Re: Meetings cut
OMFG so much this ^
At the same time the pandemic hit a lot of the infrastructure teams (including my lot of sys admins) were being told to start being "global". eg I no longer could I just concentrate on my little EMEA empire, but I now had to concern myself with how things get done the same way over AMRS/EMEA/APAC. The result being I now get dragged into more Zoom calls than I know what to do with. Most afternoons are taken up with calls once the US get in. In some cases I've been triple booked.
So more often than not, I'm not concentrating on the meeting at hand but am tapping away at several SSH sessions or poking around at web-based front ends. I have no idea how people think I get things done (or when). Must be those magic computer pixies that do it all...
Meanwhile my place has been sort-of OK at letting people get on with what they want to do (though they are trying to get a few more people to come at least once a week). I usually do 3 days in the office a week, which is enough to obtain a permanent desk. As during the pandemic management decided to move to a smaller office and with no consultation decided all of IT would be WFH ot hot desk. Of course all the business people were sorted out with offices and permanent desks and pretty much every question regarding how hot desking would work and various facilities was met with the answer "don't know". In short they didn't give a flying fuck about IT and we had to deal with the consequences. This in turn has led to problems as people who prefer to WFH do as much as possible not to come into the office.
No-one really likes hot desking and it's become a faff to try and get several desks together when teams come in. In some cases micromanaging/presenteism managers insist that their team have permanent desks (which then lessens the amount of desks availble for the hot desk pool), but their staff mostly decide to WFH. Meanwhile there are veiled threats from management around why there are so many empty desks, which then gets interpreted lower down as we must have at least one person from the team in the office each day. Though this may be a bit of front-running to head off some stupid ruling from people who either have their own offices or permanent desks
It's as if they can't make up their minds at what they want...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
