Company spends $263,000 a year on engineering team’s daily meeting instead of letting them work: ‘Decisions made during standup: zero’ – FAIL Blog

What typically happens in the meeting makes it even more absurd. Over a month of tracking, one person found zero actual decisions made, and fourteen times the team said, “let’s take that offline,” which is corporate for “this is not a meeting, this is a script.” Most standups are just people reading task lists out loud while everyone else politely waits to recite their own line from the same play. The format is not broken, it is just mismatched. Five‑minute standups with a real blocker and a real fix can be useful. A fifteen‑minute meeting that is mostly theater is just an expensive way to pretend the company is doing something instead of actually changing how it works.