To me it's also annoying as an unnecessary point of synchronization—for everyone on the team. Everyone has to be there at the same time, which means that either everyone has to arrive at the same time (annoying, inconvenient and unnecessary) or everyone has to interrupt their work at the same time. Aren't interruptions grand?
I would love something less synchronous and centralized.
The cost goes up quadratically with the number of people you add (every single person has to spend 1 unit of time and attention for every other person) while the benefit is limited to either the people working together most directly—who should be communicating constantly anyhow—or for the manager.
Having everyone stand around to update the manager is not great for anyone but the manager, but of course they're the ones mandating and organizing standups in the first place. I've seen a few cases where that's what standup devolved into.
It's easy to do standup wrong, and the benefits of doing it right are not immediately obvious. I don't think they outweigh the costs, and I am not a fan of the practice.
> The cost goes up quadratically with the number of people you add
This is a feature: it incentivizes keeping the functional teams small.
> or for the manager.
This is your problem. The "manager" is not supposed to be present in a daily standup, according to the design documents that introduced the term "standup". The daily standup is for the dev team to sync up.
I would love something less synchronous and centralized.
The cost goes up quadratically with the number of people you add (every single person has to spend 1 unit of time and attention for every other person) while the benefit is limited to either the people working together most directly—who should be communicating constantly anyhow—or for the manager.
Having everyone stand around to update the manager is not great for anyone but the manager, but of course they're the ones mandating and organizing standups in the first place. I've seen a few cases where that's what standup devolved into.
It's easy to do standup wrong, and the benefits of doing it right are not immediately obvious. I don't think they outweigh the costs, and I am not a fan of the practice.