Plumbers that you personally hire to your house are similar to software consultants. They're often more than "just" plumbers - they're small business owners, so

Plumbers that you personally hire to your house are similar to software consultants. They're often more than "just" plumbers - they're small business owners, so they do a lot of things besides plumbing (e.g. marketing, business management, etc). Again, similar to software contractors. But take plumbers working construction on a 30-story building. They're usually part of a team, and work together with dozens if not hundreds of other professionals. Do you think they don't have meetings where they get together with the other teams, discuss problems, progress etc? I'm not defending stand-ups here, btw. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. But if your measure of "developers are treated badly" is "developers are asked to be in a 10-minute meeting to talk about their work progress", I think you're missing the forest for the trees in terms of what are and aren't good working conditions.