Every morning at 9:47 AM (because the Scrum Master hits snooze twice), the team gathers in a circle — physically or via a video call where 40% of people have their cameras off — to recite their three sacred vows:

  1. What I did yesterday (mostly Slack, some Stack Overflow, one commit)
  2. What I’ll do today (same as yesterday, but with more confidence)
  3. Blockers (which no one will actually help with)

This ritual is called the Daily Standup. It is the purest distillation of corporate theater that software engineering has ever produced.

I’ve been doing standups for 23 years. I have never once been unblocked by a standup.

The Invention of the Standup

Legend has it the standup was invented to be short. “If people are standing, they’ll want to sit down quickly,” said the consultant who sold this idea for $800/hour.

Reader: they are not standing. They are slumping in ergonomic chairs, half-watching a Zoom tile of someone’s bedroom ceiling, muted because their cat knocked over their microphone stand.

The “15-minute timebox” is fiction. Every standup expands to fill available suffering.

“Wally, what are your blockers?” “Yes.” — Dilbert, basically every strip from 2001-2023

The Three Archetypes You Meet Every Day

The Overachiever

"Yesterday I refactored the authentication module, wrote 12 unit tests,
reviewed 4 PRs, updated the wiki, called the client, fixed the CI pipeline,
and learned Rust. Today I'll—"

This person makes everyone else feel like they haven’t existed for the past 24 hours. They are despised. They will be promoted. It is the same thing.

The Philosopher

"So, yesterday... I was thinking about the architecture we discussed back in
Q3, and I realized — actually, can we open a Miro board? I want to draw
something. It'll only take a second."

It takes 47 minutes. The Scrum Master has a small breakdown.

The Ghost

[STATUS: Away]
[STATUS: In a meeting]
[STATUS: Do not disturb]

This person is either doing actual work or they’ve already quit and no one has noticed. Both are valid. Both are aspirational.

The Blocker That No One Unblocks

Here is the dirty secret of the standup: blockers are mentioned but never resolved.

The standup is not a problem-solving session. It is a problem-announcing session. You say your blocker. People nod. The Scrum Master types it into Jira where it will age like fine wine — quietly, in the dark, becoming more complex and vinegary over time.

BLOCKER LIFECYCLE:

Day 1:  "I'm blocked on the API spec from design."
Day 3:  "Still blocked."
Day 7:  "Still blocked, but I worked around it."
Day 14: "What blocker? I fixed it myself."
Day 30: "It became a feature. We ship next week."

You never needed the standup. You needed 15 minutes of uninterrupted focus.

See also: XKCD #303 — Compiling (the real reason standups exist)

The Standup Report You Actually Want to Give

Here’s what people want to say versus what they say:

What You Want to Say What You Actually Say
“I spent 6 hours in a Kafka rabbit hole and have nothing to show for it” “Working on the event pipeline. Making good progress.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing” “Investigating some edge cases.”
“My blocker is that this project is fundamentally broken” “Minor dependency issue. Should be resolved today.”
“I played Factorio for 4 hours at 2am and I’m exhausted” “Good to go!”
“What is any of this for” [joins Zoom, sits in silence]

What Standups Actually Measure

The standup does not measure productivity. It measures performance of productivity — and these are different things.

A developer who writes 3 lines of perfectly placed code that eliminates a race condition that’s been costing the company $40,000/month in downtime has nothing to say at standup.

A developer who opens 11 tickets, attends 7 meetings, updates 3 wiki pages, and replies to 400 Slack messages has a great standup.

Guess which one gets the performance review bonus.

def productivity_score(actual_output, standup_performance):
    # Classic enterprise calculation
    return standup_performance * 0.8 + actual_output * 0.0 + vibes * 0.2

The Optimal Standup Strategy

After 47 years of surviving standups, I’ve developed an optimal strategy:

Step 1: Always go third. First is too eager. Second is still catching up. Third is perfect — the Scrum Master has stopped paying attention.

Step 2: Speak for exactly 42 seconds. Long enough to seem substantive. Short enough to avoid follow-up questions.

Step 3: Name-drop a ticket number. People respect ticket numbers. It implies structure. It implies you know what you’re doing. It implies accountability. None of this is necessarily true.

Step 4: End with “No blockers.” Even if you have blockers. Because if you mention a blocker, you’ll be asked to “take it offline” immediately after the standup, which means scheduling another meeting to not solve your blocker in a different room.

Step 5: Disappear from Slack for 90 minutes after standup. This is when real work happens. The standup has exhausted everyone’s social energy. Enjoy the silence.

The Async Standup Heresy

Some teams have tried async standups — writing your update in a Slack thread or bot. This is treated by Scrum Masters the way medieval peasants treated eclipses: as an omen of doom.

“But how will we connect as a team?” they ask.

We won’t. We’re software engineers. We connect through pull request comments and passive-aggressive git commit messages. That’s enough. That’s always been enough.

“I’m not anti-social. I’m anti-pointless-meetings.” — Me, in my head, every 9:47 AM

A Note on Standing Up

I’ve worked at companies that actually enforce the “standing” part. They believe discomfort accelerates brevity.

It doesn’t. It just accelerates back pain.

One engineer at a former job installed a standing desk in the meeting room and gave 20-minute standing updates every day. He was promoted to Principal Engineer.

His spine, however, was demoted.

Conclusion: What Standups Are Good For

Standups are excellent for:

  • ✅ Finding out who hasn’t pushed code in 3 days
  • ✅ Reminding yourself what project you’re on
  • ✅ Making the Scrum Master feel useful
  • ✅ Providing 15 minutes of structured procrastination
  • ✅ The ritual comfort of human routine in an otherwise chaotic codebase

Standups are not good for:

  • ❌ Solving blockers
  • ❌ Coordination
  • ❌ Engineering
  • ❌ Anything in the Scrum guide

But we’ll keep doing them. Because stopping standups would require a meeting to discuss stopping standups, and that meeting would need a standup to coordinate, and then we’d never escape.

See also: XKCD #1658 — Estimating Time (how long will standup take today?)

The author has been “blocked” since 2017. He mentions it every morning at 9:47 AM. No one has ever helped.