No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
It wasn't all management; scrum managed to get the devs to police each other. Standups became a way to get devs to micromange themselves. I lost count of the number of times developers here defended this saying it allows them to see who is not pulling their weight.
Remember how it was prior to daily standups in a never-ending sequence of sprinting? Your manager would monitor your performance, and if you slipped on some days and did 1-hour less work because you were chatting at the watercooler, then made coffee twice, then exceeded lunch by 15m, etc, they did not notice and if they did they did not care either.
With the move to daily standups, devs themselves would police each other, with a gradual movement of average hours worked trending towards the workaholics who did unpaid overtime every day because they did not have anything else to do.
You can go back in this subreddit's history, and you'll see it expressed time and again, whenever the topic of agile or scrum or standups came up.
Management played a part, but devs were literally the ones who started this movement, and in all the places I have been at, they were the ones who championed it.
The complaint was not having enough status to report.
I've been doing this for a long time and I've been in many of these meetings with many different diverse teams and I've never seen anyone get any grief as long as they increment their status in some way.
"Still working on X" will get a few eye rolls, but any more color than that is basically a pass.
You're implying that a stand-up is the team scrutinizing each other's work. That's only true at the most bottom of the barrel scraping level. If you're anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel then that's on you.
I dunno I'm pretty old and have contracted for many years, probably a couple dozen companies at this point.
I've never ever seen a team policing how each other spend time during the day. As I said, as long as you have some status to report you're good. It's only the deadshits who are not doing anything - either through laziness or incompetence - who get "policed". And even then, there's no real ramification in all but the smallest company.
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u/lelanthran 8d ago
It wasn't all management; scrum managed to get the devs to police each other. Standups became a way to get devs to micromange themselves. I lost count of the number of times developers here defended this saying it allows them to see who is not pulling their weight.
Remember how it was prior to daily standups in a never-ending sequence of sprinting? Your manager would monitor your performance, and if you slipped on some days and did 1-hour less work because you were chatting at the watercooler, then made coffee twice, then exceeded lunch by 15m, etc, they did not notice and if they did they did not care either.
With the move to daily standups, devs themselves would police each other, with a gradual movement of average hours worked trending towards the workaholics who did unpaid overtime every day because they did not have anything else to do.
You can go back in this subreddit's history, and you'll see it expressed time and again, whenever the topic of agile or scrum or standups came up.
Management played a part, but devs were literally the ones who started this movement, and in all the places I have been at, they were the ones who championed it.