BrutalTechTruth
Brutal Tech Truth is a multi-platform commentary series (podcast, Substack, and YouTube) delivering unfiltered analysis of enterprise IT, software architecture, and engineering leadership. The mission is simple: expose the hype, half-truths, and convenient lies in today’s tech industry and shine a light on the real issues and solutions. This brand isn’t here to cheerlead feel-good tech trends – it’s here to call out what’s actually failing in your infrastructure, why your cloud bill is insane, how AI is creating tomorrow’s technical debt if not guided, and which “boring” solutions actually work. In Frank’s own direct style: “If you're looking for feel-good tech talk or innovation celebration, skip this one”
Brutal Tech Truth tells the uncomfortable truths behind shiny vendor demos and conference-circuit clichés, bridging the gap between polished narratives and production reality.
BrutalTechTruth
The Daily Humiliation Ritual: Why Tech Stand-Ups Are Destroying Your Soul
The brutal truth about the tech industry's most wasteful ritual has finally been exposed. That daily stand-up meeting you're dreading tomorrow morning? It's not just annoying – it's actively harmful to your productivity, creativity, and psychological wellbeing.
What began as a quick developer check-in has mutated into an anxiety-inducing performance where team members recite rehearsed lines about productivity while nobody truly listens. "Yesterday I worked on the thing. Today I will continue working on the thing. No blockers." This monotonous script plays out across the industry, consuming approximately six weeks of your working year. That's right – a month and a half annually spent proving you're working rather than actually working.
The psychological damage runs deep. Developers start each day with pre-meeting anxiety, struggling to make routine tasks sound impressive. The blocker question creates an impossible trap: mention none and you're not communicating; share real ones and you appear incompetent; list too many and you're labeled negative. Meanwhile, managers claim they're "just listening," but they're taking mental notes about who sounds productive, who's struggling, and who might be expendable during the next layoff.
Remote work has only worsened the experience, adding camera anxiety, technical difficulties, and even less engagement as participants multitask behind muted microphones and turned-off cameras. An entire industry has formed around this dysfunction – stand-up apps, coaches, books, and certifications – creating an economy around a solution to a problem that the solution itself created.
The revolutionary alternative? Nothing. Literally nothing. Trust professionals to communicate when necessary, to seek help when blocked, and to manage their work effectively without daily surveillance. Companies that embrace this trust-based approach will gain a competitive advantage through increased productivity, improved morale, and authentic collaboration. As AI continues advancing, it will make stand-ups even more obsolete by tracking work through commits, tickets, and communication platforms without the performance theater.
Ready to reclaim those 250 hours per year? Start by questioning whether your team really needs a daily ritual to function. If it does, you don't have a communication problem – you have a trust problem. And no amount of standing up will fix that.
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Hello, I'm Frank and welcome back to the show. Today we are going to dissect the most universally hated, completely useless, psychologically damaging ritual in tech the daily stand-up, that 50-minute meeting that takes 45 minutes, where you perform productivity for an audience that isn't listening, where you lie about yesterday, lie about today and lie about blockers that everyone knows won't get resolved. It's not a meeting, it's a humiliation ritual, a compliance test, a daily reminder that you are not trusted in your job without surveillance. And everyone knows it's worthless the developers, the managers, even the scrum masters. But we keep doing it Every single day. The origin story nobody tells. The stand-ups are supposed to be developers, quickly thinking Developers, not managers, not product owners, not stakeholders, not anyone who wants to drop in. It was supposed to be 30 seconds per person. Here's what I'm doing. Here's what's blocking me Done Now. It's a performative autobiography where everyone pretends to care about what everyone else is doing while mentally writing their grocery list. Yesterday I worked on the thing. Today, I will continue working on the thing. No blockers. Multiply that by 15 people every day, four years, that's your career. People every day, for years, that's your career. Announcing that you are working on work to people who don't care about your work.
Speaker 1:The psychological warfare is what stand up actually does to your brain. You start your day with anxiety before, before coffee, before cold, before thought. You have to perform. You have to sound productive. You have to justify your existence. What did I do yesterday? Panic, you work, but can you make it sound impressive. Can you make debugging sound strategic? Can you make reading documentation sound innovative? What will I do today? Why, I have no idea. I'll do whatever fires arise, whatever luck demands, whatever meeting allows, but you need a plan that sounds planned Blockers the ultimate trap.
Speaker 1:Say you have none, you are not communicating. Say you have some, you are incompetent. Say the real ones, you are negative. So the status theater Stand negative. So the status theater Stand-up isn't about status updates, it's about status performance. Watch closely.
Speaker 1:Everyone has their stand-up character. The overachiever lists 47 things they did yesterday makes everyone else look lazy. The buzzword king Synergizing. The blockchain, ai integration Nobody knows what they do. The perpetual blocker Always blocked, never progresses, somehow still employed. The ghost Camera off, muted, probably not even there. The rambler Turns 30 seconds into a TED talk about their debugging journey and the honest one says I did nothing productive yesterday. Once, never promoted again. Everyone's acting, the body's synchronizing. It's a collaborative theater where everyone knows their role and the body admits it's fiction.
Speaker 1:The time mathematics of insanity. Let's do the math that will make you weep. 15 minutes stand up, 10 people, that's 2.5 person hours every day, but it's not 15 minutes, it's five minutes waiting for everyone to join. Five minutes of can you hear me? 20 minutes of actual stand-up, 10 minutes of quick follow-ups and 15 minutes of contacts. Reaching back to work, that's an hour per person per day, 250 working days per year, 250 hours, six work weeks A month and half of your year spent saying working on the thing, we'll continue working on the thing. No blockers. Multiply by team size, by company size. We are burning millions of hours on a ritual that could be a slack message. That could be nothing.
