It seems like "mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up" is why the meetings seem so pointless, because you aren't listening to other team's challenges and providing input?

Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged, so I don't want to project that onto you, but I always though that was the _idea_ of the daily/weekly standup?

At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.

And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.

The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.

Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.

Before I moved and started working remotely for my company, I was in one of these meetings where a coworker who took over one of my projects from ~2012 was commenting on what he was doing, and I offered a suggestion in an attempt to help. My immediate supervisor said "That's not important". This is a guy hired all of 4 months before me -- we're #2 and #3 in terms of tenure among developers, and until about 3 years ago both reported directly to the owner of the company.

I then noted that I believed it was important, and I knew that because I had direct experience with the project where my supervisor did not (because I wrote it), and my supervisor asked me "well then why don't fix it instead of [the newer dev working on the project]?" in a dismissive tone. This is a project I hadn't worked on in half a decade and was no longer in my job description.

Thankfully the owner of the company was in the meeting as well, noticed the tension, and talked to both of us separately about it after the meeting (agreeing profusely with me that I was adding a valuable contribution and that my supervisor was out of line to snip at me). The supervisor later apologized to me directly. That was not the first time he directed uninvited hostility toward me, but it was the most public instance of it, and was the last before I started working remotely. Things are much better now, I imagine because the perceived threat of me trying to usurp his managerial role is now 1000 miles away from the office.

So yeah...sometimes these meetings aren't so great, haha.

The tried-and-true method of, "oh, ask so-and-so, they worked in that area" is strictly better, because no matter how many times you're redirected, you're bothering fewer people than at the daily standup.

You don't want to force 50 people to sit around waiting while two engineers discuss a problem for 5 minutes. Instead the meeting organizer should say, Sarah, you know about this area, can you connect with Justin after the meeting and see if you can help. Anyone else who has ideas is welcome to join.

Standups only work when people give a quick status update, their plans for the day, and call out any blockers. If it devolves into discussions of how to solve any problem it's no longer a standup. And anyone who schedules standups with more than a single focused team (preferably no more than a dozen people) just doesn't understand what a standup is for.

I was thinking more about the case of "here's how we are doing it" and someone you wouldn't have thought to ask saying "oh, we tried to do that at [x] last year and it didn't work because [a], [b], [c]".

Maybe twice a year you can have a big 'all-hands' all day work shop where you go through and discuss major long term issues.

In a sense, being in the conference room is asking people to be (ostensibly) 100% on during the whole meeting, which seems like a huge mental drain.

(20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)

I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer.

That's how much I believe in it.

Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..

I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do?

We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.