Interesting, and I think a lifelong consideration/debate. Having been a sysadmin / various kinds of techie for the majority of my career,nevertheless from most

Interesting, and I think a lifelong consideration/debate. Having been a sysadmin / various kinds of techie for the majority of my career,nevertheless from most of my initial visibility into business & management worlds; and now having been full-time manager for 18 months; my feeling is that absolutely you need to understand, support, and enable your engineers to work on and in the way that makes them productive and satisfied... but last thing you should possibly do is "leave them the fuck alone". Otherwise, very quickly, there would be no salary for anybody :| That being said, to the topic here, most "standups" I've been to have been a "spoke and hub" model where a PM elicits list of one-on-one status updates, and having done their part, people can doze off for rest of the meeting. In meetings I own, I try to change that to "Tell us of things that matter / are interesting to everybody here". It's not an easy criteria to fulfill though, for management or techies alike.