Are daily standups hurting your team?
Where I work we have something that other software developers might consider <i>”shitty standups”</i> or a waste of time. We show up one or two minutes late, we often chat about life, topics outside of work for anything between 2 and 15 minutes. Only then we actually start the standup routine. Each person chooses if they want to just say <i>”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today”</i> or to share a complex coding problem or business doubt they want help with. Then it is over and a bit more chatting until someone decides to leave.<p>But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it before and that’s how we want it, at least for now.<p>The thing is, it’s a completely remote team of 9 people (two PMs, two engineering managers that code, 5 developers). 5 of us never met in real life and the rest were remote even before the pandemic. For us developers it is the only group meeting in the day 90% of the days. The PMs and Managers have lots of meetings, so they are often the ones leaving the standup early, and that’s ok.<p>We want that meeting to be loose, to allow for non-work conversations, to be flexible in what and how each person share their status. It works great for this team, of this size, with these people.<p>That’s the thing with advice like the OP. You have to make assumptions about how teams behave. But teams behave in an infinite combination of size, members, companies, and time (we might decide a year from now that we want to run standups differently).