I'm on a team of 10 people, including my manager. During our weekly meetings, I struggle to pay attention to what's happening when other people give their updates. I only work closely with 2 of my 8 coworkers. For those 2 coworkers, I already have a weekly sync with our manager on a different day. For the time being, I don't have much to do with the other 6 people on my team. I have 2 questions: Should I try paying attention to others' updates or should I try and reclaim this time and do work during the meeting? One can make an argument that long-term, it's beneficial for me to know what's happening with the other people on my team, but in general, I'm under the impression that the greedy (short-term) approach is best. If I should try and pay attention to others, does anyone have tips for doing so? I'm not sure how normal/abnormal I am in being able to pay attention to people, but I've always been a big day-dreamer. In elementary and high school, I was a good student in spite of day-dreaming during class because school was pretty easy and I was self-motivated to learn from the textbook. In university, I was still a big day-dreamer, but I was no longer a good student because school was hard and I couldn't just learn from the textbook. Now, post-school, I am motivated to pay attention to things that really count. e.g. when my boss wants me to do something, you better believe I'm motivated to pay attention closely to what he says. But by default, my mind doesn't want pay attention to anything unless it knows I need to do it. I can try taking notes, but often times there's so much additional knowledge and context the people working on the tickets have that my notes are kinda useless. Ultimately, this team meeting is only a half hour per week, so it's a huge deal either way, but I'm leaning towards trying to continue working on my tickets during them (i.e. what I know counts).

As a mid-level engineer, there's not a ton of value understanding what everyone else is working on (unless you are making serious progress towards senior). You could just work through their updates, especially if you need more productivity. Another option is to try to understand what they're doing, and you will probably need to ask questions for that. For example, let's say one of them references a project ABC that you aren't aware of, you can ask something like, n00b question: What's project ABC? Is there a primer or tech spec I can check out? Just curious to understand what other folks are working on.

Paying Attention During Team Stand Ups Vs. Working Through Them

Mid-Level Data Engineer at Instacart2 months ago

Instacart

Meetings

Mid-level Engineer

I'm on a team of 10 people, including my manager. During our weekly meetings, I struggle to pay attention to what's happening when other people give their updates. I only work closely with 2 of my 8 coworkers. For those 2 coworkers, I already have a weekly sync with our manager on a different day. For the time being, I don't have much to do with the other 6 people on my team.

I have 2 questions:

Should I try paying attention to others' updates or should I try and reclaim this time and do work during the meeting? One can make an argument that long-term, it's beneficial for me to know what's happening with the other people on my team, but in general, I'm under the impression that the greedy (short-term) approach is best.
If I should try and pay attention to others, does anyone have tips for doing so? I'm not sure how normal/abnormal I am in being able to pay attention to people, but I've always been a big day-dreamer. In elementary and high school, I was a good student in spite of day-dreaming during class because school was pretty easy and I was self-motivated to learn from the textbook. In university, I was still a big day-dreamer, but I was no longer a good student because school was hard and I couldn't just learn from the textbook. Now, post-school, I am motivated to pay attention to things that really count. e.g. when my boss wants me to do something, you better believe I'm motivated to pay attention closely to what he says. But by default, my mind doesn't want pay attention to anything unless it knows I need to do it. I can try taking notes, but often times there's so much additional knowledge and context the people working on the tickets have that my notes are kinda useless.

Ultimately, this team meeting is only a half hour per week, so it's a huge deal either way, but I'm leaning towards trying to continue working on my tickets during them (i.e. what I know counts).

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Instacart13 questions

Discussion

(3 comments)

1
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
2 months ago
As a mid-level engineer, there's not a ton of value understanding what everyone else is working on (unless you are making serious progress towards senior). You could just work through their updates, especially if you need more productivity.

Another option is to try to understand what they're doing, and you will probably need to ask questions for that. For example, let's say one of them references a project ABC that you aren't aware of, you can ask something like, "n00b question: What's project ABC? Is there a primer or tech spec I can check out? Just curious to understand what other folks are working on".
1
Rahul Pandey
•Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
2 months ago
If you're not getting value from the standup, it's likely the case that others are not getting value from it. So if you're empowered to change your environment, two options to consider:

Reduce the frequency of standup or eliminate it altogether

Change the format to make it more valuable.

You could propose one of these options after talking to others.

If you don't feel empowered to change your environment, then I'd either take notes or do some action for each person while they present (e.g. look at all their code commits).
0
Mid-Level Data Engineer [OP]
•Instacart
2 months ago
Asking questions is a good idea, but I'm not sure it's the right forum for it since the meeting is only a half hour and as it is we don't have enough time to get through everyone's updates. No one else asks questions unless they are involved in the project, and if I did ask a question, I'd probably have to stick to max 1 per meeting.

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