Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it Welcome to a fresh Monday, and therefore a new installment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of making workplace mistakes and scraping your way to safety afterwards. This week, we venture into the realm of office politics with a reader we'll Regomize as "Palmer." Palmer once worked under a …
> His big managerial innovation was to stage a weekly meeting during which all members of the IT team were required to share what they had done in the past week.
The term seems to be "Scrum," and where I've worked at the last 2 companies, it's been *every day*. Where a group of people get together and tell each other about all the unrelated things that they did *yesterday*. This 15-minute meeting often goes to 30 minutes, or longer, not least because the contractor(s) on the meeting like to talk in great detail of all of the things that they did, how well, the issues they ran into, and hey free money - just keep this meeting going.
Every line of the description applies. Every day. Because why not. Raise the point that this is dumb. Raise the point that we're doing unrelated things. Raise the point that this takes a lot of time each week. Raise the point..... and the daily meetings continue. People henceforce give their "LGTM" thumbs-up not-review on PR's and click Approved. The next day, another meeting.
This sounds more like the weekly stand up. Intended result friendly relaxed meeting, every stands up gives a quick run down of weeks plans, says if they need help etc on something, gives metrics if relevant. Everyone is informed of what people are doing and help out if needed or they think they may be of use. Efficiency increases.
Actual result. C Suite stand about like the inquisition picking shite apart so they look good and powerful. Everyone has to give metrics even if they're pointless. Whole morning is spent by teams prepping for them rather than working so they can avoid being the one picked on. Depression insue's and morning is lost.
It comes from those wank MBA programs and courses like scaling up. Where they chuck around words like lean management like it's a new revelation, and then just mentally tick the box (but don't actually work towards implementing it) saying we're doing that we're very very cool.
Often worshipped by the sort of execs that think Steve Jobs and Elon are cool innovative businessmen who can do no wrong.
There's nothing wrong with some appropriate metrics. But when everyone has to deliver one cos metrics it becomes a farce.
Some poor cable guy, well he cant say I completed the site because if he says that they'll sagely point out how PMO has already mentioned that and use them as an example of how they are delivering a useless metric like a silly person.
So whats he gonna say, "erm I did a cable run using 80m of cable".
I mean whats the use of that? "Oh wow, can you reduce that metric make it 70m"?
What they expecting? Your gonna knock a buildings wall down and shift it and the desks, data points and all 10m closer to a riser?
The problem is most managers are using a 19th century industrial revolution manufacturing paradigm to manage a 21st century research and development (AKA knowledge gaining AKA programming) project. The manufacturing part of programming is trivial, especially with modern DevOps. You commit the branch, it gets tested and built. Manufacturing. Done. The challenge is designing the solution and that can't be managed like a production line turfing out Model T Fords.
That's because most organisations/teams/departments/... claiming to be agile are not agile. They are doing the "easy" bits but not the hard parts of agile. Thus have all the disadvantages without any benefits (outside claiming "we're agile).
Daily scrums have their place. But requires: it is a cohesive team working closely together for one goal, and decent leadership to keep the scrum focused (any discussion needs to be done outside the meeting with just those who need to be include). 15 min should be more than enough as even with 2min per person (more than enough in most cases) as if you have more that 5–6 in the call then you are too big to be an agile team.
But then that requires all the team members know that a scrum is there purely to keep everyone in the team aware what else if happening.
I'm not a fan of Agile, but in this case, the point is that you split projects into smaller teams specifically so these things work better. The "scrum master" isn't supposed to be another person. If you need one at all, that would just be one of the members of the team, but you can do these meetings without anyone to facilitate it, so eliminate them from the set. Product owners at this level would also be people working on it in some way, and testing is supposed to be done by everyone. That means you can have five programmers and one person who mostly interacts with other teams. That is if you're trying to do the original idea of a standup, which got its name specifically to tell people to do it really quickly. Now that we have hour-long standups with shared screens, it's something completely different that achieves none of the goals of the original thing.
So only for small components then?
Which then means it breaks the users of the components, because nearly all changes will break the API basically by definition, and they aren't there.
The more I learn about "real" Agile, the more it becomes obvious that it never could have worked for anything larger than a University group project.
Which is of course why absolutely everyone does something different, in an attempt to come up with an "Agile" that kind of works.
I'm increasingly convinced that the true meaning of "Agile" is "managers want more meetings".
5 developers (or more likely 4 with a tester) can, over a few quarters cover a lot of functionality.
I've done, over less than 2 years, in a team that was usually that size[1] a complete custom e-commerce site plus complete backend (CRM, product management, order processing through to shipment, returns, inventory management, ...)
[1] There was a brief, few weeks, period of more people but that was largely due mitigating customer changing what they wanted while not changing the deadline.
