- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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The meek “please call me” was after the manager found out from upper management that they were far more replaceable then Caleb was.
Exactly. If Caleb had it in writing that he was going to be paid regardless then the dude had some serious leverage.
Nah, “call me” always means “let’s make this a real-time social hierarchy game, because I’m good at exploiting verbal cues and expectations to shove people toward my desired goal.”
And also a way to move something to where there’s no proof of what was said.
The #1 reason in my experience. The only bosses who have ever said this to me are ones who were manipulative creeps where i made sure to keep a record (outside the company tools) of everything they ever said. It was never said to me like this, it was just standard operating procedure for that type.
There’s also the “oh shit, I’ll get this fixed, but nothing I say can be in writing or I’m definitely getting fired” possibility.
Nah boss, I just apologized for my misunderstanding, I have no idea why $Insubordinate_Contractor is saying that I said he’d better come in or I’m going to blacklist him in the entire industry and ensure he never works again … I mean, why would I say that?! I don’t have that kind of power!
Yup those of us who are not good at bad faith conversations need to get good at recognizing when one is about to happen and insist on written.
“We need to take this conversation offline” is a near-universal precursor to ethical dispensation.
If you want an example, every online “debate” is a bad faith convo.
Oh so you’re calling me a liar??!
You sound defensive!
No, “call me” means “I’m going to say some things to you I don’t want to put in writing that could be used against me later.”
In my experience “please call me” is more often business speak for “you’ve really got a problem now” than a statement of weakness. Like they’ve got too much shit to say to you to fit in an email, and they maybe don’t want what they’re about to say to be written down
Yes. But then the “no” is a full sentence response. I love it.
No. It’s a way they try to cover their asses so it’s not in writing so it can’t come back to bite them when they inevitably do or say something illegal and he comes back with a lawsuit.
In my experience it means managers want to discuss something without a paper trail.
Or it’s the manager seething with rage, wanting to vent that rage, but not being able to do it adequately via text message.
I can.
I was stuck in a job I hated for over a decade, and not only that, I was the guy on the team doing the shit jobs no one else would do because many of the older, tenured people didn’t want to work weekend hours ever.
I remember the slight panic in my boss’s eyes when I put in my two weeks, but it wasn’t half as sweet as my former coworker’s panicking when they realized that they’d have to figure out how to do my job without my help. One even had the balls to say something to me about selfishness.
You see, they’d also declined my offer to train them on the functions I was involved in and the items I created.
Glorious.
The irony is that, for the job I have now (which I LOVE!) I spent the interview talking about the databases and resources I’d created in the former shit job, and that work got me hired. My new employers treat me like absolute gold.
Yeah culture is so important, you can work somewhere people are like whatever we used to do it by hand and nobody died, and then you move somewhere they realize the excel sheet you made saves them hours of time each day. It’s just sad so many people out there working at and owning businesses and they’re just not interested in pursuing best practices.
I love it when people expect loyalty’s benefits without paying loyalty’s price.
I always loved the “selfishness” take regarding jobs. It’s business not friendship.
You should be as loyal to your company as your company is to you.
A step further is anything an employer would do is fair game imo. Lie. Cheat. Deny that the sky is up. Their rules.
As loyal as they have been to you in the past, or as loyal as you expect they might be in the future? Because, that’s the problem, things can turn on a dime.
“I was just informed you weren’t on the morning stand up call this morning” implies that this person wasn’t there either.
It’s a middle manager whose presence isn’t needed in daily stand-ups, as evidenced by the attempted micromanaging. We don’t invite those fuckers to stand-ups because they just talk about useless metrics the whole time.
You could have just stopped at “who’s presence isn’t needed.”. If they’ve got time to worry about standup attendance, then it’s extremely likely that all the useful parts of their job will fit into a short python script, and the company can save some money.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Yes, in most variations golf Agile, middle management should -‘not be in standups. This is the opposite of micromanaging
being absent from the standup is not micromanagement. Getting annoyed while texting a single employee who didn’t hit metrics for one day very much is.
They also may have just not checked to see if everyone was on the call, especially if that meeting has a bunch of people on it.
Then there is too many people on that meeting and its a waste of time.
Yeah any stand-up call that has more than like 4 or 5 people on it is automatically gonna be unproductive.
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I don’t know, call me skeptical or whatever, but this feels like one of those “and everyone clapped” kind of stories
It does seem probably fake, but being able to set boundaries and say no is definitely a major saving grace of freelance work, even if you have strong reasons to be professional about it.
