As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.

Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.

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poincaredisk a day ago | parent | next [-]

>async doesn’t go well with scale,

Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.

>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read

Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.

>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable

Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.

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2muchcoffeeman a day ago | parent [-]

The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them.

Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup.

Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script?

It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec.

You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it.

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ipaddr a day ago | parent [-]

Now you need three managers. The reason for the 20 person standup is to save money and give lip service to the standup trend.

	▲	Talanes a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Same manager with right-sized stand-ups wouldn't cost anymore money, unless that manager is making many multiples over what any of their team makes. It seems more like a kneejerk reaction to not "waste" the manager's time at the expense of the actually-more-important-but-hierarchically-less-important employees.
	▲	2muchcoffeeman a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Easy. Have another team member run the stand up. Again the problem is that no one is interested in processes to make things better or more efficient and then people blame the process. The process might have plenty of short comings, but we’ll never know.

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izacus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Essentially the old "This meeting could be an email. Yeah, but would you actually read the damn email?" thing.

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coldtea a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether

All of that can happen just fine in a real-time team chat as well - and give people the chance to provide actual context and links, and also check back at the actual discussion later.

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portaouflop a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.

What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time

	▲	scott_w a day ago \| parent [-]
		When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.