meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
I have a project kicking off with a bunch of people in Perth, so there is literally zero way to make those meetings within office hours for both ends of the call.
(which is frankly completely fine, I don't mind doing these things at 8pm or whatever. Previously on international collabs I've had meetings at 1am or 4am, so honestly anything after midday is a comparative delight).
Yeah meetings with people across the world should either have them flown in for a week, or be done handled via email and with project managers for big deal things. Maybe... maybe after hours for lots of overtime or big salaries.
uh ok well utterly bonkers carbon footprint aside (and cost!) how exactly do you handle that for 3/6/12 month projects? five year projects?
Pre-COVID-19: One-ish-week (minimum 5 days in the lab) technical sync-up and hands-on lab work with 2-7 people traveling to destination office roughly every 3-6 months. Every 12 months is a big sync-up with program management and a shit load of free food. Get 3 years in and then cancel that project. Shake with ice. Pour into a martini glass.
Carbon footprint problem still stands, and this is highly discipline and project specific. For my field (fields? tbh I never work with other engineers), usually for anything long term we'll try and meet up in person at some point (at conferences if not direct institutional visits), but it's pricey and we really have to justify the latter if it's intercontinental. (Lab-work-specific visits are different, but if resources are that localised and someone at another institute needs access that badly we'll try and embed them for at least 6-10 weeks).
A significant part of our software here that we work on to provide national social welfare services to an entire country is from IBM. The particular devlopment team for that software framework is lead from Dublin. There's global round-the-clock-support, and we have IBM contractors on-site working with us, but if we need to talk actual tech to the people doing core platform development, that's Wellington to Dublin calls. We've had them regularly scheduled for over a decade, anywhere between daily to monthly (during war rooms we will be 24-hours both ends and having hourly catch ups for days at a time). That's just all the time BAU. Ongoing, for over a decade now. And until we end-of-life the software, which won't be for at least another decade yet.
Our regular meetings are currently about once every two weeks. It's 8am at one end and 7pm at the other, but which end is which changes depending on which hemisphere is in Summer Daylight Savings at the time. Exactly which team members attend the meeting changes depending on what issues we want to make the agenda, but the meetings are still happening most of the time, even if who is at them might completely change week-to-week.
That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
+3
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
Sounds like maybe you've hit burnout?
Can you take two weeks off work and spend it at the beach eating takeout and sunbathing?
Some absolutely daffy fucks called my phone at 11:30 PM from a private number and woke me up, and somehow managed to string me into a 3 minute conversation that I cannot recall at all except my repeated mutterings of "who are you, I can't understand you" and "don't you know what time it is" (to which, the only thing I can completely recall was "sir, we are calling during our business hours of 10:30 to 11:30" as if that makes it ok). I don't get a lot of calls so I don't typically bother with DND settings, guess I'm going to have to change that going forward.
Then my neighbors A/C started making a nightmarish rattle and woke me up at 5 AM. I am so out of it right now. If this wasn't the start of a three day weekend I'd have taken today off from work.
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
This is what sleep deprivation feels like. I have apnea and I didn’t realize how bad I felt until I got a cpap and started actually sleeping.
Fly people in and only do in person?
That's crazy talk, you're wasting 2 days/person for every trip just in time, not to mention life diaruption. I have very productive working relationships with probably 20 different people in England, Ireland, Colombia, India and Singapore. Some I'm talking to on a daily basis as we share notes and ideas.
You just suck it up and have an early or late meeting now and then as that's just the easiest solution, and you remember to be open to new times if people have life stuff going on.
The rest is slack, email, lucidchart and teams. If you're a multinational team or company, you get used to weird meeting times.
On the flip side you also get the time back during the day if you have an 11 pm meeting.
PS Asia time zones no bueno from the east coast
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
I have a project kicking off with a bunch of people in Perth, so there is literally zero way to make those meetings within office hours for both ends of the call.
