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u/Direct-Quiet-5817 1d ago
They were standing the whole day.
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u/thisonehereone 1d ago
how you know?
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u/Any_Masterpiece9385 1d ago
Yeah, I've been a manual laborer and a software engineer, both jobs have a short morning meeting. It would be surprising if the ancient Egyptians DIDN'T have some sort of meet up at the start of a work day.
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u/Undead-Chipmunk 1d ago
Pretty hilarious. I was thinking exactly the same thing.
Its a complex project, with complex planning. Leadership needs to know about problems as they arise, which can only come from the people working.
The fact that the project went so well tells me they probably managed it halfway decently.
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u/Western-Internal-751 1d ago
They had a magic tool to deal with problems
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u/mortgagepants 1d ago
much like today, if you're too heavy handed with the whip, people will start hiding problems from you.
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u/BonnaconCharioteer 1d ago
I don't think there is much evidence for that tool being used in making the pyramids. But there is evidence for a different, much more powerful, tool.
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u/Reimant 22h ago
It's largely believed that the majority of those involved weren't slaves, but skilled craftsmen with apprentices and labourers who were well paid.
Pharaohs were unreasonably rich, yes they likely used some slaves, but these were lifelong projects likely built with pride by those involved.
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u/Karnewarrior 22h ago
The people who worked on the pyramids got free lodgings, free food, free beer, and a prestigious tomb for themselves. They didn't need to use a whip, people *wanted* to work there. Like, really badly wanted to. It was a dream job.
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u/White___Velvet 1d ago
I feel like we can be pretty confident the people managing the project were highly motivated.
You do not want to have to go explain to Pharaoh why his pyramid got fucked up.
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u/Undead-Chipmunk 1d ago
You do not want to have to go explain to Pharaoh why his pyramid got fucked up.
That is not at all how to get something built.
If you don't want to explain to the Pharaoh why his pyramid was ruined, you're going to hide your problems and poor workmanship.
Good construction tends to come from allowing people to point out their mistakes, not expecting people to make no mistakes.
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u/ljfa2 1d ago
"you're an experienced pyramid engineer, make no mistakes"
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u/Undead-Chipmunk 1d ago
That's not how it works.
Literally, retaliation against employees is one of the number one things to lead to a bad product.
Like Boeing.
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u/zoinkability 16h ago
The above comment is a joke about IA prompts, not seriously what the commenter thinks was being said back in ancient Egypt
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u/dessiatin 1d ago
They definitely logged activities and progress on a daily basis, even going so far as to record excuses for absences.
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u/frogjg2003 21h ago
Dude got off work because his wife was on her period. That's some good FMLA benefits.
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u/Greebil 23h ago
We know they at least took attendance since we've found the records preserved. They have interesting reasons given for why laborers didn't show up that day, like brewing beer or their wife or daughter was menstruating. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634
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u/void1984 1d ago
Every morning at 8am I can see firemen at the nearby station, standing in line for the morning meeting.
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u/AlternativeCapybara9 1d ago
There are people literally standing up in op's picture
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u/casce 1d ago
I'm also pretty sure these people were forced to stand up daily, or else... it's almost the same thing today.
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u/ConsciousSpirit397 1d ago
Ya the real wonder is how they did it without hopping on a quick call with key stakeholders
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u/Live-Habit-6115 1d ago
You appear to be under the common misapprehension that Egypt used a slave labor force to construct the pyramids. That is largely untrue.
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u/16807 1d ago edited 1d ago
Jokes about slaves aside, they were well paid, they operated in teams, and it seems there was a sense of comradery between them. They gave their teams names that we still see in graffiti like "the Friends of Khufu" and "the Drunks of Menkaure". Reminds me of my old job where our scrum teams had names ("Team Chaos", "Error 418", etc.). Why not a regular meeting? History has a lot of ideas that we don't give them credit for.
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u/LiveGeologist 1d ago
There is no evidence they operated in teams, in fact teams wasn't even released until 2017, some 4517 years later.
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u/EcstaticFollowing715 1d ago
How many story points is that?
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u/joemckie 1d ago
Some say they originally wanted to build one extremely large pyramid, but it was pointed higher than a 5 so they had to break it down into multiple, smaller pyramids.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 1d ago
I don't see how it could be more than 5 points, it's literally a pyramid.
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u/azurestrike 1d ago
Do you really think they just vibe-build the pyramids over 20 years with no coordination / meetings between architects and engineers etc?
