There are two kinds of meetings: decision meetings and update meetings. Update meetings are bullshit time sinks designed to validate the complete chain of command. Decision meetings are where something tangible is determined.
The former is the vast bulk of meetings. The latter is a rarity, and sometimes only possible after fully satiating the beast that is the former.
Sysadmins too
Me
I have gotten a couple meetings to be something we ‘skip by default’ where we keep it on the calendar but someone only starts the meeting if they actually need something.
Dramatically cut down on meetings without any problems so far. Now it’s just occasional and way shorter because we get straight to business and then drop the call.
I’m in an open plan office. On Mondays, one of our employees works from home. This means that every Monday, we all put our headsets on and have a Slack call for an hour, 9 of us in the same room, one person remote, just so the boss can natter on about whatever they’ve been up to this weekend and how they think everybody else has been doing their jobs.
Then, the head of the marketing team will join in with a very rambly, unfunny, and irrelevant diatribe, which gets the boss talking again. We all sit for an hour while they talk about shit that is nothing to do with any of us, listening to their voices out loud and then a half second later in the headphones.
After that, I say about two sentences. The other developer says two sentences. The rest of marketing get through their tasklists. It’s ridiculous.
We’ve been told that we absolutely have to pay attention, so rather than working on a Monday morning, I now have to pause at 10:00am and sit in silence for an hour plus, waiting until my motivation and flow is completely crushed. Thankfully it’s only once a week but it’s just so stupid.
One of the first things my new boss did was to cancel the daily standup meetings that were enforced by the previous management. God, what a great decision. I’m finally getting shit done instead of having to talk and endure bullshit every day.
I call it the numbing hour. It’s only scheduled as a half hour but it always runs for nearly an hour. I never speak for more than two minutes, I just stand there as my motivation to do literally anything for the rest of the day burns down to zero. Sometimes I wake up 110% motivated with a list of stuff I can’t wait to get done, fortunately the numbing hour is first thing everyday ensuring that I am always fully neutralized.
At least you have until the end of the day to (try to) regain some motivation. My daily is currently at the 10am. Smack dab in the middle of the morning.
Not when you’re working from home and being a dad at the same time. Got my kids nap times aligned with meetings. “Oh, sorry to cancel last minute”
Fuck me, I gotta align this shit all over again tomorrow.
But…it’s canceled, not rescheduled for a different time that day. You just have free time. I don’t understand how that affects other timing.
It doesn’t but trying to perfectly time your kids nap to the meeting time (she’s still young and needs at least 2) usually results in a really cracky kid at some point.
Sleep is important and I try not to fuck with it when I can. So doing that when someone just cancels 10 minutes prior is frustrating and usually means I woke her up early from a nap previously to get on a good time sync.
Rescheduling to a different time that day is less bad because I can more easily keep her up another 30-40 minutes depending on the time of the day.
Basically if it’s a completely different day it means she’s cranky back to back days.
Making programmers attend meetings should be considered a hate crime.
Which is worse: forcing a programmer to attend daily meetings, or forcing them to work in an “open plan” office? If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose to go work on a garbage truck.
Forcing programmers into an office at all should be enough to get a manager dragged before the ICJ on charges of crimes against humanity
but the collaboration!
yes luigi them
You, sir, understand me
Scrum is just something I have to endure in order to get paid to program. The worst is when you’re working on something hard and your status hasn’t changed substantially from the previous day. “I did a bunch of things that didn’t pan out, so I only really have an expanding list of things that are not the problem. No, assigning someone to help me is unlikely to resolve the issue faster.”
“no, having a meeting about it won’t help, it will just waste my time that I could be using to figure out the problem.”
At least you’re getting assigned a human. My boss’ new habit is to print out what chatGTP thinks about the problem I’m working on, if i take too long solving it…
My boss does this constantly and it has never once helped. Infuriating.
ouch, that is a hell that may one day await us all.
I wonder if the boss will be replaced by the machine entirely by then
Ohhh I got that too recently!
Yeah that sounds awful. Fortunately corporate policies prohibit putting our technical data into AIs.
Here here!
I love meetings about the general idea and concept of a project that takeip the “doing” timeof the single person that will do the work.
I just don’t go the meetings, if they actually need me my boss send me a DM asking me to enter, otherwise she just told me what I need to know. Only when she can’t participate on the meetings she ask me to enter and told her if they talked about something relevant for us.
Tag teaming that shit like wrestlers.
At some point in the future, someone will understand what I mean by “I haven’t had enough time between meeting to read the necessary materials” because I can’t learn shit from verbal discussion.
If that ever actually happens, i firmly believe I will get more time to actually do work too.
It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:
“Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”
“And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”
“It says ‘working on project’.”
And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.
No. If you need babysitting you have the wrong guy
Well, at least they can see the baby steps that way I guess.
But I’ve always wondered if I’m actually terrible at my job or if PMPs, Scrum Masters, Management, etc, can’t actually fathom that I have absolutely no way to roughly estimate how long something can possibly take that ive never done before, and I have no evidence someone else has done it before.
When I was younger I got so frustrated with it I asked if anyone else on the team wanted to do it instead, and there was a resounding no, but it’s feasible so you should keep at it. And eventually I get it working but the whole time it’s demoralizing with the amount of “why are you not done?”
And now I just give the exact details that goes straight over everyone’s heads anyway and ask if they need me to switch my priorities.
Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.
I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.
I like my team. I don’t mind meetings
Having worked in nonprogrammer roles… I think the only people that like meetings are upper management - across departments.
They don’t really even “like” them but they’re basically the only thing they do that makes it seem like they do any work.
It’s like grabbing a broom when your boss enters the restaurant. Better to pretend you’re doing something.
Though a lot of them do just like the sound of their own voice.
That’s okay, we can reschedule the 1 of the 60 TFCV meetings about theupcoming 5 TPS meetings, that so we can be prepared for the 2 SMR meetings in 3 and 4 months, which is needed for the the BRM meeting in 6 months. Then we’ll see if anything is decided at the BRM meeting. If not we’ll repeat the meeting schedule for the foreseeable future.
