My mind still boggles how nobody else questioned such a misuse of resources.
The entire team including PMs, design, business dev, etc. would be present everyday for that absolutely excruciating 1 hour long meeting.
If your standup has a dozen people and takes 45 minutes, that implies that either everyone's taking about four minutes to say what they should be able to cover in 2 or 3 sentences. That or someone's missed the point and your standup has turned into the kind of meeting that standups are explicitly not supposed to be, only without the chairs.
A 45 minute meeting is by definition not a stand-up... physically it just makes no sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting
I'm not wild about people trying to be pedantic about rigidly adhering to some idealized Agile-with-a-capital-A. But it's not rules lawyering to say that someone's completely missed the boat. And it sounds like whoever implemented the process at your former employer completely missed the boat.
Same process run by different group will feel different.
Which means, given a 8 hours working day, that you've been needing the help of Dave since the previous day, for an average of 4 hours, and you didn't ask him yet?
It's very possible the guy thought he could figure it out, but discovered he was wrong and mentioned it in the stand-up because it was the first opportunity that day to bring it up (remember, in a lot of places stand-up happens fairly early in the morning in order to give coders the largest block of contiguous time for development).
Exactly. Which means that he's saying that at the standup not because of any special advantage given by it, but just because it's the very first appointment of the day. Had there been no standup, he would have asked for help anyway.
So either: 1) the standup covers up a fundamental malfunctioning of the team, namely that people can't communicate freely during the day, or 2) useful stuff that people say at the standup is stuff they would have said anyway at that time of the day.