From my experience as a SWE over the past ~15 years working in teams ranging from 10+ engineers in large companies doing daily in-person standups, to ~5 engineers in small remote-first companies doing daily videocall or async standups, and everything in between: the standup ceremony is a waste of everyone's time. Its only purpose is social/political as with any meeting, and giving micromanaging managers something to do and something to report to their higher-ups (I've been part of teams where the "Scrum Master" and even "Product Owner" attends the standup...). Which is fine if that's the way the company works and the participants enjoy the ceremony for personal reasons, but there are no tweaks to the standup formula that makes teams more productive or functional.

If I'm working on a solo project, nobody cares about the details of my progress besides the users I'm building it for. Whether this is an API for someone who is part of the standup, or a feature for someone in the company, I would communicate with them directly when needed. They would already be aware of my progress, and they usually don't need to be informed of it on a daily basis. If I'm stuck on something, then I would also communicate directly with the person who can help me.

If I'm working on a team project, the team members would already be aware of the project status, whether that's via pull requests, issues, or direct communication (in-person, chat, email, etc.). The users of the project would be notified of the progress as needed in this case as well.

So the standup ceremony is redundant for the few people familiar with the context, and completely useless for those who are not. The standup assumes that teams aren't communicating already, which is ludicrous.

It's about time that the industry accepts that the Agile manifesto, while noble in principle, has been completely misunderstood and corrupted in all its implementations, and that the modern software development process is not an improvement over the Waterfall one it aimed to replace.

To me the only process that makes sense is giving engineers autonomy, assuming they're self-sufficient and capable of making good decisions, and providing them with a very lightweight set of tools for collaboration (issue/task tracker, code review, chat, email, meeting, etc.). A process that works best for that team will emerge by consensus. Anything that's imposed from the top down or by cargo culting some process that worked for some other team will inevitably cause friction and be of little practical value.

As with many things, it depends on the team. Some teams and people really do seem to need some amount of daily direction to have confidence in the work they are doing, and that does have a meaningful impact on productivity.

My bias is always to only participate in frequent recurring meetings as a last resort, but sometimes they seem to be necessary.

> giving engineers autonomy

That is almost as offensive as a slur to management in 95% of companies