No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to say.
The purpose of a functioning standup is contextualization. If you know your teammate is still working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work is related and you can design some shared data structure that speeds up both of you.
If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more productive individually and as a team, though, the interconnectedness of the team is just as important as what any one member is working on.
I'm still not clear on what information ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” gives me.
It gets better if there's some detail about the task, like "Still working on X, runtime is too slow but I found a paper linked from Wikipedia with a promising algorithm." Lots of inferred and implied knowledge transfer can happen through intetactions that seem simple on the surface. E.g. in my example here, ideas of how to approach research for a task, what kinds of obstacles are normal, etc.
If you're not building camaraderie, then maybe your standup isn't set up right or at the right time, but that doesn't mean the concept or the information is useless.
And as a last resort, if you can't change something, then put in your own effort to make the best of it instead of just wasting the time entirely.
Oh, but I can change something. If you remember having this discussion last year, it was ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today. No blockers.” To which I pointed out that the "No blockers" part serves no purpose as if anyone had a known blocker, they would have already let the team know when it became a blocker, not wait for a fixed time of day. It is not coincidence that the last part isn't said today.
Today, I am here to share that the rest of the canned response is also useless.
Build camaraderie. Actually talk about the work you are doing with your teammates. These things can be beneficial and you'll still get the same non-verbal cues if there is something afoot. Don't waste valuable time on nothingness.
1. If I did, I would have told you a long time ago when it became a blocker.
2. If I somehow forgot to tell you a long time ago, I would have told you when I did my standup comedy^H^H^H^H^H^H routine.
3. If I still somehow forgot after all that, it doesn't matter.
I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I was, but I think 30 minutes would be my max lost productivity.
Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is one of the top perks for many developers and some developers are also much more productive working at non-traditional times.
The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition, particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest of the day.
If anyone reading this does use daily standups and everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every team is different and doing what works for your team is what matters. But personally I have found that while sometimes useful points do arise during standups the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not least because IME the same information would probably have been passed on some other way and often faster in any moderately functional development team anyway.
Now every where I go some douchebag paranoid manager has established daily stand-ups because it makes them feel better. I resent telling people I'm working on a story we all groomed together and brought into the Sprint....it's right on the board: In progress, In Review, Ready for acceptance, Done. Clear as day. I'm still working on X, gonna work on X some more...everything is going great. Not adult-like behavior.
Given how common standups seem to have become, that probably tells us something. Maybe the typical daily standup as widely advocated isn't usually productive and it's actually some variations used by some individual teams that have been more worthwhile for those specific teams?
Fundamentally, that is also the idea pushed in software. A chance to talk about what needs to be done that day. But, in my experience, tech companies also schedule planning meetings. That is where it is determined what will be done for the next while (two weeks seems to be a common cadence) and after that the course is set. There is nothing else to talk about, unless someone has a problem, and when someone has a problem (assuming your team is functional) they reach out when they have a problem, not wait until a prescribed time 23.75 hours later.
That means there is no additional information to give in the standup, and thus this is likely the source of why standups end up being pointless the vast majority of the time in tech. The healthcare case, on the other hand, provides clear value.
There are likely some cases where tech teams suffer from no direction, void of an idea of what needs to be done before the moment it needs to happen. I imagine that overlaps with tech that is dysfunctional. A productive standup does not exactly seem like something to strive for, but if all you have is a bandaid...
I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it accounts for the additional friction involved. You might be the exception, but humans in general are known to avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for the mind to accept that the time is right.
And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06...
What a gem. Whenever the next "silicon valley" is made I'm waiting for a character to say this. Simply hilarious.
Get off your high horse. You can afford an interruption or two per day.
Standup can be great if the responsibility across the team are spread out, but only at a lower frequency (once a week?).
Fine, catch me the moment I wake up. But good luck finding two team members who wake up at the exact same time each day. That never happens in the real world. No matter how you slice it, productivity is going to be destroyed.
I like it for two reasons, I go for lunch straight after so don't have two context switches. And it sometimes works as an effective midday target for me to try to get a ticket progressed before the standup.
Asynchronous standups avoid that problem, but I've never seen an async standup bring any engagement and ends up being nothing more than "I'm working on X again. Duh." which is completely pointless.
In fairness, as you are forcing a context switch for a standup, it is likely that you do work with unreasonable people.
It was glorious. Having record of all conversations for easy reference really did help build better software, as far as I am concerned. These days, everyone wants to do video conferencing, it seems, and half the time the job doesn't get done right because someone misheard something or forget what was said. It makes no sense to me.
I can only imagine that those who think voice communication is the best communication haven't tried anything else.