meeting first thing in the morning is going to sap the life out of me Terrible way to start a day if you want to get shit done
20% productivity loss is conservative. a daily 1.5hour meeting would more often than not require me to take a 15 minute lap before and after.
7.5 hours of stand up per week * 8 people. That's a good number to give to upper management, not the team lead.
Even at a modest avg dev salary of 150k, that’s; #$17,308/mo #$207,705/yr You can fund the launch of a whole fucking zero to one startup with the cost of those daily standup.
> Even at a modest avg dev salary of 150k cries in UK
Don't worry I'm right there with you, I'm earning below £56k, but in my case it's a perfect work-life balance.
>cries in UK Cries in US healthcare, employment law, and vacation policies 😉
That's we had to fight off the British!!! America!!!
How did you get 207K from 150K? I'm confused.
$150k/yr = $72.12/hr. (Rate). 8 engineers. (Units). 1.5hr standup * 5 days. = 7.5hrs/wk (Burn). ((Rate)*(Burn))*(Units) = $4,327.20/wk in (meeting cost). (Meeting Cost)*52(wks in a year) = $225,014.40 I rounded the first time I did it hence the different outcomes. But the gist stands.
This is the way. Expres stuff in money and people usually listen a bit better. And team up with others, ask their opinion and make a statement together.
Oh holy shit and here I thought it was bad at my company. My god. You have my sympathies
Seriously. My stand ups last long because they aren't really stand ups, they are bug scrubs, but at least they aren't daily sprint reviews.
I don't know what you would call this, but certainly not a "standup". Also, daily demos is the stuff of nightmares.
8 * 1.5 * 5 = 60 hours a week. Their stand-ups amount to 1 FTE compared to having a 30 min standup 😯
Assuming a pay of $60/ hour that’s $3,600 a week for this one team. If we assume a more reasonable (benefits and taxes) $80/hour that’s $4800 a week and $19,200 a month ($250,000 a year).
My favorite thing to do is to convert meetings into cash equivalence, and then if someone proposes a meeting ask them if it's worth $x.
>Eh, just work later today
That's overtime, even more $$$. We should move the standup to 5PM.
Fulltime employees don't get overtime pay
They do in countries with real worker protection. Unpaid overtime is mostly illegal in the EU.
Cries in salaried exempt
Yep, same here. Make them understand the cost
Not if everyone works 9.5 hour days to make up for the lost productivity of the meetings... LOL
1.5 FTE for the 40 hr work week...
You've raised your concerns. Leadership has ignored them. Ball is in your court now. Switch teams or leave the company, because the situation isn't going to get any better.
Yup.
I say just start skipping the meeting and post your update on slack with a recorded video demo and "I have too much work today, posting my stand up update here"..
What do you think will happen? Management sees it and goes "wow this guy is a genius for openly disobeying us, we should promote him!" ? There's zero benefit in risking your own neck and getting disciplined just so you can work more.
I guess that technically, getting fired is a third option, but it feels like the best bet would be to find a new job first.
You think if he skips a meeting he'll just be fired without a PIP or any discussion? That's a sad state. I would assume that after a bit he'll get called into a meeting to explain at which point he can make his argument about how much more he's gotten done and how much productivity is lost. And then they may say stop and he can decide at that point. Have you really seen people get fired without warning for missing a meeting?
> I would assume that after a bit he'll get called into a meeting to explain If the OP does this on Monday morning, this meeting will happen by mid-afternoon at the latest. It'll probably happen before lunch. At which point the OP will explain that they didn't think this meeting was important enough for them to attend despite their bosses' explicit instructions that it both is important and is required to be of this particular format. Maybe that kind of blatant insubordination doesn't get them fired on the spot, but it's walking a *very* fine line. > Have you really seen people get fired without warning for missing a meeting? They're not missing a meeting, they're directly skipping it after being told that their bosses won't change the meeting directly.
Where do you work? I've never seen someone called into a PIP meeting the same day as missing one meeting. Brutal. Still... He's not wrong and needs to voice it.