(which is frankly completely fine, I don't mind doing these things at 8pm or whatever. Previously on international collabs I've had meetings at 1am or 4am, so honestly anything after midday is a comparative delight).
Yeah meetings with people across the world should either have them flown in for a week, or be done handled via email and with project managers for big deal things. Maybe... maybe after hours for lots of overtime or big salaries.
uh ok well utterly bonkers carbon footprint aside (and cost!) how exactly do you handle that for 3/6/12 month projects? five year projects?
Pre-COVID-19: One-ish-week (minimum 5 days in the lab) technical sync-up and hands-on lab work with 2-7 people traveling to destination office roughly every 3-6 months. Every 12 months is a big sync-up with program management and a shit load of free food. Get 3 years in and then cancel that project. Shake with ice. Pour into a martini glass.
Carbon footprint problem still stands, and this is highly discipline and project specific. For my field (fields? tbh I never work with other engineers), usually for anything long term we'll try and meet up in person at some point (at conferences if not direct institutional visits), but it's pricey and we really have to justify the latter if it's intercontinental. (Lab-work-specific visits are different, but if resources are that localised and someone at another institute needs access that badly we'll try and embed them for at least 6-10 weeks).
Essentially it was meant to be bonkers because meetings are dumb and I hate them and I want to make them cost prohibitive so that things that shouldn't be meetings won't be meetings.
I know some people absolutely love face to face communications, I'd prefer them over phone meetings, but, almost nothing I've ever had a meeting over couldn't be handled by 1:1 with a manager or team lead with the problem offender or the person being locked down by other team members or just straight up a 3 line email.
I realize there are types of collaborations where you still need meetings, but, those are exceptions rather than the rule. No matter how much the people who loathe WFH and miss water-cooler gettogethers want them to be.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
But yeah that aside, it would be swell if the actual "figure it out, you only have to work 40 hours or so" was the norm rather than the exception too.
When there's an 8pm or 4am meeting I'm expected to get up and still do my regular hours, or was, I don't do that anymore because I refuse them when they try that. Shit I don't even do <10am or >4pm meetings anymore.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
Sounds like maybe you've hit burnout?
Can you take two weeks off work and spend it at the beach eating takeout and sunbathing?
I'm due to be off work for nearly nine weeks from July 5th, so I guess I just have to survive until then.
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
Well I'm an admin that schedules meetings for a massive investment firm and I can tell you wholeheartedly that would suck balls.
A: T-Th 11-3 would be back to back meetings all year.
B: We would have maybe 1/4 of our actual meetings so goals would get done massively slower.
C: Lunch would suck terrible because it would be a massive cost sink.
If lunch didn't suck, the complaints from the overprivileged execs would be an unparalleled din
E: There would be absolutely no more one on one meetings with your boss.
But maybe that's just us, we are stupid large.
I think people underestimate just how detrimental meetings are to their workforce.
A 5 minute standup at like 10am once or twice a week is fine, I'm not even talking about those (if you do it more than twice a week you're probably doing more harm than help). If someone in particular needs babysitting constantly that those standups are required maybe deal with that independently.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
Well I'm an admin that schedules meetings for a massive investment firm and I can tell you wholeheartedly that would suck balls.
A: T-Th 11-3 would be back to back meetings all year.
B: We would have maybe 1/4 of our actual meetings so goals would get done massively slower.
C: Lunch would suck terrible because it would be a massive cost sink.
If lunch didn't suck, the complaints from the overprivileged execs would be an unparalleled din
E: There would be absolutely no more one on one meetings with your boss.
But maybe that's just us, we are stupid large.
I think people underestimate just how detrimental meetings are to their workforce.
A 5 minute standup at like 10am once or twice a week is fine, I'm not even talking about those (if you do it more than twice a week you're probably doing more harm than help). If someone in particular needs babysitting constantly that those standups are required maybe deal with that independently.
totally agree. we have way waaaaaaaaaaaay too many meetings. but that's because most people are afraid to make a decision without it being okay'd and, more importantly, noticed by the higher ups
+1
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Now that I'm in a larger org I've found there are meetings that can be useful--because it's so fucking hard to get adequate communication across several different VP-level management chains and thousands of people.
