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But you don't just have their online status. You can still talk to people even if you're not in the same room. You can ask them questions about what they've tri

But you don't just have their online status. You can still talk to people even if you're not in the same room. You can ask them questions about what they've tried and see if they're making any substantive progress from day to day. When they say the problem is difficult in the daily you can ask followup questions to see if they've really thought about the problem hard. If on day 4 all they can say is "it's difficult" then they are clearly not working very hard on trying to solve the problem. Once they finally do finish you can ask details about why it was so hard and judge for yourself whether it was genuinely a tricky problem or they were just slacking off. These are all things you should do as the team lead or manager whether you are in person or remote.

The_Colonel 3y ago
Well, basically you then need to chase them as a dev manager. And not just one person, but most of the team, because you can't really get the information passively. I bet the devs love that. In practice this doesn't really happen and the dev manager is quite blind to what's happening. And it's not just the dev manager, but generally all team members get this information passively when co-located. It's much easier to read the room when people are in the same place, and you see how they interact. When remote, devs often have no idea about other devs, unless they again chase the information (which usually doesn't happen).
- thinkharderdev 3y ago
  > Well, basically you then need to chase them as a dev manager What you are describing, following them around to observe what they are doing, sounds a lot more like "chasing them" than asking a couple of follow-up questions in the standup.