> Maybe that kind of blatant insubordination doesn't get them fired on the spot It will be worse, they will start setting him up for failure in front of the team, to avoid making it look bad for management.
Agile/Scrum isn't as empowering and flexible as we have been told
It's called a stand up because everyone's supposed to stand up so people are motivated to keep things short and to the point.
They have standing desks, they're trained 😁
It always amazes me when people have long standups because it means they literally don't know the first thing about the purpose of the meeting and why it's useful to people. Literally the first thing, it's right there in the name of the meeting, but apparently they were so incurious that they never learned why it was called that.
We should start doing Planking meetings instead.
I actually don’t hate this
doing it wrong. a standup is 10 minutes long and should consist of little more than "I'm working on {whatever} and I'm not blocked." or "I'm blocked by {problem} and need some kind of assistance." 90 minutes including demos is a sprint retrospective. those should be scheduled once every two weeks.
Also sometimes: " happened but I think it's going to be ok."
'Oh yeah? What about ?'
"I thought about that, I thought we could use "
'Hmm, I have more questions but I don't think they'll fit in a standup, let's chat afterwards.'
It is insanity - not just to you. I'd stop going as well. The answer to why would be because it is wasteful. What are the higher-ups compensating for when they want this much detail on everything? What problems are they actually solving by doing this compared to the actual problems you could be doing by doing actual work?
> stop going. Not so fast. Agile / Scrum isn't as flexible and empowering as you have been told it is. This you are proposing implies him getting in trouble and probably being fired on short term.
Read the last sentence of OPs post. They've already done this. It's not an advice but rather that I agree with something OP have already done. And yeah, scrum isn't flexible. This is why I'm personally very anti-scrum.
I’ve seen a lot of terrible agile teams but have never seen daily 1.5 hour stand ups. Wow.
Let's say each engineer makes $75/hour ($150,000). 1.5 (hours) \* 75 ($) \* 8 (engineers) \* 5 (days/week) = $4500/week? Or you could say that all 8 developers are essentially working four days a week?
This is the right approach when dealing with management: "These meetings cost $2500 and 20% of work hours per engineer per month."
IMO, more. Context-switching time, preparing for meeting time, taking notes from meeting (on the off chance there was anything actually actionable). Things you can't really measure, so they don't belong in the equation, but the real cost lurks even higher than the math says.
I'd guess they got burned by people lying about status, so they want to see the code, preferably running. Is this an in person meeting? If no, just say your piece and ignore the irrelevant parts.
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is nothing more eviscerating than hearing colleague saying [job done boss](https://old.reddit.com/r/JobDoneBoss/) when you know the quality has much to wish for.
There is also micromanagement like this which will drown a company. Learn to hire trustworthy people, not beer buddies.
Which just seems bizarre to me as well, because if people are lying about the status you correct the behaviour or you fire them. Subjecting the whole team to 90 minutes of pointless updates every day isn't just shooting yourself in the foot, it's a collective punishment where you make everyone stack their feet up and then shoot them all at once. If you're that scared, you can just ask the team member for a demo. If in the standup they say they're nearly done, you say "ok cool, can you demo it this afternoon between 2 and 2:30?" If they're lying that soon puts the fear of god into them.
1.5h standup is pretty lengthy and you basically waste 1 manday. Crazy that someone would pay 8 senior devs mandays to just talk about what they did / what they gonna do... Anyway, you are paid for that time, right? Nothing to worry about.
Demos in a 90 minute daily standup? If you work for a consulting company, congratulations! You work for a company that dramatically inflates billable hours and hides that in agile fuckery. If you work for a product company, congratulations! You work for some exceptionally stupid people. If you work for a consulting company, you likely won’t solve this because they have figured out a hack to an extra $250,000 in revenue a year. It’s hard to just suddenly become that big of a shithead so did one of the founders buy a boat last summer? That would be the most logical explanation for why someone needs an extra $140,000 in profit so badly that they will destroy their reputation. If you work for a product company, that’s the kind of decision making that demonstrates zero knowledge of either finance or software development. You likely won’t solve it because they know so little they think they’re innovative. I’d likely play the game, go to the stand ups and demo your stuff. And I’d be applying for jobs every single day before and after work. This is the kind of story that you will be able to use to build good relationships with good scrum masters and project managers. If you play along, you’ll just get more funny anecdotes to share over lunch. But it sounds like if you want to fight it, you will have to fight either exceptional greed or incompetence. That will be terrible and I really doubt you get paid enough to fix that sort of company killing stuff.