It's frustrating but necessary.
The irritating part is finding the balance of "these people need to be aware" vs. "okay now I'm getting literally nothing done because I'm doing nothing but meetings."
Yeah the "need to go up 3 levels" meetings are good, probably don't need whole teams though.
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
I think there's a been a fresh round of pollen this week or something because I feel like shite.
How I long for the 30-odd years of my life where I didn't suffer from hayfever in any way.
Yeah the "need to go up 3 levels" meetings are good, probably don't need whole teams though.
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
Functional software suites for enterprise solutions? What is this Candyland fairytale happy funtimes!? *Remembers the horror of power cycling an old windows NT 4.0 desktop we had "hidden" on our network that ran our Airline ticket printers because the software that ran said printers hadn't been updated since then*
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
My (ex)Manager is a good egg. He's letting me use the last 30 days of my employment strictly for job hunting, and he's not requiring me to give any notice if I happen to find a job in that time.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
Well I'm an admin that schedules meetings for a massive investment firm and I can tell you wholeheartedly that would suck balls.
A: T-Th 11-3 would be back to back meetings all year.
B: We would have maybe 1/4 of our actual meetings so goals would get done massively slower.
C: Lunch would suck terrible because it would be a massive cost sink.
If lunch didn't suck, the complaints from the overprivileged execs would be an unparalleled din
E: There would be absolutely no more one on one meetings with your boss.
But maybe that's just us, we are stupid large.
I think people underestimate just how detrimental meetings are to their workforce.
A 5 minute standup at like 10am once or twice a week is fine, I'm not even talking about those (if you do it more than twice a week you're probably doing more harm than help). If someone in particular needs babysitting constantly that those standups are required maybe deal with that independently.
I think we just have different definitions of what a meeting entails.
I have finally begun training the person taking my work from me 2.5 days before I am done here.
Its the guy from the Cyber Security department they hired over me last year. He doesn't understand a lot of the "technical terms" I am tossing out so I'm going over stuff slowly because hes been here over a year and doesn't understand even basic financial terminology because that hasn't been required of him.
Yeah the "need to go up 3 levels" meetings are good, probably don't need whole teams though.
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
Functional software suites for enterprise solutions? What is this Candyland fairytale happy funtimes!? *Remembers the horror of power cycling an old windows NT 4.0 desktop we had "hidden" on our network that ran our Airline ticket printers because the software that ran said printers hadn't been updated since then*
We're using a faxfinder now and it's glorious, integrates right into our phone system and I built my own API layer over top of their API to send faxes out from PDFs we have internally.
So now my EHR can send faxes without them printing off bundles and faxing them by hand. They also don't go "uh I think our fax lines aren't working" because they can go see the status of it:
9 times out of 10 it was because we were getting 2 50+ page bundles from a hospital and now I have the proof instead of throwing my hands up and going "I don't know because the 15 year old software doesn't keep a log of that stuff".
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I have finally begun training the person taking my work from me 2.5 days before I am done here.
Its the guy from the Cyber Security department they hired over me last year. He doesn't understand a lot of the "technical terms" I am tossing out so I'm going over stuff slowly because hes been here over a year and doesn't understand even basic financial terminology because that hasn't been required of him.
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
Sounds like maybe you've hit burnout?
Can you take two weeks off work and spend it at the beach eating takeout and sunbathing?
As a super allergic asthmatic who turns 34 this year and has sleep apnea, all of the above probably!
I hate that if just one person writes a check, that's a whole separate deposit I have to prepare.
I work at a Target store and recently our guy who handles receiving has been needing some time off for a LOA and such due to him being asthmatic and the whole covid thing, so I got tapped to fill in for him. We mail out our checks weekly to the nearby corporate campus, and being a store in a area with a lot of retirees we get a fair amount of physical checks still. It amounts to maybe a pound a week, but man I can only imagine what it would have been like before debit cards were a common thing.
