As I sit here nursing a head plagued with a migraine, I read with great interest Eric Sink’s latest in my RSS reader about his experiences learning Scrum, a paper submitted for the proceedings of Agile 2011. Here’s my favorite part:

“I have come to think of our daily standup as being similar to a security guard at a bank. Most security guards stand around for their entire career without ever firing their weapon. It's probably a boring job. But the consistent presence of that security guard probably prevents some big problems from ever happening. Our daily standup is the same way.  Nothing exciting ever really happens. But we can confidently assume that many big problems have been avoided because we regularly take the time to get synced up.

“The culture of Scrum teams seems to be built on working together in shared spaces. In contrast, our company has always placed a high value on each person having a private office.

“We are aware that there are tradeoffs here. A private office gives each person a quiet place to work, but it also creates the opportunity for people to get isolated. So even as we provide private offices, we create ways to drag people out of them, including soda in the kitchen, lunch together on Wednesdays, a pool table, and a video game room.”

For this I would consider relocation to Illinois. And I always tell recruiters I’m not interested in relocating.