Generally speaking, it is important for a well functioning team to have a status and sync-up meeting. When well run, it provides a way to batch what could end up being lots of individual ad-hoc interruptions throughout a week to a single point.
Again, generally speaking, no one should have more than one of these meetings a week unless they really have a good reason to be actively involved in multiple independent teams.
The real meeting-smell is when people have lots of weekly recurring meetings. If you're not a manager then two would be expected for most people, a 1hr team meeting and a 30min 1-1 with whomever they report.
I disagree. Most status meetings are useless at best and harmful at worst. If there really are blockers then people should be raising them immediately, not up to one full week later in the next scheduled sync. And if all blockers are addressed promptly as they should then what is the point of a delayed status update?
Like the parent post mentions these kinds of meetings are for the benefit of managers and executives, not people working on the project. And this validation shouldn't come at at the expense of everyone else's time.
Not every issue/question/complaint is an immediate blocker. Status meetings are great to queue topics or issues that do not need to be immediately addressed but if left ignored too long could snowball into a more serious thing.
Don’t you think that blockers affecting long term timelines will have ripple effects for higher level planning? Not everyone involved in that communication will be clued in to the day to day messages.
If status isn't being communicated well enough through general chatter and the multiple status tracking tools ("what do you mean, multiple?" everyone almost certainly uses at least Git and some kind of issue tracker, and it's not Git's main purpose but that definitely should convey some amount of status-related info) we're supposed to use daily, for the project manager to have what they need with nothing more than a couple impromptu "hey, what's up with X?" questions to the right people per week, something's seriously fucked up.
Granted, more often than not, something's seriously fucked up.
Again, generally speaking, no one should have more than one of these meetings a week unless they really have a good reason to be actively involved in multiple independent teams.
The real meeting-smell is when people have lots of weekly recurring meetings. If you're not a manager then two would be expected for most people, a 1hr team meeting and a 30min 1-1 with whomever they report.