I suppose that depends what you're building. There is a lot a team of six can manage. But if this was something massive like an operating system, nothing says your teams always have to be the same people. You could discuss a feature you want to add, design the APIs, then create a new team to write the thing. Once they're done, merge that back in and come up with a new feature for a different subset to write. If you're doing something that large, you will need to split it up, partially to reduce the number of meetings. If every person who wrote any part of Linux or Windows had to get into one meeting, it would be a massive meeting that wouldn't help most of them.
And as I said, there are several cases where the Agile approach is not very useful. Not really because of standups breaking down, but because of all the other suggestions/requirements they have which work only if your project has a few attributes that not all projects do. For example, Agile works great when you can deliver incomplete versions of software to users, but if you can't, it's probably not going to work and trying is going to be worse than recognizing the gap and using something that fits better.
> That's because most organisations/teams/departments/... claiming to be agile are not agile.
The "Agile Manifesto" is like the babble: something idealized, an ideal theology, that isn't possible for humans to implement in practice.
At best, it always falls to the No True Scottsman fallacy. If it's not working for you, you're simply doing it wrong. "Oh, and while we're here, _you're_ doing it wrong, too!"
In some cases the lack of agility is an unwillingness to do the feedback step and make changes to the way of working.
In others it is an assumption that "agile is cheaper" which has never been a claim of the agile movement (rather than those making training/consultancy money off "agile"). Agile is about getting the customer what they need now (not what they through they needed some years ago).
"But then that requires all the team members know that a scrum is there purely to keep everyone in the team aware what else if happening."
That begs the question as to whether everybody needs to know what everybody else is doing. Regular meetings need to be regular for a purpose or they are better off being scheduled as needed. An aerospace company did a regular Monday morning "all hands" meeting where we'd tell what we accomplished the week prior, what we intended to accomplish the current week and what inputs we needed from other people. That devolved into all hands for engineering and a separate private meeting for business. The problem was then that we engineers had no insight into what the business staff was screwing up and promising we could do. It was a small company with staff/investors across the US. The reason to segregate the meeting was due to length. It also required somebody to keep notes, write them up and send them out to everybody to not read. As long as management wasn't randomly moving the goalposts, we all knew what we needed to be working on. The engineering manager was supposed to track where things were and keep people on track (and insulate the working staff from the lay-abouts).
It's rare to see Scrums or Kaizens done correctly. I worked for a place that was full of Danaher rejects who wasted about 1/3rd of employees' time by misapplication of the Danaher Business System (DBS) rebadged as <company> Growth System. Kaizens were another waste of time misapplied from the Toyota System from which all this crap comes from. Worse for me, one of my siblings spent a large part of their career at Toyota, so I got to verify how corrupted the whole thing was from its alleged Toyota origins.
Bottom line is if you are doing a scrum, you need it run by someone with a strong hand who really limits people to maybe 2 minutes tops, shuts down all discussions that would go over the 2 minutes per person (none of which require everyone in attendance anyway), and figure out ahead of time which 15 people (tops) need to give 2-minute reports. And most importantly, isn't afraid to close a meeting early. Just because a half hour was scheduled, doesn't mean you have to take a half an hour.
"You forgot the *team" and "inclusive" part where all the non-programmers staff are also included in the stand up"
In a small company, it is important for the engineering team to know what the sales team and management have in mind. I've caught some really bad problems that way when the sale plod told a customer that they could tap into our rocket's power system to run their payload. Ah, NO! Are you mental? I've also had to point out that if they wanted to shift the goal posts (again), we'd be shelving the project we were currently working on and starting from zero on this new thing they wanted to investigate. It would be better to write up this new project and put it in the hopper as a secondary thing to work on when we had hold-ups on other things. My tertiary go-to was often organizing the engineering space since it hadn't been organized and was just "things in boxes" rather than labeled drawers full of correct parts.
I had a boss, back before 2000, who insisted on a morning meeting. This was when smoking on site was a thing... He had his log book and pen, a cup of coffee, and a cig. This meeting lasted as long as one cig and one cup of coffee. He asked the questions, we answered, he made assignments, I don't think any meeting went beyond 10 minutes, and we got on with the day. I really missed those meetings when we got a new boss.
If you have a poor manager that format of "one or two sentences about what you did over the past week" will favor the weakest team members. You know, the ones who always grab the easy tickets so they can "look good" in PHB metrics by closing a lot of tickets.
Those people are trivially replaceable of course, but the PHB is too clueless to understand why. The ones who aren't replaceable are the ones who grab the toughest tickets, or work on fixing an underlying issue that leads to multiple tickets a day (the kind the guy above grabs because it has a simple fix or it is essentially warnings that require no "fix" as such so he can "close" it in 30 seconds)
So in that weekly meeting the first guy will talk about how he closed 89 tickets in the past week, and the boss will say think to himself "if only everyone on my team was a go getter like him, if he keeps this up I'm going to allocate most of the team's yearly/bonus raise to him". Then the second guy will say he closed four tickets and fixed a problem that results in an average of 12 meaningless tickets a week. The boss will think to himself "if my manager tells me I need to layoff someone I'm definitely offering him up".
