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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.
So your PM is useless too? I feel like updates can be useful if others then go and help each other out with things.
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.
Sounds like it would drive some socialites insane.
I love it.
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.
Honestly, how many workers really want a meeting?
Managers do. Collecting status and showing who’s boss is their work.
Marketing types. “Designers” (I.e. people who drive product requirement.) People who just love to hear themselves talk. Also we have this one QA guy who can’t code for shit and always wants someone else to do his work for him. He wants to be on zoom calls 24/7. I’m surprised that guy can piss without someone showing him how to hold his dick on a zoom call.
When I worked in customer service in a callcenter we all tried to ask a bunch of questions to try to extend the meeting so we wouldn't have to go back on the phones. anything is better than being on the phones.
I worked in a call center for a month, failed miserably, and I completely understand what you're saying, 20 years later.
Depends on the meeting. I look forward to meetings where the process people will explain how stuff actually works so we know how to build the feature that will interface with their systems
I too heard about such meetings. I'm yet to participate in one though.
Useful meetings? Yes. Useless? No.
If your job is bad enough you look forward to useless meetings
Most meetings are useless, or they could just be an email.
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."
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
Yeah that sounds awful. Fortunately corporate policies prohibit putting our technical data into AIs.
"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."
Sysadmins too
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 tell 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.
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.
No. If you need babysitting you have the wrong guy
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.
Having worked in nonprogrammer roles... I think the only people that like meetings are upper management - across departments.
I just don't understand why they apologize.
They could probably write "You're welcome." and get a bunch of thank yous back.
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.
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.
I like my team. I don't mind meetings