As a software engineer, I have 1-2 stand ups per day, 30 minutes each. One with the product and eng team and another with just engineers. The product standup includes directors, executives and managers. We go through three things: What we did yesterday, what we are doing today and if there are there any issues.
I’m having trouble coming up with meaningful updates and constantly question if im doing enough work or providing enough value compared to my coworkers - even if im delivering the work being asked. Sometimes my updates are very brief but my coworkers are quite long and detailed and I feel the team may judge me for the amount of work im doing. It feels like an added stress on top of the actual work and takes up energy in the day.
How do you deal with the stress of standup anxiety? Am I just overthinking?
On those days when I hadn't done much, my manager, the product manager, and the project manager, would all imply pretty strongly I hadn't done enough at the next standup, and ask why I hadn't done more, and so on. Pretty stressful.
What I started to do was, when I had a good day, hold some work back. I'd only "git push" some of the work I'd done. Only move some of the tickets along. At standup I'd just mention the first half of the work. That way when a day inevitably came along when I hadn't done much, I could claim to have "done" the second half of the work I'd previously done.
My relationship with the various managers greatly improved.
I don't know if this way of working was really beneficial to the company, but it was the company that was setting up my incentive structure this way, I was simply responding to it. I got the same amount of work done in total anyway so I figured it didn't really matter too much morally.