Been there, had a PHB exactly like that. He also didn't like me pointing out that the 66 tickets "favourite blue-eyed girl" had closed were all password resets, while my 3 were quite time consuming network and hardware issues. Luckily, he needed me more than I needed him - I was the only one on his team with Novell training, which accounted for a lot of the work.
Yes, I and another external worker were amused by a new Scrum Coach (old Project Manager) having a daily standup which every day grew in length and size of team until it was about 30 people in a small room taking an hour to an hour and a half to micro-manage issues. The only part of the original intention that remained was that no-one was allowed sit down.
Person #1: "I've been doing the same stuff"
Person #2: "So have I"
...
Person #25: "Me to"
My time taken - 4 hours travel each way + 1 day "working" in the office.
Still, I did get a day's pay to sort through my (personal) emails and listen to music whist on the train.
I have been fortunate enough to only have been subject to this sort of nonsense in one of the companies I have worked at. By pure coincidence I had 'critical daily tasks' which were scheduled in exactly the same timeslot and as the only person who could perform those tasks I had to decline the meetings. There were questions asked but I could point at a variety of suitably vague agreements and responsibilities for my role and a couple of the departments who relied on the systems I looked after backed me up (they agreed these scrums were a parasite).
Sadly the people that like holding this style of meeting are the ones who then spend the rest of the day putting the 'results' of the meeting into Crayola charts ready for the next day's meeting.
"We now have a CEO who thinks meetings are a waste of time.
If I wasn't such a coward I'd tell you where I work, and that we're hiring programmers..."
Too old, I was never a code monkey but the NASDAQ stock symbol might be useful.
On second thoughts I am assuming that by this CEO's aversion to meetings he/she is an enlightened, rational executive but I also can imagine a raving insane autocrat might have a similar aversion and unfortunately those creatures don't appear to be in short supply.
Yes, history has shown me that there is no good idea that can't be overdone by someone who doesn't understand what the point is. I'm imagining an environment where you don't know what anyone is doing because meetings about it are considered harmful. Probably that's not what they meant.
I have never been in a meeting that wouldn't have been far more productive if people had just responded to an email.
If you want to send around an automated email every week asking for updates, and everyone fills in their bit, it would work just as well.
I once had a 2 hour meeting on whether a colour of green was the right shade for a website. Even at consultancy rates I realised I wasn't being paid enough to tolerate that kind of nonsense.
A meeting should be either 2 minutes of everyone getting together to "bash heads together" (i.e. make sure that everyone know what the priority is so that you don't get infighting because they've all been told by the boss in the meeting what needs to happen and they can't deny they didn't hear it), or it should be something else entirely (with recorded responses).
The whole agenda/minutes thing is SO ARCHAIC that I find it hilarious. Especially when I can just pull an email and say "As per my email..." for anything that arises (and have done on many occasions). Email too long to read because I've covered every base? Then reply to it and ask for the short version, CC:ing in all the same people. What do you have to hide?
I do not understand the purpose of meetings unless it's literally to make people feel powerful because they can "summon" everyone any time they like and control the meeting, which is precisely what you DON'T want for anything vaguely important.
In charge of a group of SW Engineers, I used to sit in on the HW Engineers meetings. I usually didn't say much and sat planning tasks for my team, but occasionally they would come up with some wizz/bang new idea or device to use, and they had to be made aware of how much that decision would cost in SW development.
It saved us quite a few 'impossible' requests.
As a programmer who also had the knack for being able to "talk to normal people" (we all know that the very best programmers are kept locked away from the actual clients) I found a useful niche as a sort of translation layer between the techies and the sales bods.
It got to the point where I was sent out with the Sales Director on sales visits to prospective clients so that I could head off any attempt to offer functionality that I knew we couldn't actually deliver. And on occasion got to be the hero for saying "yes we can do that" to a function request that the client thought was tremendously difficult but I knew would be easy to implement.
"I once had a 2 hour meeting on whether a colour of green was the right shade for a website" - luxury!
I was working on a database that dealt with the protein, carbohydrates etc. info on food labelling and had to suffer an all day meeting in a windowless basement near the House of Commons that had people arguing for three hours on the question of whether "Blackcurrants" should be listed as such or "Currants, Black". It's clearly the former (not that I'm any expert on the subject) but the others felt that it was a matter of vital importance. They were still arguing when I left after having invented an urgent train that I had to catch.
In the end they went with "Blackcurrants".
I had a similar experience, but with the design of a a new invoice. I printed a sample invoice , with every message that could possibly be printed on it so that the prioritisation could be checked, and they could see how each message appeared Spent the rest of the day being told why a residential customer could not possibly get message 123 because that was for university customers only, and message 124 was only for bulk users and ...
I'm not sure that they are completely pointless, but the value is very nuanced.
