There are either too many people in the room, or people are talking too much, and probably about the wrong things.
And, if they are doing standups wrong, I question how much else they are cargo-culting.
There is no one true way to organize development of software and generally shoehorning dogma without proof of value is counterproductive.
Standup daily meeting must be short and focused. Moreover, standup meeting is for developers only. No project manager, no customer, no QA team. Just developers talking about their problems. Everything else deserves it own separate, hour long meeting once a week or two.
Agree completely. When incredibly common complaints about a methodology are raised and the response is "you're doing the method wrong" you start to err towards dogma and a "No true Scotsman" approach to management.
Sticking to any technique, including agile, no matter what and with no modification is a symptom of a problem. Projects are unique, there's no one size fits all way to manage them.
The first thing we do after stand ups is have a bunch of quick one-on-one or small group meetings.
Then we got a new scrum master whose desired format was to talk about each item on the Kanban board each day, even the ones that weren't being worked on.
It should take 10m at most. Any issues (blockers, dependencies, etc) should be taken to separate ad-hoc discussions to let the team get back to work.
The standup performs an important social function of making everyone involved in the work of the team. People have to face each other, feel accountable to, and feel supported by the group.
And of course there's no room for synching up: The morning standup is meant to facilitate those synch-up meetings, synch-ups that don't have to involve everyone.
This is a fantastic description. And it goes a long way towards explaining why standup (even if I'm not directly involved) leave me feeling so uncomfortable.