Just a quick meeting

I would react the same way if my scrum meeting was 1 hour!
- I remember working in the office and the customer visited and took part in our task estimation meeting. We've spent about 3 hours in one block estimating their tasks because they had so much input.
- Been there, done that. Everyday would start with a 2 hour session of meetings. Daily for 30mins and then 1.5h of refinement. Day by day, for 2 years of me being there.
  It, without an ounce of irony, leaves a fucking scar on you and makes you despise having meeting for the rest of your life.

My most successful standups have been like:
“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”
“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”
“Sure.”
“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”
Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.
- I find daily stand ups are completely useless because most of the useful communication can just be done by the people involved directly over email, messaging, or just talking to each other. I find it's useful to have a whole team meeting maybe like once a week just to see where everyone is at and how different parts of the project are going. There's very little reason to do that every single day.
  
  Standups are ok if they stay fast and they are at the start or end of a day. The forced sync points are also more important in remote settings. This is especially true for new or junior employees.
- If you're not doing your stand-up standing on one foot or wall-sits, people forget about the time.
  Hmm. Can we somehow have it so that people wanting to speak need to jump rope or something? Make that speech, Dave; sweat a little.
- I see some value in this fairly common interaction:
  Person 1: So for bug-1234 I did XYZ and saw ABC
  Person 2: ABC? I see ABC when I do XYZ for bug-1235! They must have the same root cause, I'll mark mine as a dupe of yours and move on to bug-1236

About a year ago, I was working with an east coast customer while working remote on the west coast. Scrum was at 7am my time, with the customer on the call.
Probably should have been a stressful situation as they were a tough customer, our largest account in terms of ARR and PS dollars, and they loved to tell us which Data Enginners or PMs they didn’t like, who would promptly get reassigned. But honestly, having that call so early was the least stressful thing ever.
I would roll out of bed at 6:30a and make a cup of coffee, just to get my computer tuned on and ready to join the meeting by about 6:57.
Worked out great, cuz I never spent time thinking about scrum beforehand, and frankly always felt a bit energized afterwards cuz it was now time to start my work day.
Ended up working out well I guess, cuz the customer kept me on the team the entire length of the engagement.

This stuff is purely for my manager and I’ve recently noticed he’s basically not paying attention. Losing so much time for a ritual lol.
- it's basically this
  
  I've lost my shit with people over this lol. Just sucks when you are like 3 hours in on something and then someone just comes along and makes small talk.
  I was fired from my last job because I was expected to write features AND do helpdesk support at the same time and just no... I was also fired because I suck at programming but still...
  
  Learn to document more. It gets a little better with age once you must resign yourself to the fact that you will be interrupted at any point. If you document, you can resume easier and there's less mind shift inertia.
  
  This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I'm working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we're doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There's always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I'm writing more emails than code these days.

How did you get my work schedule

Why is your scrum 1 hour long?
- Because that's how it often goes. I find there are two types of scrums in practice. First is when it goes fast, and everybody just says they're working. There's no time to give any detail or context so the status update is largely meaningless. Second is when people start giving details about what they're working on, and that quickly explodes to an hour long meeting.
  
  Interesting... I've yet to see a team that didn't have regular touch bases not having the polar opposite issue, being communication happening in isolated silos and resolvable issues taking too long to bubble up. YMMV, I guess.
  
  Participants need to find the right balance of information. I noticed it is productive when developers give just enough information for other to understand but not too much to confuse them and loose time. This is not easy to achieve..
- because no one follows the damn guide and "scrum" is done so managers can claim the company can work "agile", because customers dont want "not agile", customers also dont want to participate in the way it would be necessary for a project thats supposed to follow the scrum guide. that also sounded good for people looking for a new job so hr wants to put that into job descriptions and now everything is scrum and agile and i still have to sneak in refactorings or have to fight to get time to work on our fricking ci pipeline or need to conspire with QA to get them time to work on test automation, because screw the notion that decisions should be done by the people doing the work.
  screw "scrum", and the word "agile" should never have been taught to anyone claiming to be a "manager", we don't need managers we need people helping us getting the tools we need and trust that what we do, we do to deliver better solutions and helping us to fascilate constructive exchanges with customers.
  
  we don't need managers we need people helping us getting the tools we need and trust that what we do
  The word "manager" is extremely overloaded and barely says anything about what that person does for its team without knowing how the company operates. Where I work, the person you're describing would be someone in technical management.

I normally go "what the fuck did I even do yesterday?" five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.
I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It's very boring. "Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does."