Sometimes, in a group that covered more than my immediate peers, it was useful to hear, for example, what the network people were going to be doing, and also to have a chance to ask questions about how it is likely to affect my systems. Similarly, I can expand on my work to give warnings to other people about how it may affect them. Got to avoid detailed discussions in the meeting, but can be a useful springboard to post meeting discussions.
Of course, this would be better serviced by having a functional change review systems, (or possibly diligent project managers!), but you can't have everything.
Where I am now, networks (who used to be on the same stand-up) now have their own one every day, so I don't get to hear about their work, and the first I get to know is if someone says to me "why can't I log onto your systems at the moment", or the monitoring board goes a bright shade of red.
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At one time in my career (now retired) I was working with two (very large and successful) companies who had opposing views on project meetings:
#1: Every major decision on a project needs to be confirmed by a team meeting i.e. the meeting meant anyone making a bad decision could slope shoulders and share the blame with others.
#2: Meeting are to exchange information so nobody has the excuse they didn't know something critical was happening, and they are NOT to make decisions - THAT is the responsibility of the individual (manager or engineer) accountable for it.
In the first, meetings needed time to prepare and could go well past their allotted time; in the second, they actually helped!
Contractors working for them also encountered a difference that needed to be recognised:
#1: Every technical point was reviewed by the client and had to meet their internal standards and specifications and resulted in quite a protracted engineering review process.
#2: The contractor (after an appropriate verification exercise) was deemed competent and the client let them get on with the work.
Ironically, whist they complained about the review nit-picking from the first, many contractor senior management teams preferred working for them as it meant their lawyers had ammunition in any subsequent claims for cost and/or time overruns and delivery problems - they could almost always put blame onto client #1 (whereas, with client #2, they were expected to deliver what they quoted).
The same (Shaving Cream)* happens in Teaching. It is the Inspiration behind this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Notv13QqA
My dad worked at the same institution, little had changed except for the introduction of emails.
[*] Another song he performs...
> If you want to send around an automated email every week asking for updates, and everyone fills in their bit, it would work just as well.
Back before the turn of the Century, working for a startup with only a doxen people, the office manager caught me using a Eddie's tiny wiki server* to keep my notes. She grabbed her own copy from Eddie's site and ran it on her Windows PC. From then on, every week, we'd all have a blank page created for us which we then filled in with an update (the usual "what I did" and "what I'm doing next" - and this was all before "Agile" was the thing) and we could then read each others. A small update - I had my knuckles gently wrapped because I was going into too much detail! So I put the detail into the wiki on my PC and a URL into the weekly.
This worked because this is a really simple wiki (too simple for today's work environment, in terms of security and robustness - which could be fixed...). Unfortunately, trying something similar a couple of decades later and - well, Confluence just isn't as encouraging for everyone to use for a simple, brief bit of text with a little bit of very simple markup** added.*** And unlike email, you could just go direct to this wiki server and get to all the updates and just the updates, no long chains as people hit "Reply all" to comment on somebody else's update. Run another wiki instance for specific topics and for discussions and keep the pages short, cross-referencing using wikilinks...
Today, I use (almost) as simple a wiki to keep all my daily notes: totally rewritten by now, of course (using a state machine lexer/parser, all that), but still no wysiwyg.
* my build of the 32-bit exe for his v0.95 was under 62 kiB
** simpler than Markdown
*** to anyone who comes back with "but Confluence (or other wiki) let's you do this and that, with so many features, a wysiwyg editor": that is all the opposite of simple!
My entire documentation is a MediaWiki and I paste in meeting notes and work lists into it on a regular basis. It's a great reference and nothing quite matches the linkability and simplicity of a basic Wiki for things like that.
Helps that it runs on anything (this one started on my PC, then moved to my work PC, then moved to the servers, then moved to the cluster as it grew in use/importance) and that you can break things out, like you say. One page to say how we're connected to the Internet and a bunch of hyperlinks to all the devices and gorey details for each setup, including how it was built and what's changed historically and - most important of all in all documentation - RATIONALE. I don't care what you did... I can mostly discover that quite easily. But I want to know why you did it that way because it's often VERY important to understand that, especially when it comes times to upgrade or replace it. Why is that switch far more powerful than the others, why aren't we using it for Layer-3, and so on.
It's a team effort and the guys simultaneously hate it when I say "That probably belongs on the wiki, then" and love it when I say "I put that entire process on the wiki as we were doing it so you can just refer to that".
It also means that my documentation can be booted up in an emergency - including one without Internet, for example! - so you can refer to the docs while nothing else is up. Just any machine and move the VM onto it and off you go. I started the thing with XAMPP for example and moved it to Ubuntu and then to a self-contained Ubuntu VM with only basic networking.
But it's great for "when did we change that", "what did we have before", "can you remember why we did that" and other questions, especially as staff come and go.