There’s “saying no” and then there’s “You guys really oughta read the contracts you have us sign sometime. Pretty wild stuff in there.”
The burning of bridges on a current contract makes it seem fake, but it could also just be that the guy is fed up and already has something else lined up.
It’s better to stay polite and not be a snarky asshole, but if someone fundamentally misunderstands the nature of their professional relationship with you, they need to be corrected. Yeah you might lose business by answering disrespect with disrespect, but if someone is really pushy with trying to manipulate you into doing free work you didn’t agree to, it’s likely you won’t part on great terms anyway. Being honest and straightforward is more important, and good clients won’t take it personally being told in clear terms how it is.
It does, and it’s old, but it’s still a good story.
Ah, the Reddit experience. “Somebody did something cool, nobody ever does anything cool, time to put on my cynical curmudgeon cap and call it fake!”
Dude… you’re so butthurt about people assuming this is fake that you’re insulting them by calling them names.
I wonder what one would call the kind of person does that….
Hmmmmm…
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Willy Wonka didn’t market itself as a documentary.
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In my experience, daily standup meetings are largely pointless. It is yet another meeting that should have been an email or slack thread.
It makes sense if you’re in an industry with hotspot flare-ups. I work MSP IT and those morning meeting are the way my team asks for help on pressing issues, or rings the alarm bells on business impacting outages. Additionally, Tier I helpdesk and Tier III projects never communicate, so the SUM is where T1 hears about where projects are at (in case they get the breakfix for that item) and T3 knows how swamped T1 is and what mobile techs are out, and T2 gets a chance to tell us if the flow from T1 and T3 into the “escalation sandwich” is too much. And we genuinely have it down pat to 5-10min.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had shitty SUM requirements, but when they’re done right, it’s better than a state of the union email/Teams message.
Still could just be a slack thread or a dashboard. Putting people in a room every day is simply wasteful, even if it “works okay”. When I managed a team I hated them, but we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week, so I guess you have to be tactical about when you pull everyone off task to huddle.
It really depends on the group, the workload, and the structure. I’ve got two fairly ADHD employees that love rabbit holes and one that’s great at focusing, but regularly needs some guidance. A daily morning touchpoint meeting like a standup does wonders for getting us all on the same page, making a few quick decisions, and unblocking them all. It’s honestly the best 15-20 min we could spend for productivity and engagement and our most productive meeting of the day.
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days because it’s a waste of time to walk 5 min to a room and back when we can use that time solving problems.
If we had less ticket churn, or less interruptions from on call/support work, we could probably do it just MWF, but that’s just not in the cards.
Yeah similarly I have no idea what the fuck my boss is doing. Just no communication. That’d be fine if we weren’t the entire engineering department and I routinely have to deal with stuff he did without mentioning to me
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days
So, it’s not actually a stand-up meeting.
We do in fact, stand up for it.
People working at home have to stand up? So, their cameras are pointed at their bellies?
Stand up desks are a thing!
we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week
In my experience that highlights a difference in each of your “scales”; how long you can concentrate and focus; how often your interruptions are and how aligned your whole team is.
It sounds like you get less interruptions, more focus on items and your team is more aligned. Which means a lower cadence meeting works well, because you can spend more focus time.
For @[email protected] I suspect they are the opposite. More disruptions and less focus means you need a higher cadence and more chances to keep teammates up to date on who is doing what.
Personally, using teams/slack/whatever to keep up to date on this doesn’t work. As you can read on message, think someone is on one thing and miss the next message where they’ve changed tack. The DSU gives everyone a “reset” point. If you can get away with that weekly, absolutely great.
Where I currently work, SRE (but I’m much more tooling and product focussed and less on-call). My on-call teammates need a daily, I can comfortably join them 2 or 3 times a week on their DSU and not miss things.
See, the previous MSP workplace I was at did one a week. If something was pressing the tech would inform the service manager, who would tap the correct resources to assist. The stand up was mostly just reviewing all service ticket requests and making sure nothing was falling through the cracks, so that if someone had a list of lower priority work but got slammed with something intense that took them away from their usual follow ups, those less important jobs could be reassigned to someone with the bandwidth to take them on. Also to ensure that any new tickets are being picked up in a timely fashion (not generally a problem, just doing a health check on it). Took ~1hr across all tickets and techs to review. Almost never longer, but frequently shorter.
It was a small team and we would continually keep in contact throughout the day by phone and slack. Nobody needed baby sitting, we were all professionals and adults.
