> This was less disruptive than taking 30 minutes (less than 3 minutes per person) for the daily standup, which often dragged to 45 minutes and sometimes even an entire hour!

More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups. If you have standups daily, you should be able to give an update on what your status is in a minute tops, given it's business as usual. If there's any followup discussions to be had or questions to be resolved, the startup is not the right place to do that, everyone who is interested or affected can continue the discussion after the standup. This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask.

Having spent some time living in Sweden, the situation described in the article is not too surprising to me. Swedes are incredibly nonconfrontational and even the thought of politely cutting someone off because they're talking too much in a standup would be faux pas for some.

Interesting observation about Swedes. I'm Dutch, and I've noticed Swedes and Dutch people and culture are very similar in many ways, very egalitarian and everything, but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient.

I've been part of several "too large" teams, and one in particular, with 20 people, I was really surprised it worked so well. Standup would take 20 minutes, everybody paid attention. There were informal subteams that would discuss details outside the standup.

The most official subteam was the testers (first 2, later 4) who also controlled deployment, because everything had to go through them.

Somehow it was a very efficient chaos. Not scrummy at all; technically we had sprints, but everybody ignored them and it was more kanban. Some features would take months, others would be done quickly. Some would restructure much of the code base. I've seen PRs that touched hundreds of files. Somehow it all worked and it worked very efficiently. We even took over another project from a team in the US that was going nowhere, and we managed to deliver it within their original deadline despite the other team wasting a year doing nothing.

I still wonder how that team could work so well. We weren't all generalists; I was, but others would do only fronted, only backend, or spend most of their time thinking about taxonomies. The team did seem to foster a culture of friendly but brutal honesty without any punching down. Main tester and main backender would rib each other a lot. People eagerly took responsibility for fuckups. Everybody was considered an expert on something and nobody knew everything, so we'd consult each other a lot.

I've had them go 90 minutes because they branch off into tangents from people's updates and they become a solution session between one dev and our manager. Info is pretty silo'd (not required for security or anything, just bad management) so usually nobody else knows what's up with their ticket and manager is in other meetings all day so he never responds to dms to help on stuff. I've tried cutting people off to keep it moving and have been reprimanded about it, now I attend with camera off and do my dishes during the meeting.

There is a value to standup in calling out "my PR needs eyes and nobody responded on slack" or "hey I'm blocked on X who wants to pair later" but outside that it's useless.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t working on the same things. The only real solution to that is to get people talking outside the standup.

'This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask'

In my experience anything that requires discipline is too brittle to last. You can argue it should not be so, but it is.

Instead of discipline, an extrinsic force, robust motivation should be intrinsic, born from delivering a real value feeling to all participants.

> More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups.

One of my clients hired a former U.S. Marine. I so enjoyed attending the meetings he ran. He managed the clock with ruthless efficiency.

From my experience as a SWE over the past ~15 years working in teams ranging from 10+ engineers in large companies doing daily in-person standups, to ~5 engineers in small remote-first companies doing daily videocall or async standups, and everything in between: the standup ceremony is a waste of everyone's time. Its only purpose is social/political as with any meeting, and giving micromanaging managers something to do and something to report to their higher-ups (I've been part of teams where the "Scrum Master" and even "Product Owner" attends the standup...). Which is fine if that's the way the company works and the participants enjoy the ceremony for personal reasons, but there are no tweaks to the standup formula that makes teams more productive or functional.

If I'm working on a solo project, nobody cares about the details of my progress besides the users I'm building it for. Whether this is an API for someone who is part of the standup, or a feature for someone in the company, I would communicate with them directly when needed. They would already be aware of my progress, and they usually don't need to be informed of it on a daily basis. If I'm stuck on something, then I would also communicate directly with the person who can help me.

If I'm working on a team project, the team members would already be aware of the project status, whether that's via pull requests, issues, or direct communication (in-person, chat, email, etc.). The users of the project would be notified of the progress as needed in this case as well.

So the standup ceremony is redundant for the few people familiar with the context, and completely useless for those who are not. The standup assumes that teams aren't communicating already, which is ludicrous.

It's about time that the industry accepts that the Agile manifesto, while noble in principle, has been completely misunderstood and corrupted in all its implementations, and that the modern software development process is not an improvement over the Waterfall one it aimed to replace.

To me the only process that makes sense is giving engineers autonomy, assuming they're self-sufficient and capable of making good decisions, and providing them with a very lightweight set of tools for collaboration (issue/task tracker, code review, chat, email, meeting, etc.). A process that works best for that team will emerge by consensus. Anything that's imposed from the top down or by cargo culting some process that worked for some other team will inevitably cause friction and be of little practical value.

If everyone gives status updates that are either "Task is progressing as expected" or "I'm blocked as I mentioned on slack yesterday", then what is the point of the standup?

Not my experience working in Sweden for the past 10+ years. Likely that I had outlier experiences here but standups have always been short, the person leading it had complete autonomy to call out "I think this should be discussed after stand-up" whenever some discussion started to go on for a little longer (usually about 2-3 minutes is too long).

The thing I noticed being culturally different is that you just don't cut off someone while they're speaking, you raise your point by politely asking for the space and sharing your opinion, and decisions about it are made through some consensus (which never failed when a discussion is going on for too long).