Standups are Poisonous

I've worked at two companies where the day starts at 10am. You'd be surprised how common this is. For people without families and who live in big cities like New York, flex time allows you to go out at night any given night, have a good time, not miss out on sleep, and still have a full day of work by waking up at 9am or 10am. When someone in your team suggests to start the standup fifteen minutes earlier so that no two teams' standups overlap, how do you respond? "I don't want to wake up 15 minutes earlier", or silence?

Morning stands up are a great way for management to ensure people are pressured into showing up for work at a given time without having to be the bad guy and actually say it.

My experience with morning standups is that people arrive to work right before the standup or a few minutes into it, are not in the right mindset to form coherent sentences about their work, and as a result the standup is a slow monotone monologue that no one pays attention to. The one day a week when the manager joins the standup to listen in, everyone faces him and it becomes a report trying to look good and sound like they accomplished a lot that day.

Bottom line, skip the physical standup and use Trello instead!

You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by himself, right?

I've worked 5 years in an exclusively office environment, flexible time but we weren't allowed to work from home, for the last 2 years I've worked almost exclusively from home and I from my experience I can say that some days I would be more productive if I'd met some guy for a face-to-face conversation.

I do Skype meetings all the time, or Google Hangouts, none of the tools I use for remotely talk to people make me as dynamic as I can be face-to-face. I can't grab a piece of paper and sketch something to illustrate my point, I can't gesticulate to show something better than only my words or my webcam showing something can.

I have lost HOURS on meetings + sketching things with digital tools (Skitch, diagrams, etc) that I could've explained a lot better in person.

You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up. And that's what standup "meetings" are, just "gatherings" not meetings, if you think that meeting has a bad connotation. Standup meetings/gatherings just bring everyone to the same page in about 10 minutes, no e-mail, Skype or Google Hangout can do that, I'm sorry.

>You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by himself, right?

You know that "talking" as in using voice communication face to face is not the only way to make things happen, right? You know that I didn't mention anything about being a lone hero or anything of the sort, right?

>You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up.

The social interaction isn't a problem, it's that the meeting is a fundamentally inefficient way to accomplish what can be done better in many different ways with other tools. If everyone is so prone to wander that it requires an inefficient and expensive (both in opportunity cost to time that could be spent solving other problems or actually doing productive work, and the cost of paying someone to drop everything and talk about doing work instead of doing work), it would seem to speak to a larger problem, either with processes, procedures, or people.

This goes double when the content of the meeting doesn't require anything but status updates or some other kind of communication which translates mostly seamlessly to plain, searchable, referencable text.