Fuck you and your idea of productivity. Just because your job is reporting on the status of other people’s hard work doesn’t mean that’s how to get shit done - by talking. It takes doing to do shit.
Scrum is just something I have to endure in order to get paid to program. The worst is when you’re working on something hard and your status hasn’t changed substantially from the previous day. “I did a bunch of things that didn’t pan out, so I only really have an expanding list of things that are not the problem. No, assigning someone to help me is unlikely to resolve the issue faster.”
At least you’re getting assigned a human. My boss’ new habit is to print out what chatGTP thinks about the problem I’m working on, if i take too long solving it…
Yeah that sounds awful. Fortunately corporate policies prohibit putting our technical data into AIs.
ouch, that is a hell that may one day await us all.
I wonder if the boss will be replaced by the machine entirely by then
My boss does this constantly and it has never once helped. Infuriating.
Ohhh I got that too recently!
“no, having a meeting about it won’t help, it will just waste my time that I could be using to figure out the problem.”
Making programmers attend meetings should be considered a hate crime.
Which is worse: forcing a programmer to attend daily meetings, or forcing them to work in an “open plan” office? If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose to go work on a garbage truck.
Forcing programmers into an office at all should be enough to get a manager dragged before the ICJ on charges of crimes against humanity
but the collaboration!
yes luigi them
You, sir, understand me
One of the first things my new boss did was to cancel the daily standup meetings that were enforced by the previous management. God, what a great decision. I’m finally getting shit done instead of having to talk and endure bullshit every day.
I call it the numbing hour. It’s only scheduled as a half hour but it always runs for nearly an hour. I never speak for more than two minutes, I just stand there as my motivation to do literally anything for the rest of the day burns down to zero. Sometimes I wake up 110% motivated with a list of stuff I can’t wait to get done, fortunately the numbing hour is first thing everyday ensuring that I am always fully neutralized.
At least you have until the end of the day to (try to) regain some motivation. My daily is currently at the 10am. Smack dab in the middle of the morning.
Not when you’re working from home and being a dad at the same time. Got my kids nap times aligned with meetings. “Oh, sorry to cancel last minute”
Fuck me, I gotta align this shit all over again tomorrow.
But…it’s canceled, not rescheduled for a different time that day. You just have free time. I don’t understand how that affects other timing.
It doesn’t but trying to perfectly time your kids nap to the meeting time (she’s still young and needs at least 2) usually results in a really cracky kid at some point.
Sleep is important and I try not to fuck with it when I can. So doing that when someone just cancels 10 minutes prior is frustrating and usually means I woke her up early from a nap previously to get on a good time sync.
Rescheduling to a different time that day is less bad because I can more easily keep her up another 30-40 minutes depending on the time of the day.
Basically if it’s a completely different day it means she’s cranky back to back days.
Sysadmins too
I have gotten a couple meetings to be something we ‘skip by default’ where we keep it on the calendar but someone only starts the meeting if they actually need something.
Dramatically cut down on meetings without any problems so far. Now it’s just occasional and way shorter because we get straight to business and then drop the call.
I’m in an open plan office. On Mondays, one of our employees works from home. This means that every Monday, we all put our headsets on and have a Slack call for an hour, 9 of us in the same room, one person remote, just so the boss can natter on about whatever they’ve been up to this weekend and how they think everybody else has been doing their jobs.
Then, the head of the marketing team will join in with a very rambly, unfunny, and irrelevant diatribe, which gets the boss talking again. We all sit for an hour while they talk about shit that is nothing to do with any of us, listening to their voices out loud and then a half second later in the headphones.
After that, I say about two sentences. The other developer says two sentences. The rest of marketing get through their tasklists. It’s ridiculous.
We’ve been told that we absolutely have to pay attention, so rather than working on a Monday morning, I now have to pause at 10:00am and sit in silence for an hour plus, waiting until my motivation and flow is completely crushed. Thankfully it’s only once a week but it’s just so stupid.
Me
There are two kinds of meetings: decision meetings and update meetings. Update meetings are bullshit time sinks designed to validate the complete chain of command. Decision meetings are where something tangible is determined.
The former is the vast bulk of meetings. The latter is a rarity, and sometimes only possible after fully satiating the beast that is the former.
Guess I’m a programmer
You use Lemmy, that’s something at least
We’re all in the development hell pipeline over here…
/s
Honestly, how many workers really want a meeting?
When I worked in customer service in a callcenter we all tried to ask a bunch of questions to try to extend the meeting so we wouldn’t have to go back on the phones. anything is better than being on the phones.
Useful meetings? Yes. Useless? No.
Only 1/20 meetings around my office I actually need to be a part of.
Most meetings are useless, or they could just be an email.
Depends on the meeting. I look forward to meetings where the process people will explain how stuff actually works so we know how to build the feature that will interface with their systems
Ok. That’s totally true, I also really enjoy meetings where people show me what they do in depth so I can build automation around their actual processes, as well as find ways to improve those processes and save time and effort.
Sometimes you even get to show off the cool, useful shit you built for them!
I too heard about such meetings. I’m yet to participate in one though.
Thats a shame!
Managers do. Collecting status and showing who’s boss is their work.
Marketing types. “Designers” (I.e. people who drive product requirement.) People who just love to hear themselves talk. Also we have this one QA guy who can’t code for shit and always wants someone else to do his work for him. He wants to be on zoom calls 24/7. I’m surprised that guy can piss without someone showing him how to hold his dick on a zoom call.
Thay guy needs AI and patience.
You literally just suggested the creation of another vibe coder.
test
Don’t forget to test for lizards.
passed
Test
TEST
Here here!
I love meetings about the general idea and concept of a project that takeip the “doing” timeof the single person that will do the work.
Having worked in nonprogrammer roles… I think the only people that like meetings are upper management - across departments.
They don’t really even “like” them but they’re basically the only thing they do that makes it seem like they do any work.
It’s like grabbing a broom when your boss enters the restaurant. Better to pretend you’re doing something.
Though a lot of them do just like the sound of their own voice.