I only left that position because the owner was cheap and continually denied raises. I didn’t see a raise in ~4 years and decided to find something that paid better. I couldn’t keep paying my bills with all the COVID inflation; I’d still be there if I was paid better.
It makes sense if you’re in an industry with hotspot flare-ups
Only if handled properly, which a lot of supposed “stand-ups” aren’t.
I don’t see how you can have a meeting with members of 3 different tiers of support where progress on multiple projects is summarized in a way that someone not on the projects can get anything meaningful out of it, in addition to tier 1 gets to talk about how swamped they are, and tier 2 gets to talk about the flow from tier 1 into some delicious sandwich, and have that only take 5 minutes. I’m guessing that’s a minimum of 15 people in the meeting, if you have multiple tiers and everyone’s present. To get things done in 5 minutes means that on average everyone only gets to talk for 24 seconds. If you have people who aren’t talking, that suggests they don’t need to be in the meeting.
In addition, the whole concept of “standing up” for a meeting is stupid. Sure, it means meetings don’t last as long, but that’s because it’s uncomfortable. Plus there are social dynamics issues you introduce between tall people (often men) and short people (often women).
There may be some scenarios where they are helpful, but I think it’s possible to do it asynchronous in those situations.
If there’s a critical issue that needs to be dealt with ASAP, there should be an escalation process.
You can have reoccurring (or ad hoc) meetings to discuss projects across teams. If the standup is a slack thread, any interested party could view it (based on channel permissions).
It shouldn’t be on the individual members to bring up poor processes or that they’re overworked in stand-ups. That should flow through their managers
Not trying to be difficult with my responses, just adding my insight from years in tech across a few different positions and companies. I am happy to hear that your team has a process that works!
I disagree, we’re all remote so most of the time we have no idea what’s going on with other people. Dailies are basically “Ok where are we? What are we doing?” and we’re done in 10-15 minutes. Daily really is one of the most useful meetings for me. We experimented with thread approach but it was horible, no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly
I think the length is what’s important. For a long time, my team’s stand ups were going 30-45 minutes and most of it felt pointless (or were discussions that should’ve been on smaller meetings). When I got control over them, I made sure they’re 20 minutes max and I’ll cut people off if they’re talking too long about something only a few people need to input on. Now no one has an issue with the stand up and it’s helped us catch stuff that might’ve been missed otherwise.
My experience is similar; the projects with daily stand-ups are well coordinated and people remain informed while projects without become chaotic and the people become clueless rapidly.
That was our meeting before covid, but suddenly it became a 2-3 hours meeting every Monday morning. It’s a nice way to drain your whole energy to start the week
no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly
This sounds like an issue with your team and not the process of having a thread approach. If people just ignored the daily standup meeting, like they did the thread, they would also become de-synchronized quickly.
Yeah, had a similar experience in a place I worked where people wrote in slack the things for the day. It was too much and too noise too and people would not read or care. It’s too annoying and people felt disconnected anyway.
The important thing is really to have a strong arm and focus on the time. I think all the problems I ever had and they were solved in dailes was exactly because someone was enforcing time and not allowing others to say too much or derail the daily in useless details of their tasks or problems.
I’d probably ask people to literally stand (and not walk) while they’re talking. You obviously don’t have to do so, but it’ll give you a better guideline for how long you should be talking.
Unfortunately there are many juniors that you give the job of doing A to C, and if you come back a week later they’ll report they’re still stuck at job A, point 1 and didn’t want to message anyone, and is something a senior can fix in 5 minutes. Even worse you message them and they just report everything is ok, they’re working on it. Of course they never update the status of the project so you never know if they’re stuck or just not updating.
That makes daily meetings necessary so they don’t lose the entire week and delay the project. Unfortunately more senior members also get dragged in those meetings. It’s a frustrating part of working with mixed teams and a “just let me code” mentality.
When I was a manager of a small team it was all junior guys. I had to hammer into their heads to message if they had trouble making progress.
A few times I got the feeling one of the guys was having issues (based on messages). So I called them up on Friday afternoon and they admitted they were way behind because they couldn’t get past an issue. But they said “don’t worry, I’ll work through the weekend to get it done”.
I told him “no, you’re not working on the weekend. We’ll connect on Monday morning and work through the problem together. Just let me know sooner next time so we can get you back on track quicker.”
After a couple of those they got the message that it’s ok to ask for help and isn’t a sign of weakness and they’re not gonna get fired for asking.
