In the past few years I have experienced a full spectrum of meeting philosophies. At one point I was required to attend 25 standups per week! I cried mercy and got it reduced to 15. It was still miserable. Mostly I reported that I accomplished nothing since yesterday, and if you really need something done today, see me after 5PM. My current meeting schedule is as follows: a) once a week, 30 minutes with my manager, b) once every two weeks, one hour with my team, c) once a month, 30 minutes with the whole company. Somehow work still gets done without all the meetings. Or wait... work gets done when people are not in meetings! What might be surprising is that in the environment with fewer meetings there is also less chaos, less confusion, fewer mistakes, fewer disasters, and less stress.

If people aren't getting value from a meeting, they should stop doing it. Or reflect on why they were doing it in the first place. Talk about it at retrospective! Or sooner! You do have those, right? :-)

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..

Maybe you think there is no value, but don't realize the information you or others glean from the meeting pays off. Perhaps think about what value could come from these meetings and then determine whether you are getting it.

The psychological toll of being held to recount and justify my actions of the past 24 hours, every single day, is wholly demoralizing.

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.