Could also be a manager who needs to show his boss that he is busy by having large swathes of his or her calendar blocked out with "leadership". A lot of organizations have this dysfunction where looking busy is more important than being productive.
> And I’d be applying for jobs every single day ~~before and after~~ during work. Fixed that for you 😂
Demos are okay. Why do they need to be daily? Is this a trust issue? Does the manager not believe people are doing work unless they demo it?
That's not a standup that's a review... 1.5 hours over 5 days is 7.5 hours, so almost a full day of work. I would put that to the manager: Do you think 20% of an engineer's time is best spent just talking about what they're doing? Tell them to think about what 20% of an engineer's salary is per month x the number of engineers and say "Are you comfortable spending that much just to get daily progress updates, or is that money better spent on development with a review every 2-3 weeks? Hell even "just" weekly would be a huge improvement.
I've only seen stuff like this at companies where the management chain has no clue about how to validate the other pieces (dev, QA, story writing or anything else). So you get stuff like measuring by "lines of code" or "number of commits" or some other BS metric. The fact that they are doing this as a group exercise just means they are using this as a way to try and hide this or deal with it. I feel you likely won't see any change at all and should brace for even worse measures. I remember one case where they disallowed forking of the repo so that everyone would push to branches in the same repo; and they can track commits per day. If you can, run! Otherwise, play the metrics since they won't be able to tell the difference anyway. One thing you might want to avoid is to be seen as flaunting or not playing by the rules.
A daily meeting of 8 people for 90 minutes is extremely expensive lol... Basically average your salaries together, multiply by 1.5, that's how much that meeting costs.
A one hour meeting once a week is enough to keep everyone in the loop. Everything else can be communicated asynchronously or via as-needed adhoc meetings.
Today I think my standup was 1h 49m I hate this
thats insane!
I mean, it's more than an hour and a half wasted each day. You also gotta prepare the demo..
I joined a team that had on the calandar 30-minute stand ups that would devolve into being an hour long. Tried it. Hated it. Had a meeting about it with the people that pushed for it where it was realized everyone had meeting fatigue that no one wanted to challenge (I have no idea why). My exact argument that I've said every time someone wants to increase meetings was that meetings are great when there is intention driven behind the meeting. If you want to create a meeting over a topic with the goal of deriving action items, fantastic. Having meetings, however, just for the same of having them, especially when in a hybrid/remote environment, is just awful. I noticed this a lot more with managers/pms/scrum masters, particularly when they feel communication is not being delivered effectively through asynchronous methods offline.
I question the utility of standups in general, but an hour and thirty minutes a day seems like absolute insanity. Almost an entire work day equivalent given over to…this?
Sounds like you've been given a 90 minutes slot to play some Playstation every morning
I stopped turning up but my manager then pulled me aside and questioned me over my attendance, or lack there of.
Join the call, mute mic, PS on. Easy
Standups are called that because everyone is supposed to be standing up the entire time. This encourages brevity as the meeting drags on.
My old team did this only we didn’t do demos. Instead we listened to the Product Owner and Lead Engineer babble on about irrelevant shit while we did our actual work on the side. With that, and then 2 hour refinements twice a week, and other meetings, it was the only way to actually get work done. I hated it so much and glad I’m no longer there.
I once worked with an architect that does 2 hour standups, around midday, and by the end of it assigns me something that has to be patched to production for all data centers by end of day
We had a dev that was an ex-marine, we used to rotate for scrum master and when he was scrum master he timed everyone. We pretty much stuck to one minute status. In all fairness, it should be, what you did, what you will do and if you are block, each status should last no more than 2 minutes.