As a junior engineer, wish management at my last job told me that. Since our team shrunk and lost basically all of our seniors, I felt like I was walking on thin ice with all the expectations I needed to meet. And when they have to train you + give half of the department processes to you and another junior, it can be paralyzing. Didn’t help that management was never around for me to ask for help too because they were too busy picking up other issues from people leaving the company in other departments. Ugh. Me being fired was always over my head
Yeah. I’ve gotten into the habit of checking up on junior engineers around the time they should be asking me questions. If they haven’t asked me anything, I know they are lost.
While I agree that a daily standup would help with this, I feel like there’s other avenues to approach this problem. If their task is to do A -> C, give them some deadlines and if they don’t meet them then become more involved. Have them check in with a senior on the problem. No need to drag the entire team into a standup because the juniors can’t figure it out. You can also try to build a culture of asking for help, which is difficult to do. People either think they can figure it out eventually, or they’re just slacking.
There’s also the very usual problem of the scope of the tasks not being well defined and many times too big, so juniors get overwhelmed and it’s difficult for them to focus on small things to actually progress or identify that they are blocked.
I remember well that when I was junior and not having yet a proper notion of when to call it “I’m blocked” since many times it seems one is blocked but is not, like spending 1 or 2 days reading and understanding the code and how all things work are very legitimate things, which are needed to even know what to ask about. But other times I was actually blocked but could not understand that I was because it felt I was just trying to understand the code and was actually going in circles not knowing when to stop.
It’s all a balance, but the one important thing to do is communicate about it, not just a “I’m doing it”. Usually pairing with someone and take some time to explain the “thought process” and the “current understanding” helps a lot. But, a junior kinda stuck will many times not ask for that time. What I usually do is just after a daily be the one to approach the junior and ask him to pair for a while to help him, without him even asking. Many times this solves the problem.
Generally true. We have a daily 30m “standup” but mostly it’s just us shooting the shot because we’re all remote, and it’s a way to socialize a bit. It’s pretty much optional but most of us usually show up just to chat a bit.
We do our real meeting on Monday mornings
I just want to point out that this may be true for IT or other remote positions (I don’t know, I’ve never worked in IT.) But in some other industries a quick 5-10 minute morning meeting can be essential. Especially in industries/jobs were everyone doesn’t have computer access. I know Lemmys all tech bros but I did want to point out that this approach works well in other work environments.
Yeah when I’ve managed more junior teams I didn’t have an official morning meeting but I would make a point to do 3 rounds a day. One in the morning, one before lunch, and one before leaving. People could obviously ask questions any time but you’d be shocked at the number of ‘well while you’re here’ questions you get that they never would have walked over with. Once they gained more experience half the time they wouldn’t even take headphones out, just give a thumbs up. Cost me maybe an hour or two a day but def made the team more efficient
So glad I don’t work in IT, all I hear about are endless ‘standup’ ‘agile’ ‘blah blah blah’ meetings.
I work remote and message my manager if I need anything. We talk over Teams almost every day, why would we need a meeting. I work with providing support to a client for their Customs import activity. Just leave me alone and let me do my work!
I think that there’s too many tech jobs which are middle management whose job is to make it look like they’re doing something while contributing nothing.
Just leave me alone and let me do my work!
Agreed! If you need me you know how to reach me.
I mostly agree, but only because what people usually call “dailies” are actually morning meetings around half and hour. I also had those sometimes, it’s horrible.
But on the other side, when you have truly meaningful dailies that do what they are supposed and make the right people talk to each other and are short (5 to 10 minutes), those really are good. I’ve had those and I like them a lot.
There’s many mistakes people make, like letting a single person describe in detail the shit they were doing ( nobody cares about that, it’s not a status meeting with your manager), others like focusing on telling things to the manager there which is totally wrong since most times he shouldn’t be there or if there should be totally invisible.
The whole point is to make the people on the team talk with each other, either saying they need help on something or they found something that needs further discussion or deciding that another stakeholder on another team or manager needs to get involved to help unlock something. Most times not even everyone needs to speak, if everyone knows what was happening either because they were pairing or working on something already known, it just needs to be skipped ahead.
Anyway, truly most people are right in hating dailies because almost no one gets them done close to right.
I find them valuable to get a quick overview of what other people in the team are doing and maybe struggling since I could help and is a good way to start the day by knowing which priority I need to focus first (usually help in a review because some other colleague really needs to unlock their work). When working remotely one could spend the whole day sometimes focused on their own work and getting a quick overview with the team is good.