A long time ago, in a company that I will not name, but that continues to exist in a tiny fraction of what it used to be due to mismanagement and blinkered predictions of how technology would go (they failed to understand smart phones would render their business model obsolete)... I had one of those line managers.
A reverse misandrist... a man who disliked other men, a bigoted little fool who expected everyone to kiss his arse and would try and punish anyone who didn't. A man who tried to pit every one under him against each other (with some success for the weaker minded drones) to avoid the gaze of incompetence falling on him.
A man who was so petty, he tried to sabotage my application for another position on another team by lying to the dept head... who informed me what he'd said. A man who had complaints upheld against him by an incompetent HR who covered it up.
The previous autumn, I had a fling with another woman from another dept. It lasted a couple of months and I was told by her that she'd been involved with a married guy who wouldn't leave his wife and she'd broken it off. I never knew who... but I'm sure you can guess.
The following spring, after yet more attempts by this man to get me in trouble... I'd had enough and during a meeting with his line manager, I threw my resignation across the table at him... This petty little man, continued to try and stir shit up against me and they agreed to put me on garden leave... I'd given 2 months notice, so they had to pay me for that... I went around saying goodbye to people and letting them know what a POS he was.
As I was in the lobby saying goodbye to a few others... he approached me, held out his hand with a smug grin on his face and said 'good luck, and no hard feelings'.
I pulled him a little closer, looked him in the eye and replied 'Sure, and I'm sorry I fucked your mistress'
He went purple and tried to take a swing at me... in front of witnesses, catching me on the shoulder. I turned to the receptionist and asked if she'd be kind enough to call the police, and went up to HR to report the assault.
He was eventually fired, they tried to coerce me into dropping the complaint and not reporting it to the police... To which my reply was short... 'But I don't work here anymore' The police did nothing, but my job was done. I walked back into an old temp job I had before this one, and within 6 weeks of leaving (and before my paid leave ran out) I had a new job with a 50% pay increase.
Years ago, as part of my apprenticeship, I was working in a dept where stories of a legend were told in hushed tones at any excuse for a drink-up..
One story was that the hated head of dept had invited himself to his leaving do, and had stepped forward to give a speech and to shake his hand... only for the guy to lean in, grab his tie and blow his nose on it, saying "you've never liked me"
My management has pretty much always been like this too. Not coincidentally, I've also been with this employer for over 20 years. It's almost as if treating your employees well gets you some loyalty or something....
In our team (now 8 including our manager) we have a 15-minute daily standup which is just for everyone to give a very quick update on what they're doing today, flag any problems or if they need help on anything, and for the team collectively to make sure any urgent tasks are assigned to someone. It works pretty well for us.
In a long distant past, at a workplace that felt like being in the Dilbert universe, we had monthly, obscenely boring team meetings, scheduled from 8 to 12. Like in Palmer's, we had the guys who loved to hear themselves talk and rare relevance for anyone else was purely accidental. Often, those meetings would extend to 1 o'clock and even beyond. And just like Palmer, I felt they were a huge waste of time. Unlike Palmer I didn't suggest improvements but instead decided to make better use of my time: sitting there, snoozing.
Very disappointingly, I was never called out on my nap.
As an EM, I apologise for lengthy standups - its very easy to let them run away and they go on and on. You have to train people that I don't want to know all the horrible details of what you did yesterday, I'm sure you worked hard. I just want to know three things - Are you blocked?, Do you know how long is left now you've worked on it a bit?, and Any concerns around the scope of the ticket?
We do 30 minutes standup each day, 15 for standup, 15 for any extra discussions, and we always finish early. If its not an in-office day, you can give your update on Slack..
The trick is redirecting people to discuss their lengthy things 1:1 after the standup.
When newly promoted I was invited/expected to attend the company monthly management meetings. Quite a large concern, highly departmentalised..... Lots of managers and each meeting took up the best part of a day.
The same managers attended but few did any preparation between meetings; each had a dog-eared, 'dedicated' folder which they carried in order to look important.
Business was tough (no surprise there!), and inevitably cost-savings were raised. "Overheads must be reduced" meaning: "Redundancies". A significant number of staff were to go. Of course, blind to the real problem, not a single participant at those meetings was personally affected.
Eventually, it was decided that a major product was to be run down and sold off. Which was when we started our own business with a clean sheet and no baggage. It won't surprise you that 30 years on, our company continues, the old company and it's thousands of workers has been scattered (frittered) to the winds. Those managers were the last to go.
We're a small team spread across three locations on two continents so we do have a weekly team meeting, usually lasting no more than 30 minutes, just to touch base. It's an opportunity to make sure everyone is aware of the bigger picture and anything that's going on which they need to know about but we definitely do not have endless descriptions of things we've already dealt with - I've been in those meetings before!
" just to touch base. It's an opportunity to make sure everyone is aware of the bigger picture "
What base? The one at the bottom of the lamp?
