To me the industry has become so extremely toxic to mental health since agile became a thing. Must "sprint" 100% of the time, keep that velocity up at the maximum sustainable in short periods but forever.
A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity.
And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a breather, ever.
This is not at all what it used to be like pre-agile. There was time to think deeply about solutions. It was ok to slack off a day (or three) and make it up later when you got into The Zone.
Indeed, daily standups are the worst for so many reasons. First of all, everyone's just focused on what they're about to say to justify their employment, and nobody's paying attention to what the others have to say, which was ostensibly the whole point. The only one paying attention is the manager/lead, whose real, not so secret job is to make sure nobody's slacking off.
The second is that productivity in a creative occupation just doesn't work that way. We're not factory workers assembling widgets on a conveyor belt. Einstein didn't give fucking daily updates on his theory of relativity. No, we're not Einstein, but daily updates ensure that we're not thinking meaningful deep thoughts, instead giving in to short-sighted thinking like a starving beggar looking for their next meal.
It all depends on the company. My company is seemingly doing Agile, but not finishing tasks within sprint is absolutely no big deal. Sprints come and go while we work on our tasks. The sprints seems more like a way to help PO manage and organize the work than anything that affects the engineers.
One of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Ron Jeffries, suggests developers abandon the word Agile [1]. Instead, we should recommend and practice "Manifesto Agile".
A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity.
And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a breather, ever.
This is not at all what it used to be like pre-agile. There was time to think deeply about solutions. It was ok to slack off a day (or three) and make it up later when you got into The Zone.