Nineteen standups a week and nobody remembers what we shipped

I was a team lead at a software house for six years, the kind of place that builds internal tools for banks and insurance companies nobody outside finance has ever heard of. Good money, decent people, free coffee that tasted like it was filtered through a gym sock.

The work itself was fine. What killed me was the meetings. We had a daily standup, a mid-week sync, a sprint planning, a sprint review, a retro, and somehow also a "pre-planning alignment" that existed only to prepare for planning. I did the math once during a particularly dull Tuesday: nineteen meetings a week that had my name on them as mandatory. Nineteen. I have a calculator app just for that number now, out of spite.

The slow part was that none of this happened overnight. Year one, meetings felt like the cost of doing business. Year three, I started noticing that our actual delivery speed hadn't changed even though the process had doubled in size. Year five, I caught myself in a retro listening to a junior dev list "communication improvements" as an action item for the fourth quarter running, and I realized we'd stopped shipping software and started shipping meetings about software.

I brought it up with my manager, carefully, the way you bring up something you know will be received badly. I said maybe we could cut the pre-planning alignment since planning already existed. He nodded, said it was a great point, said he'd raise it with leadership. Three weeks later we got an email announcing a new "sync-before-sync" for a different reason. I'm not making that up. I wish I were.

My wife started asking why I was on my laptop at nine p.m. answering messages about a Jira board nobody would look at until the next standup anyway. I didn't have a good answer. The honest one was that I'd built my whole identity around being reliable, being the guy who never dropped a ball, and somewhere in there I'd confused being busy with being useful.

The thing that finally tipped me over wasn't dramatic. There was no blowup, no villain. I was in my fourth meeting of a Wednesday, this one about the format of the next meeting, and I looked at the screen full of tired faces on mute and thought: I could be doing literally anything else with this hour of my life and it would matter more. Reading to my kid. Sleeping. Staring at a wall.

I gave two months notice, which felt almost rude given how replaceable I clearly was. My manager tried to counter-offer with a title bump and, I kid you not, "fewer meetings going forward," which is the corporate equivalent of a guy promising he'll change. I said no thanks.

I'm doing freelance backend work now, project-based, no standups unless I schedule them myself, and even then only when there's something to actually say. My income dipped for a few months and then came back. My evenings came back faster.

I don't think the company is evil or even badly run by the standards of the industry. I think it's just what happens when process becomes a religion and nobody's willing to be the heretic who says the schedule is the problem, not the developers. I wasn't willing to be that heretic either, in the end. I just left instead.