Now, don’t have dailies with managers or people not related to the team unless they were called specifically to help on some issue. And anyway that should just be a quick thing, like saying "hey I’ll need to talk with you maybe after the daily because X"and that’s it.
The whole point is to make the people on the team talk with each other "hey I’ll need to talk with you maybe after the daily because X"and that’s it.
Can’t this be accomplished by people using your company’s messaging system (hopefully not teams). You shouldn’t have to have meetings to force collaboration.
I am all for being up to date with what your team is doing, but there is no way that every member of the team gives a meaningful update in every standup.
It really depends on what is the size of the team, which according to many should not be more than 6 or 7 people. And one core point is not everyone should be forced to say “something”, one should speak if they have anything relevant to add.
I’ve had many meetings where it’s just opening the board, asking everyone if everything looks good or anything blocked, everyone says it seems good and the meeting is ended in 2 minutes.
At my work they are necessary. I’m… I guess middle management, you’d say (supervisor in a shop). Our work changes from day to day, nobody doing the same thing from one day to the next, so there’s an upper and middle management brief where they outline all the work for the day, assign tasks to specific shops, give general information to be passed along (upcoming events and reminders), then I take that to my shop to assign individual tasks from our shop’s workload.
So I attend two of those daily meetings a day (about 5-10 min each) but they are definitely necessary for us.
there’s an upper and middle management brief where they outline all the work for the day, assign tasks to specific shops, give general information to be passed along (upcoming events and reminders), then I take that to my shop to assign individual tasks from our shop’s workload.
If this is the entire meeting, can’t they just tell you this in an email, phone call, text message, etc and have you delegate it out to your shop?
I know most of my responses in this thread come across as I’m very anti-meetings, but I feel like if you’re going to have a meeting, it needs to be beneficial to everyone. People have to take time out of their day, the meetings never start or end on time, and they generally could have just been an email. If you’re just passing along information to specific teams, I don’t think a meeting is necessary. There’s better and more efficient ways to do things.
Theoretically a group phone call would work, but that would be even more challenging than the meeting. In my shop, I need to know what the other shops are doing to provide personnel if needed, a lot of work is shared between shops, and often plans for the day are not developed until that brief. It’s not just my shop directly being assigned work, it’s a collaborative meeting.
And the meeting that I lead can’t be emails, because we have 2 shared computers for anywhere from 2 to 8 people who will be in the shop any given day (and it takes 5-10 minutes to log onto one of our computers. At least.). And in general we don’t want them hanging out on computers, we want them tasked and heading out to work as soon as possible.
All in all, it’s 15-20 minutes and gives everyone direction for the day. I haven’t come across anyone that has found them to not be worthwhile in my workplace.
This entire process seems like something that should just be automated and would save everyone time in the morning.
I assure you, it is not.
You don’t think they have systems to allocate resources across multiple locations?
https://giphy.com/gifs/snl-saturday-night-live-season-47-onyngiYITZiecYsBTj
Look, man, I’m trying to be as polite as possible, but I’m telling you that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re so invested in pidgeon-holing your solution into a problem that doesn’t exist because you lack the awareness of a workplace outside of your experience, and refuse to accept such a place could exist.
I absolutely hate wasting time and I am always looking for ways to increase efficiency. I make lists of required tools and consumables for each maintenance card to minimize walking to and from toolboxes and supply. I am constantly seeking out time wasters to remove them, to allow the guys who work for me to focus on their job and get what they need accomplished. I have also worked in my field, in this organization, from the lowest-level worker and every step up to where I am now, for 12 years.
So when I tell you, who don’t even know what field I’m in, that you are offering solutions in search of a problem, and that they wouldn’t work in my workplace, maybe you should show a tiny bit of humility and think I might know better than you how my own workplace works.
I’m not the person you were replying too but I believe that I work in a similar industry to them. Can I just say that you sound like an asshole with this response?
I work in manufacturing and automation does not yet exist for every job on our floor. Every day is different and people actually need to work as a team in our industry. You may be incapable of team work but some industries/jobs still require it. You may not work in a fast paced environment were requirements (sometimes even regarding people’s safety) can change in minutes but some people still do. You may be able to work remotely in your bubble using hands off email leadership that ignores the human element behind the screen but some people are still required to go to work in person and work with other humans face to face.
