Re: Meeting Tax - Corporate Events
* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them
If you're invited to a jolly in Las Vegas, and your attendance is optional, it's still going to cost you
982 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
Worked on an NHS project where there were a *lot* of pointless meetings and people whose raison d'etre seemed to be attending meetings.
After one particularly pointless meeting, I looked at the number of people in the room and said:
"That meeting just cost us £1200. Just think how many cancer treatments that could fund."
Worked at a company where my manager was in back to back meetings 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I suggested the idea of a 'meetings tax':
* 10% of your salary is allocated as a 'meetings allowance'
* any meetings you attend are charged at £100/hr from your allowance
* first 15 mins of a meeting are free, after that it is chargeable
* you can leave a meeting at any time
* all meetings are optional
* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them
* at the end of the year, you get to keep anything in your 'meetings allowance' as a bonus
The idea is to incentivize:
* short, focused meetings
* emails not meetings
* only going to meetings if you can contribute or get value
* only call meetings if absolutely necessary
He thought I was joking. I wasn't.
Friend of a friend once got some 'warm' laptops and had a visit from the police. They questioned him in his flat for a while, which made him a bit nervous, so he asked to get a drink of water. He was taking a while, so the police went looking for him, only to discover him trying to hide his very large stash of marijuana!
He ended up doing time for the stolen laptops *and* the drugs!
Inherited a project which had been outsourced and then brought back in house. It was the *worst* code I have seen in 30 yrs of professional development. It had every anti-pattern imaginable and a few I'd never seen before.
Turns out the outsourcer's devs were expected to write 200 lines of code per day and were punished if they didn't meet this target. Their motivation was to write 200 lines of code; not to write nice, clean, intelligible code.
Our in house devs had the exact opposite motivation. They were paid regardless, so could concentrate on writing good code.
Working remotely for a 'big data' company where they provide me with a remote desktop to a VM running in their data centre. The supposed advantage is that it is colocated next to the data lake/swamp, so there is minimal latency in retrieving 'big data'. Only problem is my VM is dog sloooow and struggles to run the IDE, let alone get any data. Looked at the VM specs and it is literally half the machine from my previous company!
> imagine if you went up to the mona lisa and you were like "i'd like to own this" and someone nearby went "give me 65 million dollars and i'll burn down an unspecified amount of the amazon rainforest in order to give you this receipt of purchase" so you paid them and they went "here's your receipt, thank you for your purchase" and went to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum and posted a handmade label inside it behind the brooms that said "mona lisa currently owned by jacobgalapagos" so if anyone wants to know who owns it they'd have to find this specific closet in this specific hallway and look behind the correct brooms. and you went "can i take the mona lisa home now" and they went "oh god no are you stupid? you only bought the receipt that says you own it, you didn't actually buy the mona lisa itself, you can't take the real mona lisa you idiot. you CAN take this though." and gave you the replica print in a cardboard tube that's sold in the gift shop. also the person selling you the receipt of purchase has at no point in time ever owned the mona lisa.
> unfortunately, if this doesnt really make sense or seem like any logical person would be happy about this exchange, then you've understood it perfectly
https://imgur.com/NJirDQp
Went to a friend of my father's house many years ago. He had some jazz CD playing music from the 40's. It was a technically very poor CD as it had all cracks, pops and whistles of the original LP. However, if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine yourself back in the 40's, listening to it on the wireless.
That said, CDs are far superior.
Worked on a desktop app many years ago with a *lot* of fancy UI. We localised it into the usual languages (English, French, German & Italian) and some not so usual ones (Polish).
About every 18 months, sales would come in and say:
"If it only it supported Arabic, we could sell thousands of licenses and make the company loadsa dosh!"
Arabic is a RTL (right to left) language which *really* messes up the UI. Supporting this is non-trivial.
We would then spend a lot of effort, translating all the UI strings, testing, finding and fixing all the bugs.
Number of additional sales: zero
Worked at a company about 20 yrs ago which had single customer on their sole, remaining VMS product. The customer enacted the escrow provisions and took over maintenance from the last, disinterested developer with VMS experience. The system is probably still going and hasn't been rebooted!