When a team is too big

Then the conclusion is that stand-ups don't work in Sweden, as we're very unlikely to change our entire culture to fit the American work style. When left to our own devices, the tendency is to overshare in order to show that you're doing (important) work, and once several people do it, you need to do it as well to show you're not slacking. And so it balloons. For some (i.e. me) I also have trouble focusing on what others say before me because I need to think about what I did the day before and focus on what to say. This is even more likely once the length of stand-ups balloon (as they do wherever I've worked). I described this to someone and they suggested the problem is not with stand-ups, but that instead I have psychological problems. But I suspect many are like me.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t working on the same things. The only real solution to that is to get people talking outside the standup.

Not my experience working in Sweden for the past 10+ years. Likely that I had outlier experiences here but standups have always been short, the person leading it had complete autonomy to call out "I think this should be discussed after stand-up" whenever some discussion started to go on for a little longer (usually about 2-3 minutes is too long).

The thing I noticed being culturally different is that you just don't cut off someone while they're speaking, you raise your point by politely asking for the space and sharing your opinion, and decisions about it are made through some consensus (which never failed when a discussion is going on for too long).

It's odd, because I've known folks who 'wait', but most of the time, when I hear someone voice a blocker in a standup, it's notice that "this is already something I've tried unblocking by ABC, and have talked to persons XYZ, and it's still a blocker". Or sometimes, people saying "I was blocked yesterday on X for Y hours, which is putting things back a bit, but now moving forward again".

So yeah, waiting until a next meeting to get announce that you're going to start working on a blocking issue is nuts, but I don't actually see that specifically all that much.

A possible solution, perhaps, but i personally wouldn't consider it a good one.

I can full stack dev, i choose not to because i don't like the current state of the front end ecosystem but that's a preference not a limitation.

I can also do devops, standard sysops, data engineering/analytics to a degree and some other misc stuff.

I would absolutely not expect that to be a *requirement* to be a member of a functional team.

> Any dev worth their salt can learn enough of a different discipline in the dev field. Or maybe I am biased because I was “raised language agnostic at uni”.

Setting aside the true scottsman of that statement, the technical ability needed to learn other disciplines isn't always the limiting factor.

Not everyone has (or chooses to allocate) the time to keep on top of the multiple sets of ecosystems needed to keep up with all the disciplines, being language agnostic is one the least important parts of being effective multiple dev disciplines.

> You can feed maybe 3-4 engineers with 2 Swedish pizzas

I dunno, we (Swedes) tend to do personal pizzas (1 per person), at least where I grew up. They're most likely talking about family size pizzas or something, but even then it sounds like too little, you'd feed maybe 3 people tops per family size pizza.

Or maybe me and my friends were just overly excited about our pizzas.

I've assumed the 2pizza-thing was based on something like 'familjepizza' rather than the regular swedish size.

I agree about team size, 3-5 is good, any larger and people will start wandering off on their own or create cliques.

I'm also not a fan of "sync standups", that's micro management garbage. A three minute 'i'm blocked, who can help?' or 'no blockers today' session, that's the sweet spot. If someone wants a report on progression and so on they can book a meeting with a clear agenda in advance and the relevant people can prepare and do a succinct description of where they're at. No meeting that takes more than five minutes and doesn't have a set agenda should ever be held.

Depends on the jurisdiction obviously (seems in this case Sweden/EU), but I don't think the author could blanket ban it like that, as research organisations and cultural heritage institutions have exceptions for example. I think news organizations and archivists have exceptions too, but less sure about that.

Besides, I think for it to actually have any effect, it would have to be in a machine-readable format, I'm not sure placing a notice like that in the middle of a HTML document is good enough.

> Art. 4(3) applies only on condition that right holders have not expressly reserved their rights “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online”. According to Recital 18, “it should only be considered appropriate to reserve those rights by the use of machine-readable means, including metadata and terms and conditions of a website or a service. […] In other cases, it can be appropriate to reserve the rights by other means, such as contractual agreements or a unilateral declaration.” In other words, Art. 4 right holders may effectively prohibit text and data mining for commercial uses by adding robot.txt type metadata to their content online.

https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/07/24/the-new-cop...

But maybe the author already have the same notice in a machine readable and of course I'm not a lawyer or anything, so this is just guessing based on what I've learned about the regulations that affect me personally in Spain/EU.

When your LLM starts caveating things with "No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs." you know they ignored the request.

I do not love this. I stopped reading right there. I’m not giving losers who are too lazy to write their own blog posts with their own words clicks.

The hypocrisy of it is astoundingly obvious. The author used AI trained on stolen content to help write their blog post but then denies “the next author” from benefitting in the same way. If you love AI so much you should let it steal your content and train on it.

Classic “pull the ladder up behind me” mentality.

If you have or can make the time, some side projects can go a long way. Mainly to find out what you are actually interested in. I usually give myself some guard rails as to not spend too much time one one thing (perhaps say a month) and then see where that takes me.

Then, I write about the project for two reasons: I get an article out of it that I can share _and_ I get to digest the project as a whole.

Just pick anything that seems interesting and build something. Later, you can even build on top of earlier projects.

> My best theory as to the why is that too many direct reports result in vying for attention of a manager, and people rapidly realise that outperforming others in their team doesn’t work nearly as well as throwing shade at one another.

This just sounds like a more deeply rooted work culture problem to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills - around since at least the 1980s. Broadly speaking it seems like an accurate description of good engineers. (I've also heard "pi-shaped", to more explicitly suggest that experienced engineers probably have multiple areas of deep expertise.)