We've been doing daily free-form standups for years. Initially, it was in-person because nobody was working remote. Recently, one of our people moved to another state and we decided to shift towards remote work to accommodate that, with the eventual shift towards enabling it for everyone.
That shift has meant that all meetings now have a video component. Our weekly meeting is everyone in a room, except the remote person who is on video. Daily meetings are all-video, everyone participating from their desk via video chat.
Previously, our "meeting" was really a chat session that we talked about work a little and other stuff a lot.
Now, our meeting starts with what everyone did and will be doing, working through some issues anyone has, and then talking about whatever until we run out of stuff to talk about, which is usually shorter than I expected, given our previous in-person meeting length.
We have 4 developers, and this seems to be working very well for us.
Without the daily meetings, we'd not get some of these issues resolved as quickly and we wouldn't have as much team-building time. We initially tried an afternoon meeting for that team-building time, but it didn't work for various people for a number of reasons.
The person writing this article seems very hostile towards the rest of the organization. They just want to be in their little box and not have to deal with others. They think everything can work out easily just by using Slack. I think they're terribly mis-guided.
What I've seen instead is that people tend to try to own their problems instead of asking for help, but daily standups give them a chance to easily mention their issue and for others to help off-handedly. Things that people previously held onto for days are now taking no more than a day to resolve.
I think the problem has 2 parts: Ego, and puzzles. Nobody wants to ask for help, and they'd rather solve it themselves. And puzzles are fun. Most of the great developers I've met love working through problems and figuring out a solution, even if it's not an ideal one. The best developers also work past these problems, but nobody is perfect, and standups definitely help.
tl;dr - Standups work for us and our team is closer for it.
That shift has meant that all meetings now have a video component. Our weekly meeting is everyone in a room, except the remote person who is on video. Daily meetings are all-video, everyone participating from their desk via video chat.
Previously, our "meeting" was really a chat session that we talked about work a little and other stuff a lot.
Now, our meeting starts with what everyone did and will be doing, working through some issues anyone has, and then talking about whatever until we run out of stuff to talk about, which is usually shorter than I expected, given our previous in-person meeting length.
We have 4 developers, and this seems to be working very well for us.
Without the daily meetings, we'd not get some of these issues resolved as quickly and we wouldn't have as much team-building time. We initially tried an afternoon meeting for that team-building time, but it didn't work for various people for a number of reasons.
The person writing this article seems very hostile towards the rest of the organization. They just want to be in their little box and not have to deal with others. They think everything can work out easily just by using Slack. I think they're terribly mis-guided.
What I've seen instead is that people tend to try to own their problems instead of asking for help, but daily standups give them a chance to easily mention their issue and for others to help off-handedly. Things that people previously held onto for days are now taking no more than a day to resolve.
I think the problem has 2 parts: Ego, and puzzles. Nobody wants to ask for help, and they'd rather solve it themselves. And puzzles are fun. Most of the great developers I've met love working through problems and figuring out a solution, even if it's not an ideal one. The best developers also work past these problems, but nobody is perfect, and standups definitely help.
tl;dr - Standups work for us and our team is closer for it.