Hacker News

No

This just reads like it was written by someone who is overly stressed about their own accountability and taking it out on the process.

So much of the wording makes most of the issues seem self-imposed.

I always feel pressure to prove I actually worked

Engineering work is not linear, and you can easily go several days without making any progress worth mentioning.

I'm tired of feeling ashamed every morning, because [non-devs] are going to think I just watch YouTube videos all day.

Even if co-workers and management are the most benevolent people in the world, just knowing that someone could ask for my status and worrying that I won't have a good answer is enough to do plenty of damage.

If the writer is within a toxic work environment, sure these are valid complaints, but that's not because of a daily meeting.

Scrum doesn't hurt people, I do.

The last paragraph is really what feels off the rails for me.

They don't do this because they misunderstand Scrum. They do it because the Scrum Guide calls for daily check-ins, and that alone telegraphs the message: developers need to be watched closely. Otherwise the manual would say,"Developers alone can choose when and how they coordinate their work — because they are adults."

The writer is clearly promoting an "us vs them" mentality, when the entire point is to work as a team. It's not about just checking in, it's about having a consistent formal time to be open to adapting as a group, especially in an agile environment. If you are trying to coordinate work between 3-10 people within an iteration, it's about getting the work within the iteration fulfilled, not just the individual pieces.

So, no, team alignment does not have to happen daily, but it tends to be more beneficial than not when unknowns inevitably come into play.