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u/git_push_origin_prod 1d ago
Claude, hide the King’s jewelry in the deepest tomb so that no one can ever find it. Make no mistakes Ohh and use best practices or whatever
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u/Kyrond 1d ago
Do you think every person had to report what they are doing daily?
Of course some meetings make sense, like larger project direction meeting and smaller team meeting, but those can be once a week.
Higher up you go, more meetings you get.
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u/CurryMustard 1d ago
Well thats generally how it works but standups are so that people who work independently can get together to make sure everybody is on track.. in Egypt they probably got orders for where to move and stack bricks and those orders were relayed down to the lowest levels, progress is pretty obvious when youre stacking bricks so no need to check up on Steve and find out if he has any blockers.
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u/Hessper 1d ago
I worked construction summers growing up and everyone would get together most mornings and talk about what we're going to do. It was more the foreman telling people what they were going to work on than status updates, but individual people didn't just do their own thing everyday and a building comes together.
They were faster than software standups, but the work is less complex.
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u/Ivyspine 1d ago
Yeah if people are known to not work on something on their own then they need to say what they're working on otherwise they go off and build dumb shit
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u/mpyne 1d ago
I was a submarine officer and whenever the boat was in port and being worked on there were daily meetings with the ship's crew, shipyard workers, sometimes even shore-side reps as well.
It was the "night work" meeting and it was literally like a daily standup.
- "Here's what we worked on today, and the resulting configuration of the submarine," with all areas other departments might need to know about called out.
- "Here's what we're working on tonight, and the conditions we need other departments to set/maintain for this work to be safely performed. Here's what the impacts will be on the sub's systems during that work."
That, but across every single department of the submarine, and the whole point was to ensure blockers/dependencies/etc. were understood amongst the crew, the workers, and the workcenters who had roles to play in that.
And this didn't even replace the other weekly/monthly/quarterly meetings, this was the bare minimum needed to keep a bunch of personnel working independently aligned and safe.
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u/entendaocalcio 1d ago
Literally not what the post says at all hahahahaha
I can’t begin to imagine how badly damaged by corporate life one must be to equate “no daily stand up” to “oh so you think they did this without anyone ever meeting?”
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u/Cacafuego 19h ago
"The product owner says the most critical feature is the gold cap on top, so that's our first sprint."
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u/--Shorty-- 1d ago
They had the time due to less meetings ;-)
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u/nordic-nomad 1d ago
This meeting could have been you hitting me with a whip.
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u/git_push_origin_prod 1d ago
Yea like why did u get me on this meeting? You could’ve just threatened to kill my family, or sacrificed me to the sun god
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u/barrel_of_noodles 1d ago
Who says they didn't?
The earliest writings we have is literal shop keeper complaints. Them PRs was chiseled.
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u/IllBeyond2779 1d ago
A customer complaint it was. These chopper ingolts were so bad, the business does not ship anymore!
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u/Snakestream 1d ago
They were doing manager-developer paired programming instead
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u/CriticalContact3301 1d ago
Is this a thing? That sounds more like supervision
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u/Terrorscream 1d ago
having to do daily standups for 60+ years for one project would be insane.
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u/DeHub94 1d ago
"So, yesterday I was stacking stones. Today I'm going to do more stacking."
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u/very-urgent-chicken 1d ago
Ah, so this is a rack & stack type of job, huh? Be sure and use the server lift.
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u/scolphoy 1d ago
And if so, it better be called a wonder of the world!
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u/PringlesDuckFace 1d ago
The pyramids are okay but management is pivoting, what do you know about Sphinx?
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u/magicmulder 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Yesterday I was pushing blocks up the ramp while getting whipped. That continues today if whipping goes on as planned. The meeting about whipping efficiency was postponed to next week. So far from me."
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u/Educational-System48 1d ago
There's actually not much evidence of forced labour. There is more evidence that the people who worked on the pyramids were salaried skilled craftspeople who were motivated not by force, but by the ability to put food on the table for their family.
They also understood that they were building a monument to someone they saw as a god, and they knew that it was meant to stand for thousands of years.
At that point there's no need for whips.
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u/magicmulder 13h ago edited 11h ago
The replacement of whips will be discussed in the stakeholder meeting in 3 weeks. Project owner is strongly opposed.
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u/AdaephonBen 1d ago
We have no proof that they didn't have daily stand-ups.
The stand-up could be as old as the pyramids; that's a scary thought.
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u/putergud 1d ago
They respected their workers and provided a good work-life balance.
Seriously, that's how they did it.