There were entire domestic and international airlines whose only job was to fly stacks of checks around.
E-check killed them off, and, really, that's for the best longterm.
I have finally begun training the person taking my work from me 2.5 days before I am done here.
Its the guy from the Cyber Security department they hired over me last year. He doesn't understand a lot of the "technical terms" I am tossing out so I'm going over stuff slowly because hes been here over a year and doesn't understand even basic financial terminology because that hasn't been required of him.
The irony here is physically painful.
Im super excited you found something new, but i am going to miss your office space style desk tribulations.
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
I have a project kicking off with a bunch of people in Perth, so there is literally zero way to make those meetings within office hours for both ends of the call.
(which is frankly completely fine, I don't mind doing these things at 8pm or whatever. Previously on international collabs I've had meetings at 1am or 4am, so honestly anything after midday is a comparative delight).
Yeah meetings with people across the world should either have them flown in for a week, or be done handled via email and with project managers for big deal things. Maybe... maybe after hours for lots of overtime or big salaries.
uh ok well utterly bonkers carbon footprint aside (and cost!) how exactly do you handle that for 3/6/12 month projects? five year projects?
Pre-COVID-19: One-ish-week (minimum 5 days in the lab) technical sync-up and hands-on lab work with 2-7 people traveling to destination office roughly every 3-6 months. Every 12 months is a big sync-up with program management and a shit load of free food. Get 3 years in and then cancel that project. Shake with ice. Pour into a martini glass.
Carbon footprint problem still stands, and this is highly discipline and project specific. For my field (fields? tbh I never work with other engineers), usually for anything long term we'll try and meet up in person at some point (at conferences if not direct institutional visits), but it's pricey and we really have to justify the latter if it's intercontinental. (Lab-work-specific visits are different, but if resources are that localised and someone at another institute needs access that badly we'll try and embed them for at least 6-10 weeks).
@tynic - Definitely. The carbon footprint of the travel is massive. The 3-6 month/12-month sync-ups are the cadence for international travel. For domestic travel? Try like once or twice a week for geographies that are ~1-1.5 hour flights (early flight out, late flight back). Wasting all the carbon.
This is only the travel schedule for technical grunts like me at the lowest depth of the trenches. We're talking at least multiple times a month international travel for folks at the upper-middle/middle parts of the org chart.
I'd like to say that the silver lining for the COVID-19 stuff is that this kind of travel will be seen as unnecessary, but ultimately it will continue. There might be some reduction as it will turn into a prestige/perk for folks trying to demonstrate how 'important' they are to the company (this travel is essential to keep the business going, etc, etc).
A co worker has returned from their vacation and is just goddamned intent on fixing all of these things people in our role do not have the authority to address
They want to fix all these things on a friday, before a three day weekend, when the staff who will be working that weekend are off
meetings should be scheduled T-Th between the hours of 11am to 3pm and that's it
if they take place between noon and 2, lunch should be provided
change my mind
Well I'm an admin that schedules meetings for a massive investment firm and I can tell you wholeheartedly that would suck balls.
A: T-Th 11-3 would be back to back meetings all year.
B: We would have maybe 1/4 of our actual meetings so goals would get done massively slower.
C: Lunch would suck terrible because it would be a massive cost sink.
If lunch didn't suck, the complaints from the overprivileged execs would be an unparalleled din
E: There would be absolutely no more one on one meetings with your boss.
But maybe that's just us, we are stupid large.
I think people underestimate just how detrimental meetings are to their workforce.
A 5 minute standup at like 10am once or twice a week is fine, I'm not even talking about those (if you do it more than twice a week you're probably doing more harm than help). If someone in particular needs babysitting constantly that those standups are required maybe deal with that independently.
