> But many years ago I gave up Scrum completely in my teams. What’s more, over time I almost stopped coming across startups where Scrum is used in its classic form at all. Many distributed teams are gradually moving toward an async approach ...
It is my personal opinion that Scrum/Agile is just a rather dramatic/over-the-top system for fixing dysfunctional teams that have fallen into poor or absent communication anti-patterns.
(I also think the general trend towards async among distributed teams is that more people have gone through this and have picked up the "better" communication habits.)
After you've done it for a while you start to find that many of the individuals are talking to each other without the various contrivances.
Planning poker isn't really about project sizing, it's about surfacing issues that the team members might not find out about if they don't talk to each other. I've been on teams where someone has spent 2 months working on something only to find that someone else had 90% of the work done in a private branch.
After the third of fourth time during planning poker that someone is reminded that they need to consider the testing/docs aspect they start to factor that in without being prompted.
The daily standup is similar. "I'm going to frobnicate the foobar today" and someone will say "Ah, have you spoken to Alice in that other team as she did the same thing with Bob's team last week, she's got a load of scripts that should save you a load of time."
Retrospectives are about acknowledging people who did good work, what worked well within the team, and also raising the things that held people back. If you have a good team leader they should be wondering why on Earth this is the first time they're hearing about any of this stuff. (A bad team leader will continue to blunder on not learning anything and being blissfully unaware that they're missing the really big neon signs, or they'll find some other way to dismiss the concerns/findings.)
Eventually you may get to a point where there is very little face to face communication required because the team starts to use the async communication systems properly, they communicate freely between team members and also upwards. But this is often a precarious situation, it doesn't take much for the boat to be rocked, new people coming in, trusted people leaving, new projects, new directions, unrealistic deadlines, etc. Every so often it requires more communication than before to get things back on track.
Once you're over the "scrum/agile solves all" hill people tend to pick/choose what continues to add value, and they discard the rest. (For the teams I've worked on in the past it was the "don't interrupt or change course mid sprint" rule that worked best for us - so many times the urgency had disappeared once we had got to the end of the sprint and we'd been saved from ultimately unnecessary distractions.)
Back to the management style in the article, even though I could work somewhere with little or no regular verbal communication I know I would quickly find I absolutely despised it.
I've done long solo projects in the past with no real colleagues or technical leadership/reporting. I found it far less rewarding than being part of a team (although it was often more financially rewarding). I get that some people thrive on this kind of thing and I'm happy for them. Every so often I like to go deep on something but how long I can tolerate this for is becoming shorter and shorter as I get older. There's a big difference between going a full day or so in focus/flow mode to extending this for days/weeks/longer.
I used to seek out 1:1s with random people in the company. I'd join the "watercooler" video call a few times a week to just chat random stuff with random people. As for async comms, although we were all good at starting off with well thought out full initial message/question on Slack (not just a "hello" and then silence) many of these were better off resolved via a quick video call once it was clear that async wasn't the most efficient method. Pretending or hoping that everyone is so eloquent, clear and exact with their language that you can do everything async is just fantasy in my experience. If the question was raised in a channel (rather than a DM) then someone would go back and provide a brief summary so that anyone finding the initial conversation by search didn't just hit a "let's jump on a call" cliffhanger with no resolution. (Then the company grows big enough that Slack retention policies become a limiting factor.)
I've definitely worked with people who can work with little or no interaction but even in workplaces with a greater than average concentration of introverts and neuro-divergence such people (who can work like that) are in the great minority (again, IMHO). Most people work better with direct access to empathy, reassurance and even just someone to listen to them ranting. The trick is to find the right balance as too much communication can be stifling, but I'd rather be in that situation and working on dialing it back.