Everyone who's spent a few months on a team with daily meetings eventually hits the same annoying question. Is this still doing anything, or did it become a habit nobody has the guts to question anymore? There's no single answer here, no matter how badly people want one. What exists are contexts where the standup is a real tool, and others where it's pure corporate theater, complete with a memorized script. The original idea, inherited from Scrum, is simple enough. A short daily checkpoint to sync the team, surface blockers quickly, and adjust the day based on what everyone else is doing. Not a progress report for the manager. Coordination between peers, full stop. The problem is most teams inherited the format — the classic three questions, yesterday, today, blockers — without inheriting the intent behind it. And that's where things start rotting from the inside while the meeting keeps happening every single day at 9am sharp, business as usual. There are situations where this genuinely helps. Teams with strong dependencies between tasks, for one — when one person's work regularly blocks someone else's, a backend the frontend is waiting on, a design a dev can't move forward without. Daily sync there stops someone from sitting stuck all day waiting on an answer that could've come at 9:05. Distributed teams across different time zones also do well with this, because without natural overlap the standup — even written, async — ends up being the one guaranteed moment of shared visibility. It's not competing with Slack. It basically is Slack, just organized. Newly formed squads benefit too, in my experience, because they haven't built the informal channels older teams already have without thinking about it. And there's onboarding — a new hire learns more about how a team actually works in two weeks of standups than any onboarding doc could ever teach them. Who solves what. Who blocks what. How people actually talk to each other when nobody's filtering. So when does it turn into pure theater? When the team is small and already uses async tools fluidly — Linear, Jira, whatever — the meeting becomes redundant. The information already moved through the system, the meeting just repeats out loud what everyone already knew. Another tell, and this one's pretty reliable honestly: watch who people look at while talking. If it's always the same person — the tech lead, the facilitator, the manager — the meeting stopped being peer sync and became accountability theater wearing an agile costume. Low dependency between tasks is a sign too. In teams where everyone works their own lane without bumping into a colleague's, knowing what so-and-so did yesterday changes nothing for anyone's decisions. It's information without consequence. And information without consequence, repeated daily for months, is just noise. There's a simple test that clears up most of the ambiguity, I've run this with a few different teams and it holds up almost every time: if you canceled tomorrow's standup, would any real decision be left hanging? Would any blocker go unnoticed? If the answer is no, the meeting stopped being a tool a while ago. It became a presence ritual, something done because it's always been done. Format matters more than people think, by the way. A lot of the standup criticism isn't even about having the meeting or not — it's about the generic three-question script, which nudges people toward narrating tasks instead of solving actual problems. Teams that swap that for something like "what's blocked today and who needs help" tend to run shorter meetings that are, honestly, a lot more useful. That doesn't happen on its own though. It takes someone facilitating with a bit of skill — cutting off people who start narrating technical detail that's already obvious in the tracker, pushing long conversations to after the meeting, keeping the focus on blockers rather than progress. Remote changes all of this, too. In-person teams get a lot of sync for free — in the hallway, over coffee, overhearing the conversation at the next desk without meaning to. Remote just doesn't have that. The standup isn't competing with informal communication in that case, it IS the informal communication, just formalized because there's no other way for it to happen. That explains why the exact same practice can be complete theater at a twelve-person startup sharing one open space, and indispensable for a team spread across three different time zones. The most common mistake, I've noticed this a bunch of times, isn't choosing wrong between having the meeting or not. It's using the fifteen synchronous minutes for status that should've been written somewhere async, leaving no time — or energy — left for what actually needs a live conversation. Another trap is confusing "this meeting isn't helping" with "we don't need any sync at all." Cutting the standup without replacing it with anything trades a visible problem, a boring meeting, for an invisible one, a blocker nobody notices for three straight days. In the end the question isn't really whether standups work. It's whether your team still knows how to tell real sync apart from corporate theater — or whether it's been a while since anyone said that out loud, even in the very meeting that's supposed to exist for exactly that.