And then there's a "parking lot attendant" ready to kill useful/interesting discussions "in the interest of everyone's time".

There are so many stand-ups I've been in where my coworkers would say what they've been working on and none of it would apply to me or my work and vice versa. It was more for the manager to hear what's being worked on. I think status updates should just be async in your slack channel

Thing is, the standup originated out of a methodology that describes operation of an organization without managers. The standup is time allotted for the developers to fulfill some of the duties the manager would have otherwise done for them. Perhaps there is some kind of merit to it if you actually operate that way, but if you can recognize someone as the manager then why are the developers doing their job? Async or not, it is just silly cargo culting.

they can be!

Nothing of importance is happening in the code base.

What's important are blockers like inability to implement something, missing permissions, awaiting external communication, freshly detected requirements that need a decision, absences etc pp

Everyone will already know about the blocker as soon as it happens. Reasserting it again at a regularly scheduled meeting would be even sillier than regurgitating the commit log. At least there is a slim chance someone hasn't kept up with the commit log. There is no chance of someone not being aware of blockers by the time the standup comes around.

> freshly detected requirements that need a decision

Oh, in that case one should definitely wait 23 hours to bring that to anyone's attention, and for sure an (allegedly) 15 minute meeting is a great place to get requirements

> absences

Uh-huh, go ahead and include births and puppy adoptions, too; I can see that you and the Certified Scrum Master™ have obviously attended the same workshops on Team Health

A stand-up is "here is what I worked on, here is what I'm going to work on, and here is what I had or am having trouble with". And if I can help you out with something or want to discuss more for any other reason, then I say "John, I can help you with that; I'll hit you up after the meet", and you say "k" and that's the end of it.

Or at least, that's how it should be. But half the people tell long shaggy dog stories because they fear "I worked on feature X, it's going well" or some such is too short or basic, but it's not. Or they turn into long protracted debug sessions that's only really of interest to two people but 7 others are watching. That should be done after the standup.

It's really just intended to 1) give everyone a basic idea of what people are working on, and 2) a moment to check in and ask for help, and/or offer help.

Right, understood that the standup was conceived under XP, which is a framework for operating self-organizing teams without managers, and it is likely you need that collaboration when you have no mangers.

But when was the last time you saw a team without managers? When you have managers, the whole reason for their existence is to take that kind of management work off the plate of developers, so that the developers can focus on what's important.

If you are having standups and managers, you need to seriously consider replacing the managers because they have straight up failed to do their job.