Since we've been WFH my boss has insisted on daily meetings at 10 AM until whenever. The problem is our department has wildly different positions and not every pertains to all of us. So she spends 15 minutes talking about new FBI investigation standards or an audit of our compliance, well that does apply to half of us so she wasted that time. Also one of my co-workers is one of those people who has to chime in and has to ask questions no matter the topic and if they actually do anything with that side of things, so we usually have 2 meetings a week that go 40+ minutes long for no reason where I just play phone games.
And this doesn't even touch on the "fun teambuilding games" she has us play in meetings.
I have finally begun training the person taking my work from me 2.5 days before I am done here.
Its the guy from the Cyber Security department they hired over me last year. He doesn't understand a lot of the "technical terms" I am tossing out so I'm going over stuff slowly because hes been here over a year and doesn't understand even basic financial terminology because that hasn't been required of him.
The irony here is physically painful.
Im super excited you found something new, but i am going to miss your office space style desk tribulations.
I had my exit interview Wednesday and the HR lady was like "Well I think I know the answer to this but was there anything that you haven't been satisfied with here?" and after going through the various things I mentioned the desk stuff and she was like "Yeah we all figured that, we saw the emails about you being moved over and and over again and were all like 'Wow this isn't a way to treat someone'" Yeah Nikki from HR, if only there was some kind of...resource that I as a human could rely upon to maybe step in and say "Stop treating this employee like shit".
One of the best things about consulting is that most stupid meetings aren’t really lost time. You want to have a meeting to discuss something we could have solved with an email? Sure, I’m still billing you a full hour.
It’s still dumb, but I have a lot more patience for it.
+13
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
in the course of my job yesterday I found out that the German word for cauldron translates directly as witch-pot
which rules, obviously
I mentioned this to my german co-worker and she informed me that this is also the term they use for a particularly rowdy filled soccer stadium, which rules even more
Yeah the "need to go up 3 levels" meetings are good, probably don't need whole teams though.
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
Functional software suites for enterprise solutions? What is this Candyland fairytale happy funtimes!? *Remembers the horror of power cycling an old windows NT 4.0 desktop we had "hidden" on our network that ran our Airline ticket printers because the software that ran said printers hadn't been updated since then*
We're using a faxfinder now and it's glorious, integrates right into our phone system and I built my own API layer over top of their API to send faxes out from PDFs we have internally.
So now my EHR can send faxes without them printing off bundles and faxing them by hand. They also don't go "uh I think our fax lines aren't working" because they can go see the status of it:
9 times out of 10 it was because we were getting 2 50+ page bundles from a hospital and now I have the proof instead of throwing my hands up and going "I don't know because the 15 year old software doesn't keep a log of that stuff".
God enterprise fax solutions were just...just so damn terrible. Like it's nice when you actually pay for the proper implementation of them and your company supports that implementation. Our jury rigged/expired license setup we had grafted into our system was such a bloody nightmare. Especially because it was agent by agent based, not necessarily just 3-4 numbers for our combined departments and trying to get that all bolted into our archaic phone closet and somehow work was...ugh. So don't miss working there, even if I do miss the peeps there.
Just wanted to check in about the new employee orientation and my first day of work before the 3-day weekend. Just what time do I need to be there, what's the schedule, where can I park, etc.
Best,
[Oghulk]
She said at the end of last week she would email me back with the information. Well.............
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
God I feel like crap all the time at the moment. Like I have a permanent hangover. I don't know if it's sleep deprivation, hayfever, or this is just what happens once you turn 35 and I'm going to feel this way forever now.
I think there's a been a fresh round of pollen this week or something because I feel like shite.
How I long for the 30-odd years of my life where I didn't suffer from hayfever in any way.
I've had hayfever since I was a kid but it gets worse every year.
Just another crushing reminder of the relentless onslaught of time and death.
+2
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Yeah the "need to go up 3 levels" meetings are good, probably don't need whole teams though.
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
Yeah, whole team meetings rarely make sense beyond a quick sync. Beyond that it's getting the right cross-functional group of people together to solve the problem/make the thing work/hash out something. And then adding or removing people as the solution space is clarified.