What picture? The one in reception or the motivational one in the office?
Admit it, your the manager.
Please do keep going I need just three more for a line in Bullshit Bingo.
Ah Agile working, we have that, 15m daily chats in morning, on what your doing and how well, end of sprint reviews and then a 2 days of planning out the next months work. The planning works, it's great to see everything planned out and approved, other teams scheduled in to work when they are needed and no short notice emails for help, as we say no, unless a major incident, well in my team and we hit our targets, even though we are the smallest team in the business, starved of resources, others same old adhoc chaos and last-minute cries for help haven't learnt.
We have something similar here. Daily stand-ups, once-per-sprint backlog refinements, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospectives, and every three months a two-day high-level planning. All involving the whole team, and some requiring a bit of initial prep.
This does work...sort of. We get to plan and have a clear idea of what we're going to do, are doing, have done, but f*** me, the overhead cost for doing it is astronomical.
In a business where every minute of my time needs to be accounted for, it's a difficult ratio of time spent actually working on stuff versus doing ceremonies.
I sometimes think that our biggest achievement isn't what we've actually done, but that we're able to achieve much at all amongst all of the Agile overheads.
Sounds like manager I used to have. He worked in pre-sales support so you thought he would understand technically.
He would ask for a technical description of the problems I was working on "because I did work in tech sales support you know". I usually refused - until he insisted - and I explained. We got lost after the second sentence. He never asked for an explanation again.
My next boss was brilliant... she said "give me the 30 second impact of the problem" me : "It is a rare problem - it could cause a major outage".
She got a reputation of being a good manager, because she let us techie get on with the job, and kept her manager informed with all the one liners.
The best manager I ever worked with was female too. Nobody else on the management team liked her, due to her abrasive manner and her complete inability to suffer fools gladly. Being a colonial-era engineering firm in the South East of England, you can imagine the people who inhabited "Mahogony Row" upstairs.
She introduced a weekly (sit down) meeting that lasted no more than a few minutes. People grumbled at first, but having hardware, software and production engineers talking to each other regularly really helped get things done.
Of course she got fed up and left for pastures new, but for a few short years we had the happiest and most productive design team.
If a meeting was called for late morning, I used to take my lunchtime banana in and place it on the table in front of me.
If (when) the meeting ran over into lunchtime, I'd start eating it conspicuously with a "sorry, my stomach's expecting lunch and my brain can't cope without food"
In the lengthy meetings I described above, at one point I started to have appointments for lunch, mostly fictitious. At 12 I'd get up and announce: "sorry guys, I have an appointment for lunch. Bye." No one ever complained about that either. And it inspired a couple of colleagues to do the same - occasionally we then had that lunch appointment, non-fictitious, with each other.
Bananas are more of a stealth fruit in my opinion, you can pull small chunks off with your fingers which can be scoffed quietly and quickly without making much noise.
Apples are the best balance of practical and conspicuous, crunch, crunch. You could show up to a meeting and start chopping up a pineapple or a watermelon but it’s a lot of effort in comparison to just pulling out an apple and biting it. I’m tempted by the pineapple though.
I think this is from The Dilbert Principle.
I worked in a group of softies all working on different projects for different internal and external customers, either individually or pairs. We had a weekly team "progress meeting" in which few could actually discuss any detail, there was no comparison with any planned programme of activities, and no reference to the previous week's minutes. Basically, two hours listening to other people talking of things that were of no relevance to anyone else whatsoever. Occasionally the manager had some announcement that affected us all, usually a new HR initiative that was designed to distract us even further from doing our jobs.
The whole thing could have been done by email in a fraction of the time.
... a new HR initiative that was designed to distract us even further from doing our jobs
My last job was coming to that point (actually, it was there). I sometimes wonder if there is an "HR Today!" or "Modern HR" magazine, where all these HR departments get these brilliant ideas for raising the profile of HR within the company.
Mine started going on about how your advancement in the company was up to you, and you needed to provide (every f*ing 6 months!) all this evidence of what you had done over the past 6 months along with feedback from 3-5 people you'd worked with during that time, and, of course, self-evaluation. Oh, and "personal goals" -- 3-5 of those as well, long and short term. So you could be tracked against them, I assume. None of which were supposed to be associated with your actual work, just stuff that would make you a better employee and move you up on the ladder towards management. None of which helped you to get your actual work done. And it wasn't supposed to cut into your productivity (i.e.: all that paper pushing was to be done on your own time). And, of course, it was doubtful you'd see a significant raise unless you were to be promoted...which required a whole 'nother set of paperwork...all through the HR system of course.
Retired now, and damn glad of it!
I worked in two research groups (medical engineering and magnet technology) in which the week started with a meeting in which everyone, from the Big Boss to the humblest student (that was me, in one case) said a few words about what they would be doing that week. It was really good idea, because it gave everybody a clear picture of how the work of the group was progressing. That said, nobody talked or was expected to talk for more than thirty seconds or so, and it was not a time for discussion. However, it did tend to generate lots of useful one-to-one discussion later.
