Maybe other teams work radically differently, but everywhere I worked it was inevitable that team members would occasionally get "meaty" projects to work on where they would take primary ownership. Under the repetitiousness and time constraint of stand-ups, it still outwardly appear that the smaller tasks broken out of a large project can all sound the same to others on the team who are only mildly interested in the details of other people's tasks.
If I was working on a very functional team where we had the employees and resources to work very collaboratively across projects, I'd certainly agree that (groups of) tasks that take that long should raise alarm bells. But most companies, in my experience thusfar, minimally value their developers and only hire X amount of them, so the developers they did hire are naturally forced to take on large projects to the point of taking sole ownership of them.
Disregarding that, I don't see it as unreasonable that tasks shared between multiple people would take weeks to figure out. If I were hiring developers, I wouldn't want them to race to make a bunch of horseshit that's going to fail, but instead they should take their time to figure out the right approach. In conjunction, they should be able and allowed to communicate when long-running tasks aren't going anywhere, without any shame. As long as they document the steps they took along the way, there's no reason that standup needs to play a role; with documentation, a manager should be able to tell if an employee is incompetent or merely trying to do their job right.
I don't think that stand-ups are really a big deal, but if I were running a team, I probably wouldn't use stand-ups in a traditional sense. Rather, I'd keep stand-ups but not make them goal-oriented or strictly related to work in any sense. As I said earlier, I think it's positive for people on a team to interact at least once throughout the day if they are in the office, and a quick and optional stand-up in the morning would be a great way to facilitate this. If someone wants to bring up an issue or asks if another team member knows how to do X thing, then awesome. In fact, I suspect people would be more comfortable in doing so if they aren't wasting time thinking up how to summarize their work for stand-up, and if stand-up was kept casual and didn't devolve into employees reporting to their manager.
If I was working on a very functional team where we had the employees and resources to work very collaboratively across projects, I'd certainly agree that (groups of) tasks that take that long should raise alarm bells. But most companies, in my experience thusfar, minimally value their developers and only hire X amount of them, so the developers they did hire are naturally forced to take on large projects to the point of taking sole ownership of them.
Disregarding that, I don't see it as unreasonable that tasks shared between multiple people would take weeks to figure out. If I were hiring developers, I wouldn't want them to race to make a bunch of horseshit that's going to fail, but instead they should take their time to figure out the right approach. In conjunction, they should be able and allowed to communicate when long-running tasks aren't going anywhere, without any shame. As long as they document the steps they took along the way, there's no reason that standup needs to play a role; with documentation, a manager should be able to tell if an employee is incompetent or merely trying to do their job right.
I don't think that stand-ups are really a big deal, but if I were running a team, I probably wouldn't use stand-ups in a traditional sense. Rather, I'd keep stand-ups but not make them goal-oriented or strictly related to work in any sense. As I said earlier, I think it's positive for people on a team to interact at least once throughout the day if they are in the office, and a quick and optional stand-up in the morning would be a great way to facilitate this. If someone wants to bring up an issue or asks if another team member knows how to do X thing, then awesome. In fact, I suspect people would be more comfortable in doing so if they aren't wasting time thinking up how to summarize their work for stand-up, and if stand-up was kept casual and didn't devolve into employees reporting to their manager.