Telling someone they should layoff everyone by just adding automation is insulting. Telling someone they should be delivering instructions for complex systems, in an industry you clearly know nothing about, over text is asinine. The guy you were talking too is trying to do the best he can to make the people who work for him successful in a low tech enviornment with massive coordination requirements and you think he can be replaced with an automated text message? Fuck you.
I’m not saying lay off the person and replace them with automation. I’m saying if the entire purpose of a meeting is for humans to come together and make decisions about how to delegate resources, well that’s a perfect job for a computer to do. It can do it more efficiently and better than any group of humans. If you give a computer a set of requirements to delegate the resources, you don’t have to worry about human error there as well.
Nice assumptions about my ability to work as a team though, just because I think we should eliminate pointless meetings 😂. If the person gets back 15-20 minutes every morning, it would allow them to better manage their team instead of sitting in a meeting 😁
It’s 2023 you should be using tech to make your lives easier and work more efficiently. Use tech to feed up your time so you can use your big brain and work on more important problems than mundane tasks.
Manager: “Torrential rain at our customers location means we’re going to have to move priorities, I just got the email 5 minutes ago.”
Sup 1: Our new pioritizes mean we’re running the lathe. We cant pivot to project Y because the metal for that was cut incorrectly and the new order is on backorder. We can use that metal to make order K but well have to manually cut it down."
Sup 2: “Tim called out this morning, I can rearrange my department to cover most positions but not that one, can I get John from you to run the lathe? Gary is the most qualified but his sister filed for divorce from Doug on saturday. Doug has to interact with the lathe position all day and itll cause issues.”
Sup 1: “I can give you John if I can get Frank from department X to help cover down.”
Sup 3: " I can give Frank up but were having a baby shower for Rachel at 1400 and Ill need him back for that."
Sup 1: “Thats fine we have maint scheduled for today well just do that then.”
Manager: “Now that we’ve had our 5 -10 minute start up meeting no one do anything. Lets call the IT guy on the other side of the country who hates meetings and get him to program the details of todays resource allocation into joemos skynet. He says its way more efficient than us talking for 5 fucking minutes at the start of the day. It definitely has a section for you’re most experience lathe operators sister is divorcing the forklift driver in another department. Joemo skynet can then text its plan into the ether cause 10% of the floor doesnt even have a working phone number and 99% dont have computer access. Joemo definitely understands the manufacturing industry.”
If you know of a good way to automate leading humans out of manufacturing then youll make millions and CEOs will love you. Because if theres one thing computer systems are definitely great at its dealing with completely unique and non black and white information especially without a human having to manually input it.
There’s a point. Usually it’s to stroke the ego of the managers and reinforce that they can make you do anything, regardless of how useless that activity is.
They can also spend the time interrogating everyone at the same time about how their output isn’t good enough and that they should try harder despite having most of their working time being sucked up with unproductive meetings and fucking TPS reports, and filling out time and completion information on their tracking system, all while you’re getting random ad-hoc untracked walk-up requests from anyone passing by.
I swear, I spend more time reporting and accounting for the fact that yes, I’m working, like I’m paid to do, and I’m expected to do, than I actually spend on doing the work I’ve been hired for. Now we have mandatory meetings about whether I’m doing work and why I’m so far behind and/or so slow at getting things done… maybe I’d be able to get my work finished faster if I didn’t have to stop every 10 minutes to report that, yes, I’m actually still working on the tasks I’m assigned, and dealing with Mark for the sixth time today because he walks by my desk and always has some inane complaint/request/question that he just needs to relay to me every time he goes to the bathroom. I’m not your therapist Mark, if you need me to do something, submit it through the tracking system so I don’t keep looking like a lazy-assed failure! But no, mark is the step nephew of some c-level and if I actually complain or deny him, he’s going to run off to my superior and then I’m going to have more meetings and shit on my plate. I just want to do my job. Leave me the fuck alone.
If your boss is checking in on you that much, that isn’t a good sign.
At minimum, I would let your boss know before you do anything for the nephew because it is their job to say your priorities. Hell, you can even blame your boss for doing this. “I’m sorry, but my boss won’t let me do that” is a great excuse which puts the responsibility on someone else.
Meeting per videochat with the whole team 1 or 2 times a week is enough.
Kind agree. Daily standup is often only valuable if the team doesn’t do a lot of communication in other ways. In my team, there’s jira comments, pr comments, slack, project meetings. So our standup is just rote “I’m working on X” over and over.
