That's the problem. Anecdotally, for many programmers I spoke with over a 20 years of career, it's not "can be used as passive aggressive bullying sometimes"; it's "almost always". :(

Likewise. Pretty much everywhere I've worked uses standup as a way of bullying people into working more hours, with a couple of unusually relaxed exceptions. It is a far cry from the origins of agile as a means of programmers defending themselves against a hostile organisation, as it was originally. Now agile is the hostile organisation.

I think at this point it should be common wisdom that anything and everything can and will be adapted to yet again introduce a power imbalance. The people who supposedly rule people -- a-hem, sorry, they manage them (heh) -- don't like it when the worker has influence of the process and especially the costs and schedules.

So they'll co-opt any newfangled trend into plain old serfdom. And they do.

As another commenter said, we should take page from the lawyers. A lot of them manage to convert bosses into paying subscribing customers.

I’ve never seen bullying in stand-up? So I’m skeptical of this “almost always”.

In fact many of the teams I’ve working are fine with people skipping standup if they have any reason to. Currently I skip like half of my teams standups.

Everywhere I've been, ever, stand-ups weren't optional.

That’s interesting. I’ve run into this a lot online. Its obvious in retrospect but often taken for granted that people can have such diverse experiences that really influence our opinions and views of the world.

The nice thing about anecdotes is that they don't say anything. For example: I have heard this for none of the programmers I've spoken with over a career of a little over half that time.

Anecdotes don't cancel each other out. They are all true at the same time.

So yes they do say a lot, maybe not what you believe but they still do say things.