As long as i take projects from non-IT people, there are no stand-up meetings. But, when you are in relationship with IT companies, code more specifically, you have to attend stand-up meets. There are times when i worked remotely for some companies where we needed absolutely no meet for some 3 weeks. That was because i knew the area they took me in for as good as the folks over there and also because the tasks were pretty well defined.
Then there were companies who did meets which went for over an hour. It was really killing since i knew we did not really need those. I finally managed to get rid of those. The way it works is that when you know you are going to meet, you work in a kind of irresponsible way, knowing that you will meet to clear things up. I have always contributed to OpenSource and i can say that the discipline and standard it has coupled with normal text-only communications ensures that meets are not necessary, save to discuss ideas and direction. The only difference is that OpenSource does not have a deadline normally but even then i managed to apply the principles of OS contributions to projects with deadlines.
I was pleasantly surprised when i read Muhammad Hasan Khan (a current Google engineer) ‘s post on meets. He termed them as distractions when there are too much and that a 1-1 meet once a week with the manager is enough and that working remotely cut off the physical meet ceremonies. Like sometimes you don’t need to be a X master to be able to have an eye for pragmatism.
I can only say that dear X masters, in addition with your Y certifications, please contribute to OpenSource. I don’t say it’s a magic pill but it does help a lot to understand how collaboration between people who don’t know each other, working in different timezones helps produce the world’s best softwares.