My team does them twice a week and I still dread waking up for the call.

Maybe if I felt like my department head actually did anything to unblock people but sit there, blink a few times before saying “ok who’s next?” I wouldn’t dread them as much.

As practiced though, I really don’t know who benefits from our standups anymore.

> As practiced though, I really don’t know who benefits from our standups anymore.

It's not for you, this is why it sucks. Standup could be better but it's not designed with concern for all participants, or at least it takes effort and empathy to run one this way. If doing it well was easy developers would all be tripping over their dicks to give standup updates.

tl;dr: stick not as effective as carrot, but stick is cheaper / easier / simpler so stick is the only option

It's sometimes the only way you get to communicate with all of the team during the week. So it's more of a social ritual than anything else and those are important too.

One way to avoid burnout is to achieve progress in the form of milestones.

Another one is the pure joy from achieving a difficult goal, e.g. a difficult problem that has eluded you for some time.

Those two things are what I am for to avoid burnout. And if there is no longer joy from the second option, then it might be time to call it quits.