Also, there were biscuits.
Several comments have talked about this in terms of standup meetings, but most seem to miss the essential point of standups. No chairs (or chairs that nobody is allowed to sit in). Meetings where everyone stands throughout rarely overrun. One comment mentioed people standing up to speak, but that's not a standup meeting. The ideal standup would be barefoot on a shingle beach, but that's hard to organise on a daily basis.
The worst are Zoom meetings, because it's hard to make people stand up at home. They're probably in bed, or not wearing trousers.
I have at least one of these thoughts far too often:
This in-person meeting should have been a teams call.
This teams call should have been a phone call.
This phone call should have been an email.
This email should have been a message.
This message was useless.
It's interesting to count how many of these can get hit by the same event.
Every month the board would hold a meeting.
The day after they would call in the department heads to brief them on what happened.
The department heads would then spend the next week meeting with their team leads to brief them on what had happened.
The team leads would spend the next week passing on "really useful information" to their various teams - you know, useful stuff like "this person you don't know, working for a division you didn't know about in an organisation you didn't know was part of BigCo has been promoted to a position you didn't even know (or care) existed".
In all, the sort of stuff that could have been notified in a monthly email that everyone could redirect to "junk".
Luckily, I was a contractor and didn't have to get involved.
We used this format in not-automotive manufacturing.This practice even had a name: "Team Briefing".
Grade A1 useless. Important/interesting news spread (much) faster by the jungle-drums; Doom-news was never reported but we knew, often before some of the bosses themselves.
As a consultant, I was pulled into daily/weekly meetings to review progress. It always went off topic and never lasted less than 2 hours. Well, I was on a day rate, so the contract got extended more than once - not my fault, as I explained to the customer - you asked for the meetings.
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When I started at a university lab as the graphics and imaging manager, I had a couple of programmers and a couple of student interns under my management.
The group had established a short weekly meeting some time on Friday afternoon with no fixed agenda and very little heirarchy, just to keep one another informed of what was going on and to exchange thoughts.
Sometimes we'd get together in my office, sometimes around a lab table, and sometimes we'd all wander off to the university coffee shop if the weather was nice.
All very convivial and collegial. Really more of a gathering of work-friends than a meeting.
About six months in, the lab director asked if he could sit in. That seemed okay at first but the meeting soon became more formal and, as lab directors are wont to do, the director did most of the talking.
Gradually, more members of the staff were included from other technical aspects of the lab and there were suddenly about 30 people and the whole thing became entirely unwieldy, with reserved rooms, long agendas, formalish reports, etc. . . . and, of course, the lab director holding forth at great length.
I wish that there was a proper denouement to the story but I just got tired of it all and retired from the university as soon as my pension program allowed.
Your lab wasn't researching Administratium by any chance?!?
--------------> I'll just grab my white coat!
Where I used to work, my manager must have been Palmer's manager's father as he too insisted a weekly meetings that would run up to three hours. He also insisted each department head, of which I was one, hold weekly meetings as well. The other departments were "unitary" whereas mine was a consolidation of four disparate units that had nothing to do with each other. Needless to say having a departmental meeting was a waste of everyone's time. If I needed to know what was happening in a section I just went over and asked. The only time we had departmental meetings was when something affecting the whole office needed to be shared. My manager was not at all pleased, even though my department consistantly met or exceeded all parameters and would even help the others.
I work for a MSP with multiple big name clients, for the most part we are largely self managed (I'm the only person on the client site).
Someone in management decided to knock badly up a Microsoft tool for a productivity tracker, to track what we spend our time doing & mandatory to fill in, presumably as a way of gaining C Suites notice & praise.
It was required not to be "accurately" filled in as it was a indicator only, the first thing we noticed was it went down into minutes, it then got tweaked to 15 minute increments
It was supposed to be "fun" to do (it's not) & only take 5 minutes (It doesn't), its so badly constructed, the drop down menu options are never in the same logical alphabetical order & change the order again after vanishing if you go to a different drop down. I fill it with roughly the same old crap every day.
We get daily reminders from our manager to fill it in, even appointments to complete it 3 hours before knock off time, ditto with our time sheets. Should anyone not be compliant we get nasty gram public shaming emails with screenshots of whose not in compliance. We even have to fill it before going on holiday or on return from sick leave as apparently our manager can't echo up his management chain why someone is not genuinely compliant, because that would require actually managing.
We had a timesheet thing like that at a place I worked - excessively granular.
So we requested a new timesheet code - to record time spent filling in the timesheet.
.. after a while they binned the excessive granularity approach as the timesheets made it clear how much time (thus money / productivity) was being wasted.
Had a co-worker who would rarely join weekly team meetings, but any time he did he would immediately jump in with "I hate to derail this meeting but..." followed by a question to the team that would of course derail the meeting.