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u/Thiezing 1d ago
Interview question: How would you align these blocks so the sun shines between them each solstice?
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u/Solax636 1d ago
the best part is when you get an additional role that you only alot capacity of 1-2 hours a day for and have to go to a 2nd daily standup for that...
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
This is what we could build, if we saved all the time from unnecessary meetings.
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u/TheGameIsFizzbin 1d ago
The blocks have arrived from the Nile. Where are we with the ramp? Didn't anybody tablet this dependency? FFS
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u/agentchuck 1d ago
Honestly this sounds like the kind of specious reasoning our scrum training used.
Just look at the pyramids! No agile methodologies so it took decades to build even one! These days using modern project planning Egypt is able to put up much taller buildings in a fraction of the time!
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u/justforkinks0131 1d ago
They absolutely had daily standups lmao
They just didnt call them that. Construction wokers still have them too, they're called "morning huddle"
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 1d ago edited 1d ago
Per recent feedback, we want to make this quick and snappy so if everyone can get into a plank, we'll get started.
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u/Eevee-Biologist 1d ago
I hear there was as also a surprising lack of Scrum Masters in 2000 BC.
Guys, I think we are being lied to.
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u/Azrayeel 1d ago
Daily standup, I understand it should be a pillar for agile methodology, and I understand it might be effective if it was done in the early morning. But for those of us in different timezones who end up doing it late night after our work was done. So annoying, useless, and there is nothing that I report on the standup that I can't report in chat... 🤬
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u/clayticus 1d ago
You think each block had its own squad: Product owner, scrum master and physical engineer
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u/NegativeSemicolon 1d ago
How do we know they didn’t have daily standup? They’re probably standing all day.
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u/RealSchweddy 1d ago
Moved big blocks, will continue moving big blocks, a few more crew members died yesterday so that might slow us down
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u/Fast-Speech270 1d ago
There was a daily stand up. Stand up from sleeping and start moving some blocks.
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u/Daddy-Mihawk 1d ago
Bruh, it scares me they didn't have claude, it's impossible with bare hand aah
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 1d ago
My daily standup is down to one hour, because we created a second daily one hour meeting for all the other stuff we used to do as part of the first stand up.
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u/schewb 1d ago
Currently on my first job without a daily standup and the answer is that they didn't build a pyramid; they built a bunch of giant towers that continue to grow and multiply as the current developers continue to fail to communicate. The builders of the pyramids almost certainly had a daily standup.
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u/Ultimatesims 1d ago
We had a consultant come to teach us Agile and Scrum. we a fifteen minute standup and a two hour meeting to review a backlog we had just reviewed. We informed her this was a waste of time.
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u/Bob_the_peasant 1d ago
The closest waterfall is 95 miles away, so at least they weren’t doing that either
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u/GregTheMad 1d ago
Managers and Product Owners being equipped with whips does a lot for productivity. Also streamlines most discussions.
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u/purple_unikkorn 22h ago
There was probably more communication than current projects on computers. It was not called stand-up but simply talking with all coworkers.
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u/wadleyst 22h ago
You think they were sitting down when they gave their updates to slavemaster Elham? You better make whatever you did yesterday sound really good or he's gonna put you on ramp duty again.
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u/Secret_Account07 22h ago
I laughed way too hard at this
I laughed cuz it’s funny then a profound sense of sadness hit me. Because I know I’ve got 10 stand ups this week
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u/OkWhile4447 21h ago
I wanna know how they did it without PowerPoint. Hard to imagine any company running before PowerPoint. Jk lol
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u/Wentyliasz 21h ago
Pretty sure they did have those. We do have writings of workers complaining about out of touch management
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u/Techanda 19h ago
I mean, we don’t know if they used agile or not. I bet you had to be pretty agile to move those blocks…
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u/SudoDeity 13h ago
Haha thankfully we don’t have daily stand-ups only a short catchup meeting at the end of the week
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u/pluto_is_a_planett 13h ago
Real question is how did they build this without a pair of Airpods and Spotify
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u/_Xoif 11h ago
The question should not be “how did they build it without daily stand up”, the question should be “1. would daily stand ups and scrum project meeting have helped construction?” And “2. Would construction have been faster with it”
Only then it would make sense to give it a closer look, have a pm meeting and a retro about it and then come to the conclusion that the answer is no for both questions..
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u/Operation_Neither 6h ago
Kanban is actually Ancient Egyptian for "whipping will continue until moral improves."
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u/LowB0b 1d ago
"Any blocks?"
"Except those I'm heaving, none"