Depending on how your team runs it a room is often useful. In an open office (which is very popular these days with management) you want a room to keep the noise down for others. Sometimes you can keep a dedicated whiteboard in the room for you post-it notes (this beats computers for what developers need to track, but for management needs a computer based tracker is better). I've worked on teams with semi-disabled people - while they could walk a short distance they couldn't stand for that long and so they sat.

However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.

We've thankfully gotten out of the YTB trap at my current org- In my experience there's nothing more energy-draining and pointless than rote statusing and recaps during a standup. We've got tooling to see what each other are working on, and any blockers are brought up in the standup.

The only time I've actually stood up during a standup was when I interned at Ubisoft. We would have ~25 people in a room all standing on the perimeter and we'd say what we were working on one by one. As an intern I really liked it because I got to hear what problems everyone was working on.

In an open office, room-less meetings are quite disruptive. I still remember what the completely unrelated team two rows away was working on 8 years ago since I listened to them talk about it for 10 minutes every day. (I also apologize to everyone else since our team did the same thing)

Exactly. Sounds like a shitty group of people harassing their coworkers.

what is a ytb?