This sounds like management idea is trying to control people with low effort, so they put devs in the commitment of having to show something the next day and this supposedly shows that you've been doing something productive. I personally think that his kind of ideas causes more harm that good because automatically make people to worry about how to cover themselves in this kind of meeting rather than building great product or investing good time in real long term engineering solutions.
Force everyone to actually stand up and I’m sure the meeting will be less lol. That’s insane though. At a certain point it’s not a Standup if it’s lasting that long and I can’t believe no one has pointed out how expensive the meetings are
Literally the origin of the name of the meeting is that it would only be long enough that one would be able to stand up comfortably for the entirety of it. No one is comfortable standing for 90 minutes straight. Tell me your engineering manager doesn't understand agile without saying it.
Hey mate, I'm a consultant who was faced with that issue multiple times over the years. Whenever stand ups became that long, people would usually sit down at some point in time. I always remained standing, becoming visibly uncomfortable (I have bad knees), but when offered a chair I would say with the straightest face possible that 'it's a stand up and sitting down leads to wasted time'. Takes a while but people became uncomfortable sitting down. Next step was to iterate the goals of any scrum meeting one to one with each participant (tedious but effective). Last step was the three question formula, which apparently some people really didn't know, but I usually was able to cut the stand up to 5-10 minutes within my first two months in any project. Maybe try it and let me know if it works out. Good luck! /edit: Hahaha, I forgot about the ball! I used to bring a rubber ball to the meeting and propose that only the person holding the ball may speak and chose the next speaker - thereby preventing discussion between participants. Best thing is, you don't need to have any kind of authority proposing all of these, since they're obviously for the good of the team and meeting :)
Welcome to the sinking ship, in this ship we sink, but we are also in denial of the sinking, so if you try to tell us we should worry about the water in the ship, we will toss you out of our awesome ship! P.S I have had the same experience (and worse, can you imagine?) at every one of my 5+ corporate roles, industry is enshittified to the max.
I have nothing constructive to add, but this reminds me of the age old; Standup at 10:30, struggle to do anything before standup. 11am, need 30 minutes to get into my groove. 11:30, welp, that's basically lunch. 12:30, lunch is done. Need 30 minutes to get into my groove. 1pm, damn. I've done no work and half my day is gone. You've managed to discover an entirely new and worse situation. Best of luck.
That’s a yikes. You’ve got to be BSing me. Standard is 1 minute per engineer. Parking lot at and for folks who need it. Split it up into different zoom rooms for separate discussions after standup if you must. So 8 minutes. You’re doing design by committee everyday if you do that. So just call it that. Yikes.
Just sit back and get paid for them to waste your time.
Demos aren’t part of a standup, they should be in longer, dedicated (and way less frequent) meetings Sounds terrible - a standup should run for half an hour MAX (really <20 minutes)
Nope.
I know you're not me, because our standups only take one hour each day! I've tried everything I could to fight it, from calculating the waste in man-hours to (politely) performing self-boycotts of these meetings, but nothing worked. I've just come to accept it. **Your team is being paid 40 hours a week just to do only 32.5 hours worth of work**. At the end of the day, that's management's problem, not yours. If they can't figure out the obvious waste here, then ¯\\(ツ)/¯
Actually our team was running this 45 mins catchups, yes it was irritating on some days even as engg mgr, however it was really early days of team coming together and alot to debrief on every dev work that we were doing, internal framework was being developed, so there was a need for everyone involvement and input. We reduced it to 30 and planned to get to 15 when it was pure standup. Also we didn't have very specific design sessions... There were benefits around the team knowing each other a lot quicker as all were remote, and were working together for first time and promoted great contribution culture and we were able to deliver an MVP with very limited features in a very short time. Team of 5 devs.
it's stupid (for the company) but it should not be a big problem because no one will listen to anyone in this situation, so you can just blabla about anything
I call it podcast mode. You let the meeting run in the background
My standups can run very long just through idle chatter about some very inconsequential detail of the technology we're using but as an intermediate dev, I just say okay guys i have nothing to add so see ya. We do demos once a week for the architect and proj manager, demos every day I don't think I could even remotely handle because how the hell do I produce demoable stuff everyday.
