The Radiating Programmer

I have found that communication strengths and weaknesses can vary, from person to person, and it's usually a tough sell to come up with "one size fits all" solutions.

One example, is that I had an employee who is probably the best engineer that I've ever met, and I've worked with top-shelf people.

But he is "on the spectrum," so his verbal communication tends to be in monosyllables, and can sometimes be a bit inscrutable.

His emails and specs, on the other hand, were absolute marvels of communication.

I had another engineer on the same team, who wasn't quite as brilliant, but he is an awesome "people person." It was always a good idea for me to make the time to chat. His emails tended to sometimes be abrupt, and the information density wasn't that great.

Put him in front of a whiteboard, however, with an audience, and it was amazing.

As their manager, it was incumbent upon me to deal with each as an individual. They would sometimes have clashes, and I was often the peacemaker.

In my decades as a SWE, there is one way that worked better than all others: having a competent project manager who individually polls team members with weekly, short(5-10min) 1:1s and then takes care of handling schedule updates, resource assignment and unblocking the dev. This allows devs to focus on what they do best with minimal cognitive load.

It requires hiring PMs though, and established managers will bristle at the thought of giving up responsibilities and power to another person. I'm seeing that within my org now. We're slowly learning all the lessons that big companies learned years ago from 70+ years of project management theory, but we're half-assing it because we refuse to accept that PMs and Gantt charts are about the only way for a large org to deliver efficiently and accurately in a mixed hw/sw, multi-team environment.

With that said, in my experience, many stand-up formats devolve into some version of "the two most talkative people have a conversation for 30 minutes while everyone else listens". I'd probably get more value out of doing a write-up than sitting through a meeting like that.

It really depends on the health of the stand-ups on the team.