Is anyone getting any actual value out of them? As much as I dig agile some of the rituals plain just don’t work.

Fight me!

aren't standups more about everybody acknowledge each other as a team and not so much what is beeing said? As a preventative measure to prevent silo thinking.

99 percent pointless ritual. The other 1 percent is used to justify the other 99.

It depends on what is done how.

We have over 40 projects with about 12 people, plus possible support cases and internal projects adding on top.

So there is a stand-up meeting thrice a week where we go through the list and talk about current todos and status updates. Many projects are on hold while waiting for customer feedback, so it isn’t as much as it sounds.

The stand-up is at 12 o'clock, and meant to be done in under 20 minutes.

The value is, that everybody has a brief but constant overview about what's going on where, and which matters are currently pressing.

Nothing ritualistic about that here...

I find standups very useful for the time they take. 15 minutes to get an idea of everyone's status; picking up any issues that people didn't think were issues before they become issues.

The whole idea of agile is to spot issues early and adopt whatever method works for you. Loosely speaking, even not doing agile because you determined it doesn't benefit you is being agile.

Well stand up is a ritual of scrum, agile is not a methodology but a manifesto.
When there is true team work, synchronization and visibility in a team, standups take minimal time and any major issues are identified quite early in the day so extra effort can be put when and where is needed, avoiding later distractions.
I will assume that you feel it as a waste of your time because most of the time you listen to things you do not care, or there are people arguing and this makes the stand up last for ever.

When we first adopted stand ups, it was a pain in the ass and just talking about day-to-day stuff.

But once you get into a rhythm and use it to communicate about project work, blockers, and where you currently are in the work, not just “I’m doing x still”

the entire team has visibility over issues instead of just 1 or 2 people it becomes very informative of where people are and who needs help earlier.

@cheke I understand what they are supposed to achieve, and absolutely support the notion of being the team together to inspect how we are progressing towards the sprint goals.

Trouble is, in my experience it doesn’t happen like this. A lot of devs don’t acknowledge this group responsibility and care little about anything other than their own little silo of work. They see standup as micromanagement (which it isn’t), even when done right (which I think ours are).

That’s fine if they weren’t expected to be self organising towards a common goal. But they are, and when they are steered into a group mindset during things like standup they don’t respond well.

I am starting to think that standup should be replaced with constant asynchronous communication.

Amongst 20 people in my standup, I only interested in 2, those who relevant to me.

The rest I have no idea what the fuck they talk about..

On the plus side, sitting too much is bad for back and legs, so standing up helps.

I should point out.

I attend these standups not as a dev, but as the scrum master.

If done correctly it's good. Get quick information what people are working on so you don't do the same work or do stuff that clashes. I.e. 80% of the times it takes less than 10min.
But done incorrectly... Yah, it can be bad.

Here's my manifesto. It's shorter than the agile one, and boils it down to it's truly valuable points:

1) Do your work

2) Ask questions when you need help

3) Provide feedback

4) Don't be a dick.

Our standups were a pain in the ass for like 1-2 months at first.

After having the feeling for quite some time that we are just wasting time and nobody listens(Scrum master has no IT experience) I just started to ask everyone after telling their status if they need help, what we can do etc. but always postponing long talks to after stand up.
Now our stand up is a lively, fast meeting with a very effective outcome every day, I love it.

We are 9 people now and normally need max 15 min and most of the time only 10.