I know this is a joke. An intended exaggeration. But it is frustrating nonetheless.
Comic I made in honour of the dev's out there who struggle to context switch – (with thanks to XKCD) #standups #agile pic.twitter.com/f08C4sXOjJ
— Brad Barrow (@foxwisp) May 13, 2014
As I was watching a show on Hulu last night, this commercial kept playing for an online K-12 school. One of the “students” was saying how awesome it was that she could do 5 classes in one day on the days she felt like doing a lot, and none on the days she didn’t.
Which is great. But then it kinda isn’t.
That’s really not life, for most of us. We don’t get to do whatever we want to do, and only when we want to do it.
We work together. We accomplish things as teams. We need other people to support and inform and help us, therefore we must do our work at roughly the same time to be efficient. Just because you don’t feel like doing your work on some days doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to do it. Your team is counting on you, so you do what you need to do on the appointed day.
Perhaps it was just the combination of this illustration and that commercial, but I got peeved. I feel it furthers the notion that developers are delicate flowers that should never be interrupted, that their concentration should be preserved above all else.
I totally agree that devs need long uninterrupted stretches of time to do work to be most efficient. And I strive to provide that. But to be effective as a team, you have to be willing to stop and talk to your team. And the daily standup is that method.
Sometimes, you have to subjugate your individual needs to better the team. That’s what a team is all about. Being pissy about a standup means no information gets transferred into other brains, which makes you a silo, and if you go on vacation, the work comes to a halt because you couldn’t take 15 min a day to have a very short conversation. You are not that important, that you should be able to bring a team down by taking a vacation.
Do the standup. Support your team. Don’t be a silo.