Every struggling project in history has had some executive look at the timeline, panic, and say the same thing: “Let’s throw more people at it.” It’s such a comforting idea. More hands, faster work. More brains, better solutions. It makes intuitive sense, which is exactly why it’s wrong.
Fred Brooks figured this out in 1975 when he wrote The Mythical Man-Month. His observation was brutally simple: adding people to a late software project makes it later. Not a little later. Meaningfully, measurably later. And yet here we are, 50 years on, and companies are still making the same mistake. They see a deadline slipping and reach for the hiring button like it’s a panic switch.
Every morning at 9:15, a dozen developers shuffle into a room or log into a video call to answer the same three questions they answered yesterday. What did you do? What will you do? Any blockers?
We have been doing this ritual for so long that questioning it feels like questioning gravity. Stand-ups are just how teams work. Everyone does them. They must be valuable.
Except they are not. The daily stand-up, as practiced in most organisations, is not a communication tool. It is a surveillance mechanism dressed up in Agile clothing. And in 2025, with distributed teams and async-first tooling, it has become an actively harmful anachronism that we keep doing because nobody wants to be the person who suggests we stop.