Yup, this. My last job was nothing but meetings where everyone in the room knew what you were doing but everyone still went around the room to verbally reiterate what they were doing… that day! My brain was melting, it felt like grade 3!
You need as many meetings as you need as many meetings. If you need one, set one up. Don’t set them up just to fill them.
The worst part is they ate into all the work time. So leads were like why isn’t this done, well because you had me in a 3h meeting at end of day, that’s why. But that was apparently your problem, not theirs.
Bruv, we have a Team meeting once a week on mondays and it’s basically useless. Once a month would be fine.
There was a part 2 to this. They told him he wasn’t actually fired and to finish the job. He obviously declined
https://twitter.com/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208
Here’s part 2 for those who don’t want to click links.
Appreciate it! I literally clicked on the link and got confused by all the spam comments promoting dick pills.
Only people really left on Twitter are old conservative men so it tracks that the spambots would tailor their messages to that target audience
Same reason you see a bunch of commercials for Cialis and piss beer during a NASCAR race
Legend. Thank you!
Nice, Nitter link in case someone prefers: https://nitter.net/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208#m
Fucking awesome lol. Sorry pal, you can’t just “forget I said that” and walk away 🖕
Bosses are too used to having 100% of power in the boss/employee relationship.
Sounds like it was some power tripping middle manager on a tirade. Oh did the door slam on your hand, be careful! 🖕
“Please call me.”
“No.”
“Please call me”
Translation: I want to tear you a new one through a non-written medium so it doesn’t get recorded.
“No”
Translation: You have no power here.
I have an app that records all my calls. All of them. It’s uploaded to the cloud daily.
I did it because I know I’m not the only one listening to them. Or at the bare minimum parsing them. If csis or the NSA isn’t running all our calls through some kind of aj I’d be shocked. “Oh w|re not recording your calls don’t worry” they’d say slyly as every fucking utterance is tokenized and stored forever in some kind of creepy fuck you mainframe somewhere.
When I started looking through what Google collects on me I realized that this is just what they’re letting me see and there’s all kinds stuff I don’t get to see. And they "keep it for 3 months’ or some timeframe like that (riiiight).
If the time ever came where I needed any of that data (I’m extricating myself from Google slowly but surely but in the meantime) - they’ve proven they’re not trustworthy enough for me to be able to rely on them to get it.
Also I can do fuck you.
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I worked with a woman when I worked for the federal government who was quite unpleasant. She left and went to work for a major contractor. I was on a call with her when several of her people didn’t show up for the call. She was raging and asked me where they were. I told her that I had no idea where her people were. She finally had had enough and demanded that I go find them and get them on the call. I said, “I’m not going to find YOUR people on your call with me, THE CLIENT. I don’t work for you anymore, Diane.” and hung up on her
I really wish these were true.
Why do so many of you Redditors think everything is fake? Like, really, where’s the evidence or even “tall tale” tone that makes this sound fake to you? Just because it’s not common? Do you only accept things that are rarer if you see them in photos or something?
Redditor that believes evening they read complains about “redditors” calling everything fake.
You certainly couldn’t fake this level of irony.
I love this person so much. Good god I would pay hundreds of dollars for an intensely realistic VR game where I can just go absolutely apeshit on middle managers for hours every day.
We do what I call a shotgun standup twice a week. But it is done async 99% of the time.
Every Tuesday and Thursday we have 30 minutes that conveniently coincides with opening of the coffee shop in the office (two of us are onsite, six remote) prior to which the team is intended to write three bullets in the meeting chat:
- Prio one yesterday - and outcome
- Prio one today
- Any blockers discovered for either of those
If nobody posts a blocker, then we get 30 minutes on the calendar where nobody from outside our team can schedule anything. And the onsite folks get the freshest coffee before everyone else gets down there.
If there is a blocker; the person who called it out and the most experienced person in dealing with that type of blocker will join the call, as will anyone interested in the outcome. Once the blocker is resolved, the solution is put into the same meeting chat.
I understood most of those words, and still have very little idea of what is going on. Something to do with coffee?
I have no idea what a prio is, or a blocker in this context.
Haha, fair enough. I was just describing one way that ‘standups’ can be less annoying.
Prio = Priority. As in which task we were primarily working on. Blocker = Some lack of resources, skills, budget, policy, or infrastructure, that is blocking someone from completing a task.
We do what I call a shotgun standup twice a week.
I hope that’s not like a shotgun wedding. But anyway this sounds like a good idea more or less.
Even better if they scheduled it half an hour after the coffee shop opens.