Love to say “hey I need to talk to my colleagues in Australia occasionally to make projects happen”, then get told at length that all not-in-person meetings are pointless actually and we should just fly people out (I assume they’ll bring the hundred-kilometer coral reefs we’re working on along with them as hand luggage), THEN get the goalposts moved to ‘well whole team meetings and meetings where someone just talks at you are pointless’ (which was never, ever what I was talking about), only to have it wrap round to
Maybe instead of meetings, we can just get some sort of device to syphon thoughts out of everyone's heads and then pool them all together and pipe them back out to everyone, so everyone is on the same page. Maybe even have one giant mind watch over them. Like, I dunno, an Overmind or something?
+3
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Love to say “hey I need to talk to my colleagues in Australia occasionally to make projects happen”, then get told at length that all not-in-person meetings are pointless actually and we should just fly people out (I assume they’ll bring the hundred-kilometer coral reefs we’re working on along with them as hand luggage), THEN get the goalposts moved to ‘well whole team meetings and meetings where someone just talks at you are pointless’ (which was never, ever what I was talking about), only to have it wrap round to
getting the right cross-functional group of people together to solve the problem/make the thing work/hash out something.
which is. in fact, exactly what I WAS talking about when I said I’m gonna have to talk to people in Perth occasionally for the next few months.
It’s almost like someone’s individual corporate experience can’t be generalized across all work fields or environments.
Maybe we can make some generalizations though!
* Meetings where the whole team is brought in so upper management can feel better about themselves are stupid.
* Meetings where groups of people that have nothing to do with the topic at hand are brought together for an hour are stupid
* Regular meetings that had a purpose at one time, but have since moved on from that purpose but have the same attendees likely fall into one of the above, and so are stupid
* Cross-functional meetings with the minimum number of people necessary to the topic(s) at hand are likely to be useful
* The more people in the meeting, the less useful it is
* The (management/PM) attitude of "the meetings will continue until productivity improves" is stupid. And common. And still stupid.
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A significant part of our software here that we work on to provide national social welfare services to an entire country is from IBM. The particular devlopment team for that software framework is lead from Dublin. There's global round-the-clock-support, and we have IBM contractors on-site working with us, but if we need to talk actual tech to the people doing core platform development, that's Wellington to Dublin calls. We've had them regularly scheduled for over a decade, anywhere between daily to monthly (during war rooms we will be 24-hours both ends and having hourly catch ups for days at a time). That's just all the time BAU. Ongoing, for over a decade now. And until we end-of-life the software, which won't be for at least another decade yet.
Our regular meetings are currently about once every two weeks. It's 8am at one end and 7pm at the other, but which end is which changes depending on which hemisphere is in Summer Daylight Savings at the time. Exactly which team members attend the meeting changes depending on what issues we want to make the agenda, but the meetings are still happening most of the time, even if who is at them might completely change week-to-week.
Sounds like maybe you've hit burnout?
Can you take two weeks off work and spend it at the beach eating takeout and sunbathing?
Then my neighbors A/C started making a nightmarish rattle and woke me up at 5 AM. I am so out of it right now. If this wasn't the start of a three day weekend I'd have taken today off from work.
This is what sleep deprivation feels like. I have apnea and I didn’t realize how bad I felt until I got a cpap and started actually sleeping.
That's crazy talk, you're wasting 2 days/person for every trip just in time, not to mention life diaruption. I have very productive working relationships with probably 20 different people in England, Ireland, Colombia, India and Singapore. Some I'm talking to on a daily basis as we share notes and ideas.
You just suck it up and have an early or late meeting now and then as that's just the easiest solution, and you remember to be open to new times if people have life stuff going on.
The rest is slack, email, lucidchart and teams. If you're a multinational team or company, you get used to weird meeting times.
On the flip side you also get the time back during the day if you have an 11 pm meeting.
