We did the same in apartment maintenance — a career completely unlike tech.

We’d stand around the managers office, take thirty seconds to say what we planned to do, what dependencies we had (eg, who needed the truck when) and then went off to do our tasks. Even though we also tracked project work in a time system.

A real standup isn’t that unusual, nor micromanagement. Though it can turn into that, when badly utilized.

> what dependencies we had (eg, who needed the truck when)

So in practice, that's a truck-sync meeting that needs to happen every day due to shifting needs and thus actually useful. Seems like there is room for improvement there but might not be worth it for them?

I also don't think certain management cultures would ever want to skip reaffirming the workplace hierarchy on the regular, but that's certainly not a culture I'd want to work in - but at least that's usually honest that it's just status updates to the boss and not hidden behind some nice sounding methodology bs.

IME, a standup is just repeating JIRA tasks 99/100 that's not useful for anyone beyond perhaps the extroverts that just wants the face-time, people who rarely reads chats, and ofc management for said office politics.

Usually you've already had a weekly/bi-weekly planning meeting distributing tasks in a rather granular size that are available for everyone to see progress on. Then you have easy-to-access direct communication channels through Slack or similar for ad-hoc questions to anyone at any time. Have a question? Just ask? If that's not enough I'm a lot more inclined to believe that the team is dysfunctional.

I genuinely think it's a shame that the autonomy & trust that other fields can offer people with proven qualifications/past work is not being offered, instead you're stuck in various infantilizing rituals when you're building a house that you've already built multiple times and don't need hand-holding to do so.

But there's some serious amounts of gaslighting going on in the field to explain that a tracker on your car is trust & autonomy.