I finally got fed up as I was leading the meetings (and he was technically above me in the company), so I responded with "You know- that's a good and pretty involved question that is worthy of its own meeting. I'm going to proceed with the published agenda, but feel free to schedule a separate meeting with the relevant members of this team to cover your topic."
After a couple of times of that, he stopped interrupting the meetings but he never scheduled those other meetings either.
As some may have guessed, partly because of the burning hatred of the beancounter (currently off sick), but mostly because what is discussed there is a complete waste of my time.
I have far more important things to do* than listen to the latest financial projections (we're broke) , and what is planned to do about it (make some money ** )
But just sometimes, just once in a while, the meeting is worthwhile..... such as...
I worked at another company doing aerospace stuff and the big bossman comes down to do a 'morale boosting meeting' with the aerospace people, and he comes out with all the buzzwords*** and power point slides. then an ex-colleague**** asks "All this BS is all well and good, but how do you propose making all these new bits on machinery that struggles to make what we do now?"
So nice to see a site manager flounder like that especially in front of the senior manglement/board members
*making a voodoo doll of the beancounter out of bluetac for a start
**or send the PFY's hubby round to get the customers to pay their bills... he's 6' 6" tall and just as big across the shoulders...
*** someone yelled bingo 6&1/2 mins in...
**** whos still in the business and in contact , but in Bournemouth of all places..
A long time ago, I was in a largish group of programmers, IT staff, and misc. staff which had been picked to participate in a mandatory daily meeting. It ran about an hour, sometimes longer. After a few weeks of this, one intern's phone began emitting a loud "BEEP" every so often. A few days later, the president was attending so the manager could show off. The intern's phone was beeping much more frequently, and the manager finally called on him. "Will you PLEASE turn off your phone!"
"Oh, sorry, that's an important meeting metric."
The manager inquired, "What metric‽”
"I calculated the total hourly rate of everyone in the room, and it beeps after every $1000. This meeting alone cost $5000 - so far! I could tell you the total from when the meeting first started, hang on..."
The meeting cancellation went out that afternoon. The intern also left, but he was graduating and already had a job lined up, so he didn't care.
A story was related to be about a law firm from a long time ago (early 60's). They were in a meeting of all the "partners" (read people who charge $$$ per hour) were discussing which secretary would get the brand new (remember it was the 60's) Selectric typewriter. The person who related this story was the one who piped in that at their bill rate this meeting would provide for typewriters for a good chunk of the office staff (they were called secretaries then). The decision came quickly after that revelation!
Nothing has changed in 60+ years!
Fortunately most o& the meetings I have to attend are project based - there are some department all hands but they tend to be for specific announcements.
The best ones, are a quick run through, everyone happy then get some time back and get on with the work. It may help that we have so much work at the moment we can’t risk delaying things by having long meetings.
If we hit a problem, or need a discussion then call a meeting, if there is nothing of substance then cancel it….
Mind you one project they can’t make up their mind on what needs to be done and those meetings I do my best to avoid…
I have started to think that this disconnect: "meetings are key" vs "meetings are a waste" is really down to different job functions.
For managers (especially) and others: the work is meetings. That is where decisions are considered and mode; where progress on follow up is considered.
But for many others, including most individual contributors you real work is done working on your own (with as little distraction as possible. Meetings need to be as limited as possible (some choices need to be discussed/agreed, work in a team needs some coordination) for productivity.
The problem is too many managers not realising not everyone's (likely not a even a majority) of work is done in meetings.
I too have been asked to 'chat' about my anonymous feedback by managment.
Unlike some of the other people asked to similar conversations I am in a position to stand my ground and not worry too much about any fallout so can speak truth to power a little more freely (but I'll stay anon rather than push my luck too far).
I don't think a lot of manglement are familiar with the realities of the workplace outside the exec suite
Was an engineer in a previous life and was in the weekly meeting. There were about a dozen or so people in the meeting, so we were burning about $1500 AUD per hour. Someone raised an item about stainless steel bolts. This soon degenerated into an extended, 15 min discussion about grade of stainless steel (304 vs 316 vs 316L), size (M8 vs M10) and head (hex vs allen). From the time they were spending on it, I though we were talking about serious quantities of bolts ie 100k+. Turns out it was just 10 bolts, total value < $10 AUD. We'd just burnt $1000 AUD on something which could have been paid from petty cash.
I work for an operator which over the year has become controlled by Finance. The business is now so siloed and decisions are made on cost savings. e.g. one department can make a senior manager redundant even if it affects business in another area. Costs saved - well done.
My senior manager has cut my budget by over half in the last 2 years and consequently the revenues for my product have dropped from €215m p.a to €110m p.a. but she gets praised for saving money because the revenues are accounted for in a different part of the business. The sales team gets cut from 5 to 1 single person, again the senior manager gets praised for saving money.
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