Our stand-ups are always on and I think folks here forgot the idea of a stand up … Nobody stands and so it runs a full half hour. I guess the time isn’t as bad as it sounds because it is a massive system.
Where I am a contractor we have successfully petitioned to delay a “morning standups” until 1:30 p.m. - Which is a much better time to have it because it gives everyone time to A actually wake up, and be there, and B let’s me actually read emails.
So many times things don’t get covered in the morning stand up because no one’s read their emails yet, and then you have to have another meeting at about 11:00 in order to discuss the contents of the email.
Unless the email pertains to the whole team and will take less than 5 minutes to discuss, keep it out of standup!
Ha ha ha ha.
However, I guess in that position I would still be more cautious with wording. No need to burn bridges to make a point.
Depending on the work and the contract, it may be the company burning a bridge. Specialized labour can be both difficult and expensive to find.
A lot of contractors (good ones) know how to play the game. You can get away with a lot when the companies vertically integrated sales app that only they can fix goes belly up. Saw this before where an easily replaceable manager goes up against a long time contractor (ya know, with a contract) and leadership gets to decide how to resolve the situation…
I’ve been in similar situations. It boils down to “You hired contractors to do this work because you don’t have the skills internally.” I cancelled a customer’s quarterly release because they didn’t hand over their requirements doc by the due date (after 2 months of prodding). The customer got really nasty with me. Got a call from my own VP after a few hours. He started to chew me out for not “working with them”. I showed him the dozens of emails and several meetings I had with them being clear about their responsibilities and timelines. He just said “Oh… I’ll talk to them.” The call with the customer’s PM the next day was hilarious. After he had chewed me out in front of 100+ of his people, he had to fall on his sword and take responsibility for messing up their release since it was his responsibility to manage their requirements and get them to me.
I know nobody cares, but it feels good to get that story out!
Good read, I care
Good reminder to CYA.
I care. I like it. 😁
Where’s the Lemmy tech nightmare stories community when it’s needed.
Nah, everyone here says experiences like yours are “fake”. The good ol’ Reddit cynicism.
Heh, people seem nice here, but I still have that PTSD from interacting on Reddit.
There was a story posted on Reddit about 2 years ago, long as fuck but worth the read, about why you don’t piss off specialized contractors.
It doesn’t have a happy ending, but not for reasons you’d think.
I remember that one. It was a fantastic read…but IIRC it turned out to be fake.
Oh, that doesn’t matter. This screenshot of a chat posted to a social media platform is probably fake as well. It’s still fun to read and talk about it.
For sure.
Yea this is just silly and shortsighted. Reputation is everything, and once word gets around that you’re a pretentious dick who doesn’t need to attend meetings because you can’t get out of bed, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the next contract.
If I work contract the meetings need to be in the contract. No way Im driving to location for a half hour meeting and then driving home.Either put it in contract or reimburse time, gas and wear otherwise I’m not attending
Depends. I do contract work, and I’m replaceable. I’m nice anyways, but I’m even nicer given my status. However, there are some people that are essentially irreplaceable, and they make more in a week than I make in a month. They’re all assholes, but the powers that be capitulate to their every whim. I’d love to get qualified for what they do and replace them, regardless of the pay benefits. How can you make over a hundred an hour and be such a petulant, whiney baby? If I was making that money, man, I’d be literally the nicest person. Like, who gives a shit? You make wheelbarrows full of cash, so… who cares about minor inconveniences? And I’m not talking about work issues, I mean they whine about the same damn contract paperwork everyone has to fill out. It takes 10 minutes. I’m not doing it for you, no one will, so just… do it? Baffling.
People get paid lots of money because they get results that generate even more money. Those people are given that money based on a track record of success. That success comes from making demands, and being cut throat. There is a very slim chance you can be nice and successful. It sucks, but that’s why they are assholes, because that’s who survives in those environments. Look at c level execs or really driven managers and it’s all the same “success at any cost” mantra. Also 10 minutes of paperwork at $14 an hour is $2.50 to the company while that same 10 minutes to this “top earners” is $20, or over an hour of a minimum wagers time. That’s why I am against huddles in the first place, they are money pits.
More money === bigger asshole
Very few exceptions to that rule.
What kind of job are we talking about here that makes these so called “wheelbarrows of cash”?
Nuclear power.
“You really need an attitude adjustment”… 😂
John Cena has entered the chat
Typical “manager”. Everyone show up to these useless meetings that don’t get work done or you can’t work here 🙃