Speaker 1:The remote stand-up that spiraled. Covid made stand-ups even worse. Stand up, that spiral. Covid made stand-ups even worse. Now it's faces in boxes performing productivity to a webcam. The camera, anxiety. Do you look engaged? Am I nodding enough? Is my background professional? Then the audio disasters eco-feedback, construction noise, dogs, children. Sorry, I was on mute. The screen share struggles. Can you see my screen? You are sharing the wrong screen. I can see anything? Is it frozen for everyone? The attention void Everyone's on mute Camera, optional, clearly doing other work. You are talking to the void and the void doesn't care about your GER tickets, but we pretend it's keeping us connected, connected to what Mutual suffering? The stand-up industrial complex? No-transcript stand-up apps Geekbot, standuply, daily Go, charging thousands to automate a meeting that shouldn't exist. Stand-up coaches yes, that's real. People pay to teach you how to stand up properly, how to maximize stand-up value, how to facilitate effective stand-ups. Stand-up books mastering your daily stand-up stand-up partners, the art of standing up Hundreds of pages about a 15-minute meeting standing up Hundreds of pages about a 15 minutes meeting. Stand up certifications you can get certified in stand up facilitation, certified in standing up. We created an economy around the solution to a problem that the solution created.
Speaker 1:The blockers that never get unblocked. Any blockers. The most useless question in tech. Real blockers AWS permissions been waiting three weeks. Need design approval designer quit two months ago. Waiting on API documentation it doesn't exist. Legacy system is undocumented. It will remain so. Need decision from product. They are in strategy meetings all week. The response to all blockers. Let's take that offline Translation. Let's never address this. Nothing. Nothing gets unblocked in stand-up.
Speaker 1:Blockers are just performative admission that you are blocked. The ritual requires you to announce your suffering. Resolution is not included, of course. The manager who just listens I'm just here to listen say the manager who will absolutely use what they hear against you. They are taking notes, mental notes, who sound productive, who sound struggling, who sound checkered. Then come review time I notice in stand-ups you often seem broken. Come layoff time based on stand-up participation. Then come promotion time, your stand-up communication. They are not listening, they are surveillance, they are gathering evidence, they are building cases and everyone knows it. So everyone performs other.
Speaker 1:This stand up becomes even more fake and the cycles continues. The scrum master power trip. The scrum master running stand up like a teeny dictator of a meaningless kingdom. Let's keep it to 50 minutes, they say, while taking five minutes to say it. Remember no solutioning while preventing any actual problems from being solved. Last parking lot, that Creating a parking lot where good ideas go to die. They enforce the rule of a game the body wants to play. They optimize a process that shouldn't exist. They facilitate dysfunction with enterprise precision. They make 100k a year to say who's next and update a breakdown chart that nobody looks at.
Speaker 1:The alternative, nobody will try, want to know what actually works. Really Nothing, literally nothing. No, stand up, no, check in, no, sync, nothing. Trust people to communicate when they need to Trust them to ask for help, trust them to do their jobs. Revolutionary right Treating knowledge workers like adults who can manage their own communications. But that would require trust, and trust doesn't fit in a geo-dashboard, can't make a burned-down chart of trust, can't get certified in trust.
Speaker 1:The psychological damage report stand-up is causing actual psychological harm Increased anxiety, starting every day with performance pressure. Decreased autonomy. Can't even control your morning. Learned helplessness. Blockers never resolve. Why mention them? Social exhaustion, forced interaction before coffee, creativity dead. Can't think deeply. When you are performing shallow, it's operant conditioning. You are performing shallow, it's over-unconditioning. You are being trained to perform productivity instead of being productive, to appear synchronized instead of actually collaborating, to speak without saying anything.
Speaker 1:The stand-up Stockholm Syndrome the sickest part. People defend it. The stand up Stockholm syndrome the sickest part people defend it. It keeps us aligned aligned on what nobody is listening. It builds team cohesion through mutual suffering. It's a face blockers that never get us all. It builds team cohesion through mutual suffering. It's a face blockers that never get resolved. It's only 50 minutes. It's never only 50 minutes. No-transcript, it's never done right, because right doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:We have been doing stand-ups for so long we have forgot we can just not. We have internalized the ritual, we have accepted the performance, we have surrendered to the theater. The coming stand-up collapse is what's about to happen. Ai will make stand-ups obsolete, not improve them. Obsolete them. Ai can read your comments, your PRs, your tickets, your slack. It knows what are you doing better than you do. It doesn't need a performance. The companies that drop stand up first will get a competitive advantage an extra hour per day per developer, better morale, actual communication instead of ritualized lying. The Scrum Master will pivot into AI stand-up optimization specialists until everyone realizes that's also bullshit. That's also bullshit. Yes, that's it, the brutal truth.
Speaker 1:Stand-up is a ritual of humiliation disguised as collaboration. It's surveillance disguised as synchronization. It's waste disguised as work. Every day, millions of developers stand up to announce they are doing their job to people who aren't listening, to solve problems that won't be addressed, to perform productivity for an audience of people also performing productivity. It's not agile, it's not efficient, it's not helpful. It's just another way. The tech industry has turned simple human communication into a complex process that requires certification, facilitation and optimization. The brutal tech truth. If your team needs a daily ritual to know what everyone's doing, you don't have a communication problem. You have a trust problem and no amount of standing up will fix that. Tomorrow morning you'll stand up again and you'll say you are working on the thing, you continue working on the thing and you have no blockers, and part of your soul will die again. But hey, at least it's only supposed to be 15 minutes. Well, that's it for today. Have a good stand up and see you at the next episode. Frank signing off Bye-bye.