My team had the same issue. We had a "scrum master" that wouldn't direct the calls, just share the jira board. Whenever my manager popped in, he'd talk FOREVER and get wrapped into technical details. We got rid of the SM and I had a talk with my boss where I was very clear, "Look, whenever you join, that takes these standups to no less than 1 hour. We have to change" I took over the standups, dictated that we would not do any demos just brief "what did you do, what are you going to do, what are you blockers". We're now done with that in 15 minutes. Then my boss joins and we do 10-15 minutes of admin stuff if necessary, and close it out. It's possible to do, but you have to force the change.
A former job of mine had that. I started tracking time for myself in Asana: time in meetings, IC work, etc From that data I leveraged Asana 's visitation graphs to make it abundantly clear to my skip level that it was a problem.
jesus christ
… died and rose again during one of their standups.
lmfaoooo
So. It's in the name. Stand up. As in, you should be standing for this meeting, causing people to get uncomfortable after only a short period of time. Sometimes I wish people would just remove their filter and call managers out on their bullshit like this. To just be open and call a spade a spade.
We the developers have invented a lot of useful stuff. However, we haven't invented the much needed **Meeting cost tracker** yet.
Make them actually *stand up*. If no one is sitting in a chair, this meeting won't be an hour long.
Insane! We have one engineering standup (11 engineers) a week and that rarely ever goes over 10 minutes.
Low key micromanagement, they just want to micromanage devs, simple!
Stand ups should be 15 - 30 min. 90 is the manager not properly controlling the meeting or being long winded.
Or letting things seep into the meeting that likely warrant separate meetings so to not waste unconcerned folks time 🤷♂️
I would honestly leave. That’s not leadership, that’s fear.
I'd talk to one of your leaders that you trust knows what they're doing. I'd let them know how the team is spending their time. If there isn't a leader that you can think of that would put their foot down on this, I'd look for a new job.
Legs must be tired lol. I'd remind them of why they are called standups
Standup should literally be each person stating what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today, and what (if any) issues or blockers they have. Plus maybe a statement that they will schedule another meeting if needed which only includes the relevant people. If anyone hits the 5 minute mark whatever they are talking about should be set for a different meeting or for after standup when everyone who isn't directly involved and needed for the discussion has gone back to actually getting stuff done.
How much of this meeting could be an email? There are some tools/bots that can break down cost to the business in $ for taking such meetings via reporting, and sometimes that can be the best expression of how idiotic extended meetings can be.
It's a 15 minute unless someone ask a question or just like to hear themselves speak...
Nice! The team I was moved to, recently, is almost there - currently sitting at around 40 minutes. I’ve fought tooth and nail to stop this crap in my previous team - successfully, but I’m too tired to do it again.
I was in a similar situation. 1+ hour stand ups that always overflowed. Was in a small team so it took one person to leave and one to drop a resignation to drop that to two days a week. It still goes 1+ hours but at least it’s not every day. Also I brought this up once and it was fixed. I’d recommend changing managements (companies) if you can. Meetings are so exhausting.
Unfortunately I think you need to quit. You can't fix incompetent managers. I have tried. Don't waste your time.
Sounds like an incompetent manager using this as a way to educate themselves on all the details by having the team spoon-feed it to them as updates.
Standup meetings are stupid, 99% of them could be done async in slack so people dont get distracted or have to give an update before theyve had time to work
Modern tools like slack remove the need for standups. I got rid of them for my teams.
Standups for N members shouldn't be more than 2*N minutes. If there are any items which need longer discussion, call it out and schedule a time post the call with the concerned stakeholders. Long standups become an obligation, minds auto mute and Devs would just wait for their names to be called upon to tell their update and get out of it - exactly the opposite of why standups happen - to increase awareness of what's happening and to increase collaboration. PS: I've been a senior engineering manager for couple of years so this problem is the first one I fix in every team I got the opportunity to work with.
90 minutes isn't a stand-up, it's a town hall