Why do actual work when you can talk about doing work instead?
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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To help justify the manager’s job.
Context: I get yelled at for... get this, bringing up work inside work meetings!:-P Btw if anyone wants to turn this reply into an impromptu ~~therapy~~ session offering me tips on how to survive meetings, I could use some!? :-D
Tune out the meetings if you're WFH. Otherwise, practice meditation and learn how to get an out of body experience if you have to be there physically?
With 2 screens, I just put the meeting on the secondary screen and programming.dev on the main one.
I think my main problem was caring about the work that I had done. If only I could convert myself into a robot that would do everything as asked perfectly, then ~~nothing would ever get done right~~ everything would be perfect!
If talking about work is undesirable at the meetings, maybe you can treat it as more of a social event? I don't know the atmosphere, but it sounds like it might be. You're getting paid for it anyways.
NO! We have to talk about "work". Except we cannot talk about "work". Therefore we must keep our focus on "work".
Yeah, one of these days I will figure it out... :-P
That's an interesting point you bring up there. Let me schedule a meeting for next Tuesday so we can discuss a plan going forward, followed by a weekly review of our progress in our strive to reduce meetings.
Most people in corporate have no fucking idea what they are doing and a good setup will have these meetings focus everyone on the same thing and making sure they are progressing. This setup may not be useful for coding untestable and undocumented code in your basement, but it's very useful in big companies. Unfortunately there are also many twats that abuse this in order to make themselves look useful so it's very easy to end up in a broken system if no one is keeping an eye out for this.
I've recently been in a scrum team that failed to follow most of this structure and it was a shambles.
I agree that this setup gives purpose to each meeting, and they are all things that are important.
If we could have basically only these meetings then that would be ideal, IMO.
That's pretty much the idea behind the scrum events, they should reduce the need for other meetings. As a note the weekly stand-up and 1:1 that show up in the picture are not scrum events.
Thing is, the scrum guide is pretty clear that if you don't follow the whole thing, you shouldn't call it scrum and you're on your own. It can still work, but only if the mindset is right and people involved know what they are trying to do with it. Which most times is not the case.
Yeah I'm not sure what the weekly stand up is trying to achieve, maybe I'm just lucky but I don't recall ever being in a team with these.
I do believe 1:1s are important, but that's outside of scrum and should be on a schedule that works for the participants (might be an hour weekly for some, half an hour monthly for others).
Moving jobs I went from 1 meeting a week to multiple a day and all It has done is made me think my new job has no idea what is important priorities shift almost daily due to other meetings that I'm not a part of and nothing gets done properly because we dont have time to refine.
The goal should be to have as few meetings as possible because it means they are unnecessary. If you have a plan for your backlog set, you don't need to meet up for an hour every week to sort it out
Big companies? Try any company.
90% of the time, the manager is just reproducing what they think they're supposed to be doing regardless of whether it helps anything.
See: the fact that 90% of the time these meetings will not have an agenda.
Managers like meetings because it gives them a sense of power and superiority. Employees like meetings because they don't have to work.
Tbh, I'd rather work and line the shareholders pockets a little bit more than be bored out of my mind in a pointless meeting.
You should be working somewhere where you're proud to be slacking off on the job.