Of all the horrors of scrum, standups might be the most pernicious. It looks innocent "it's just 15 minutes".
Even people who don't like standup only jokingly grumble about it, and think it's harmless or even useful "if done right".
I think that standup is actually one of the most harmful scrum ceremonies, because of its frequency, pervasiveness, and apparent innocence.
Before I start talking about the costs of standup, let's talk about the supposed benefits and show that they are a mirage.
Almost everything covered in standup is on the fucking Jira board. Especially if everything has been cut into itty bitty two story point tickets. Almost every standup consists of reading the board. You don't need a meeting for that. Just be literate. You almost never need to know how something is going with more granularity than looking at it on the board, unless it's some sort of urgent security issue, which most tickets aren't. Constantly interrupting someone to ask for progress that you can easily see yourself is insane.
The other supposed benefit is telling people about blockers. Well, guess what, you don't need to wait for a meeting to do that. We have chat. Twiddling your thumbs for half a day before you tell people you're blocked on something is a waste of time. Most people in standup can't unblock you either, because they don't have access or permissions. And we don't have blockers every day. They happen a few times a month, instituting a daily practice because of something that happens a few times a month is a stupid idea.
What about chit-chat, camraderie? Well, forced fun is anything but. Let people talk naturally, when and how they're comfortable. In office settings, hallway conversations are a great way to spread tacit knowledge and bond. It's trickier remotely, but forcing everyone every morning to be a captive audience to an inane group conversation is torture.
Ok, so standup has essentially no benefits that you can't easily get without them - that are probably better achieved outside standup. But they're just 15 minutes right? What's the harm, even if they're useless.
Well, let's imagine that people actually do keep them to 15 minutes, and they don't turn into this job justification farce where everyone speaks for ages to look like they're doing a lot. The cost of 15 minutes every morning is still not negligable. For a 6 person standup, the total time is about 375 hours a year, which is about 9.3 weeks. Would you pay an employee to twiddle their thumbs for over 2 months every year?
Of course, the cost is way more than that. Standup is almost never the first thing people do in the morning, and the time before standup is too short to do anything so that's wasted too. That 15 minutes is easily doubled or tripled. In workplaces with flexible start times, the benefit of being an earlier starter is entirely wiped out. And something so regular effectively enforces working in the same timezone and therefore restricting you to local talent.
Let's not forget the time between standup and lunch. Standup effectively halves your morning, and makes you significanty less likely to do anything ambitious. Eventually people habituate to this and stop trying. There have been multiple instances where I actually try to focus on working, and am late to standup or the next ceremony as I'm focused on the problem I'm dealing with and not the clock, so I learnt to stop doing that.
Let's say there's an actually important meeting (or, more likely, another scrum ceremony) in the morning. This effectively completely wipes out your morning. If you didn't have standup, you could have gotten work done and had the meeting, now you get absolutely no work done in the morning. And here's the thing. It's very rare that someone accomplishes very little in the morning and then locks in during the afternoon. As cliche as it is, the morning is the rudder of the day. And when people get demotivated in the morning, that makes the afternoon that much harder.
We're looking at regularly paying 1 person to do nothing all year now for every 6 people you hire, and a massive reduction in the kind of work people do.
Although other scrum ceremonies are nominally longer, and have their own problems, standup is the most universally practiced scrum ceremony. It's the most frequent - daily rather than once per sprint. People can't imagine not having it.
I'm fortunate enough that I have experienced a time without it. And, now that I've left my job, I can go back to working without it. I've been surprised at how much more I've been accomplishing - more than I would accomplish in 2 days with scrum - and this would motivate me to keep going and accomplish even more after lunch.
Scrum is like groundhog day, or one of those timeloop movies where you constanly repeat the day you died and try to figure out how to avoid that fate. First there's standup, then there's slack messages, then jira tickets and zoom meetings and scrum ceremonies, then the day ends, no work got done, and it all repeats tomorrow and you try to figure out what went wrong in retro. Removing standup is the first step.
So, erm, sit down and get back to work.