We don't have morning standups. Why is a 1:1 a waste of time, but a morning standup isn't?

For me, as a non-manager IC, I find it a complete waste of time. Unless I actually had an issue, but I'd rather not sit on an issue waiting for stand-up, and only would if it were close and I wanted to have something to say.

But managers, or at least the one that replied when I mentioned the above once, seem to like them, here what everyone's doing all at once ... Without having to read Jira titles themselves I suppose.

Perhaps ideal then would be some kind of Slack bot/app where everyone has to submit a quick video or voice clip once a day, and it queues them all up to play at whatever time the next day/stand-up period the manager wants the report.

That does sound like a waste of time, and my experience agrees with yours, that it's quite common. Which is too bad, because in my opinion, if a standup is a readout of work in progress, that's dysfunctional. A good standup is about identifying and resolving conflicts, dependencies and blockers, something that can be hard to do except as a group--it should not be a list of "what everyone's working on."

I just don't think that should wait for stand-up, even if they're daily. If you're blocked, mention it in the Slack channel or whatever we're using - someone can probably help; if not they know you need it. If a call is required, you can arrange that then with the relevant people, which may or may not be everyone.

Hear* I meant of course.

Yeah morning standups are not great either TBH but more efficient than a manager trying to gatekeep and broker information via 1:1s with each developer.

So having a standup every single day is more efficient than meeting once a week with your manager? You'd rather have to take time out every single day to hear other people talk about stuff that may have no relevance to what you do, rather than meet with your manager once a week - a meeting that might take only a few minutes if there turns out to be little to discuss?

OK, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.

If I have an issue blocking me now, yes it's more efficient to raise that at standup today with the group of people who might be able to help, than wait until next Thursday to discuss it 1:1 with the manager and then wait for the manger to find help for me.

But I'm not a huge fan of standups either, don't get me wrong. They aren't a great use of time, I just think they are better than weekly 1:1s to communicate things like "what I'm working on" or "what's blocking me."

The point of a stand is for the team to synchronize and raise potential issues. If the team is small, cross-functional, and working in the same area, it has a lot of value. You seem to be looking at this from the perspective of "what can I, the manager, get out of this" instead of "what can the team get out of this."

That's laughable - my team does not want stand-ups and after I asked them many times whether they would like regular meetings, they suggested doing a team meeting every few weeks, so you have no idea how I am looking at this.

You opened this line of conversation with "As a manager it is critically important that I have a sense of what my staff is doing." Not "it's very important to my team that they have X process." I only know what you tell me.

If they're work has no relevance to yours, I don't think you're on the same logical team? You don't need cross team stand-ups unless you're working on a project together

In some types of matrix orgs it makes sense as there is a distinction between project leadership and staff leadership.

- The staff/personnel manager is there for managing the engineers and getting their time allocated to projects. The 1:1s are for these managers to understand their engineers' skills, weaknesses, goals, and direction for growth/development so they can effectively allocate them.

- The team leads and project managers participate in standups so that the teams can effectively operate, work gets done, and project leadership knows what is happening.

The division makes sense when you have a lot of projects which may only be funded for parts of the year or where development isn't regular. Doubly so in industries which have a legal requirement for strong compartmentalization of knowledge & involvement. In these environments, your team leads, project managers, and standups will change like hats over the course of weeks, months, and years while you likely will only change personnel managers and 1:1s a few times over the course of a decade.