A few jobs back the director was having daily standups with the whole dev team for 60-90 minutes and sometimes longer.

The goal was to figure out why the project was behind schedule... yeah.

Keeping the meeting short was the whole point of them being "standups" (as opposed to "sit-downs") in the first place!

Frankly, even 10 minutes is excessive: it means either people are talking too much or your team is too big.

I'm fucking sick and tired of cargo-cult managers adopting the trappings of agile without understanding WTF they're for.

My stand-ups are at 10 am (11 am for most of the team), last between 3 and 15 minutes depending on how many of the 7 of us show up and how much everyone has to say, then we all go back to what we're doing. My project manager and boss both care about the work that gets done rather than monitoring us to make sure we're working the entire time, and we actually get reasonable (even generous) timelines for most things unless it's something super important.

I love my job.

Ha, I could not be more the opposite. I want to be 75% done with my day by 1pm. I’d rather them be at 8am

My husband holds his team meetings at 3/4pm ish on friday on zoom with beers. Afterwards he tells everyone to fuck off home.

THAT is how you do it. It turns into a pile of geeks talking geek and part post-mortem, part decompressing from the week and they've actually had some absolutely mint ideas rising out of deformalising the dev pileup.

We used to have a rigorous schedule. Arrive at the office between 8-830. Make coffee and chat. At 9am we started the daily meeting. We all read what we were going to do today to each other. By then it was 1130 and so we broke for lunch. After lunch, at 1300 we would do the thing we said we would do. At 1530-1630 we would submit out updates to the project management system and produce tomorrow's report for us to read to each other. 1700 we would go to the bar then head home around 1830.

When I started working for myself I would usually start around 9 to finish at noon, including travel time.

It wouldn't be explaining it. It would be your teammates telling everyone where they are on the projects you all work on. If you aren't working the same projects, then you aren't on the same team. Or you need sub-teams. If your work is so independent you don't rely on anyone else's work and vice versa, then you probably don't need standups.

I agree with you. That’s why we make our teams small enough in size that standups are 10min max, usually more like 5.

That said, it can be really beneficial to hear that Joe is working on something similar to a thing I’m going to start today. He may be able to give me some lessons learned or point me to a library.

But I completely agree that big teams a make this an annoyance. I used to be on a 20 person team and standups were completely worthless.

Now, we have 3-5 devs per team and it’s usually really quick.

So what if it's a waste of time. Gotta make the 40 hours anyway.