PS Asia time zones no bueno from the east coast
Essentially it was meant to be bonkers because meetings are dumb and I hate them and I want to make them cost prohibitive so that things that shouldn't be meetings won't be meetings.
I know some people absolutely love face to face communications, I'd prefer them over phone meetings, but, almost nothing I've ever had a meeting over couldn't be handled by 1:1 with a manager or team lead with the problem offender or the person being locked down by other team members or just straight up a 3 line email.
I realize there are types of collaborations where you still need meetings, but, those are exceptions rather than the rule. No matter how much the people who loathe WFH and miss water-cooler gettogethers want them to be.
When there's an 8pm or 4am meeting I'm expected to get up and still do my regular hours, or was, I don't do that anymore because I refuse them when they try that. Shit I don't even do <10am or >4pm meetings anymore.
Well I'm an admin that schedules meetings for a massive investment firm and I can tell you wholeheartedly that would suck balls.
A: T-Th 11-3 would be back to back meetings all year.
B: We would have maybe 1/4 of our actual meetings so goals would get done massively slower.
C: Lunch would suck terrible because it would be a massive cost sink.
E: There would be absolutely no more one on one meetings with your boss.
But maybe that's just us, we are stupid large.
I'm due to be off work for nearly nine weeks from July 5th, so I guess I just have to survive until then.
I think people underestimate just how detrimental meetings are to their workforce.
A 5 minute standup at like 10am once or twice a week is fine, I'm not even talking about those (if you do it more than twice a week you're probably doing more harm than help). If someone in particular needs babysitting constantly that those standups are required maybe deal with that independently.
totally agree. we have way waaaaaaaaaaaay too many meetings. but that's because most people are afraid to make a decision without it being okay'd and, more importantly, noticed by the higher ups
It's frustrating but necessary.
The irritating part is finding the balance of "these people need to be aware" vs. "okay now I'm getting literally nothing done because I'm doing nothing but meetings."
Most interoffice meetings I've been a part of have been huge wastes of time and could've been a memo or short email, even this covid stuff was mostly my boss rambling for an hour and a half.
Vendors and sales meetings are the only ones I enjoy, when they're not cold meetings. Our phone company is probably my favorite hands down, my boss hates them though because they're always about to ask for like 5 grand for something he thinks is trivial. The last one was setting up a whole fax system through our phone system with some nice little integrated equipment instead of a PC with a modem and it has 100% been worth the cost. I no longer have to babysit a fax machine PC every morning to make sure it is still limping along with 16 year old software.
I think there's a been a fresh round of pollen this week or something because I feel like shite.
How I long for the 30-odd years of my life where I didn't suffer from hayfever in any way.
Functional software suites for enterprise solutions? What is this Candyland fairytale happy funtimes!? *Remembers the horror of power cycling an old windows NT 4.0 desktop we had "hidden" on our network that ran our Airline ticket printers because the software that ran said printers hadn't been updated since then*
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
I think we just have different definitions of what a meeting entails.
Its the guy from the Cyber Security department they hired over me last year. He doesn't understand a lot of the "technical terms" I am tossing out so I'm going over stuff slowly because hes been here over a year and doesn't understand even basic financial terminology because that hasn't been required of him.
The irony here is physically painful.
We're using a faxfinder now and it's glorious, integrates right into our phone system and I built my own API layer over top of their API to send faxes out from PDFs we have internally.
So now my EHR can send faxes without them printing off bundles and faxing them by hand. They also don't go "uh I think our fax lines aren't working" because they can go see the status of it:
9 times out of 10 it was because we were getting 2 50+ page bundles from a hospital and now I have the proof instead of throwing my hands up and going "I don't know because the 15 year old software doesn't keep a log of that stuff".
Not enough popcorn in the world.
As a super allergic asthmatic who turns 34 this year and has sleep apnea, all of the above probably!
There were entire domestic and international airlines whose only job was to fly stacks of checks around.
E-check killed them off, and, really, that's for the best longterm.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Im super excited you found something new, but i am going to miss your office space style desk tribulations.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
@tynic - Definitely. The carbon footprint of the travel is massive. The 3-6 month/12-month sync-ups are the cadence for international travel. For domestic travel? Try like once or twice a week for geographies that are ~1-1.5 hour flights (early flight out, late flight back). Wasting all the carbon.
This is only the travel schedule for technical grunts like me at the lowest depth of the trenches. We're talking at least multiple times a month international travel for folks at the upper-middle/middle parts of the org chart.
I'd like to say that the silver lining for the COVID-19 stuff is that this kind of travel will be seen as unnecessary, but ultimately it will continue. There might be some reduction as it will turn into a prestige/perk for folks trying to demonstrate how 'important' they are to the company (this travel is essential to keep the business going, etc, etc).
They want to fix all these things on a friday, before a three day weekend, when the staff who will be working that weekend are off
fuck off
Since we've been WFH my boss has insisted on daily meetings at 10 AM until whenever. The problem is our department has wildly different positions and not every pertains to all of us. So she spends 15 minutes talking about new FBI investigation standards or an audit of our compliance, well that does apply to half of us so she wasted that time. Also one of my co-workers is one of those people who has to chime in and has to ask questions no matter the topic and if they actually do anything with that side of things, so we usually have 2 meetings a week that go 40+ minutes long for no reason where I just play phone games.
And this doesn't even touch on the "fun teambuilding games" she has us play in meetings.
I had my exit interview Wednesday and the HR lady was like "Well I think I know the answer to this but was there anything that you haven't been satisfied with here?" and after going through the various things I mentioned the desk stuff and she was like "Yeah we all figured that, we saw the emails about you being moved over and and over again and were all like 'Wow this isn't a way to treat someone'" Yeah Nikki from HR, if only there was some kind of...resource that I as a human could rely upon to maybe step in and say "Stop treating this employee like shit".
I know HR isn't your friend but wowie
It’s still dumb, but I have a lot more patience for it.
which rules, obviously
I mentioned this to my german co-worker and she informed me that this is also the term they use for a particularly rowdy filled soccer stadium, which rules even more
God enterprise fax solutions were just...just so damn terrible. Like it's nice when you actually pay for the proper implementation of them and your company supports that implementation. Our jury rigged/expired license setup we had grafted into our system was such a bloody nightmare. Especially because it was agent by agent based, not necessarily just 3-4 numbers for our combined departments and trying to get that all bolted into our archaic phone closet and somehow work was...ugh. So don't miss working there, even if I do miss the peeps there.
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
Just wanted to check in about the new employee orientation and my first day of work before the 3-day weekend. Just what time do I need to be there, what's the schedule, where can I park, etc.
Best,
[Oghulk]
She said at the end of last week she would email me back with the information. Well.............
I've had hayfever since I was a kid but it gets worse every year.
Just another crushing reminder of the relentless onslaught of time and death.
Yeah, whole team meetings rarely make sense beyond a quick sync. Beyond that it's getting the right cross-functional group of people together to solve the problem/make the thing work/hash out something. And then adding or removing people as the solution space is clarified.
which is. in fact, exactly what I WAS talking about when I said I’m gonna have to talk to people in Perth occasionally for the next few months.
It’s almost like someone’s individual corporate experience can’t be generalized across all work fields or environments.
Maybe we can make some generalizations though!
* Meetings where the whole team is brought in so upper management can feel better about themselves are stupid.
* Meetings where groups of people that have nothing to do with the topic at hand are brought together for an hour are stupid
* Regular meetings that had a purpose at one time, but have since moved on from that purpose but have the same attendees likely fall into one of the above, and so are stupid
* Cross-functional meetings with the minimum number of people necessary to the topic(s) at hand are likely to be useful
* The more people in the meeting, the less useful it is
* The (management/PM) attitude of "the meetings will continue until productivity improves" is stupid. And common. And still stupid.