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The Useless Meeting Wack Jobs
$$$$$exyGal writes "Have you ever attended a useless meeting? Are you the wack job who always ask the same (or random) question during an all hands with the hope that simply by asking, you're going to change something? Rands in Repose points out the difference between an informational meeting and a conflict resolution meeting."
I usually ask "Why are we having this meeting? No. Really". It never gets answered satisfactorily. Am I asking anything wrong??
Free XBox, PS2
i think everyone hates meetings, but are too busy (attempting to)entainertain themselves to close their mouth and end the meeting. sorry to sound bitter. i am
Full House! Man, I love Buzzword Bingo... and that article pretty much filled my card up.
...for instance, I've worked at companies that have them, and companies that don't. At the ones that don't, rumours and gossip often take the place of what little real information you would get at a meeting, and that can do a lot to foment discontent among the workers.
;)
At the very least, at companies that have meetings, you have the opportunity to see people you might not otherwise see, maybe get some halfway useful information, and get some free donuts.
libertarianswag.com
Is this redundancy, they said no its a strategic realignment of the workforce to provide maximum efficency and flow. Then they made me redundant... Of course you can always play Bullshit Bingo
Rus
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Is this a an Informational Thread of a Conflict Resolution Thread? You decide!
Steal This Sig
... the infamous 'Pre-meeting meeting' though.. *shudders*
Doesn't this refer to modding /. posts?
Meetings, in my experience, are "look at me!" sessions, or senior management telling you about the cool bill of goods some sales guy sold them that we have to now implement.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
All the time at Slashdot...
when you try to explain that the meeting is pointless, or the ONLY question that matters was answered ... the whole rest of the "meeting is futile"... or the kind of meeting when the speaker just doesn't shut up.... even if we are not interested.
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
God, I love being the boss.
Signed,
Your Crazy English Boss
The good kinds of meeting:
1. For active projects, once per week to review status and plan work. Without face to face meetings, projects derail rapidly.
2. To solve problems, get the people or individuals out of their context, face-to-face for half an hour, give them attention, fix whatever's wrong.
3. To explain emergency situations: get the whole team to stop and sit down, listen, and work together on the next steps.
4. To sell an idea or plan: face to face with the customer, no presentations or power point, discuss the issues and use a flip board if you need to draw something.
And the useless kinds:
1. Anything with powerpoint.
2. Any meeting that is not for a specific project or problem.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The last meeting I attended was to decide our companies mission statement. I used something from Dilbert's mission statement generator and won!
Easy.
Step 1, qualify all meetings before attending - do I *really* need to be there? Do I *really* need to be there for the whole meeting?
Step 2, if a meeting is drifting into uselessness - say something - eg "Are we finished dealing with (important things X,Y and Z)" people either agree we are and the meeting ends, or not and the meeting gets back on track.
Step 3, the ultimate sanction. If your presence at a meeting is doing neither you nor anyone else any good - don't be afraid to leave. You know, say you have some stuff to do, get up, and walk out.
And finally, never, ever bitch about useless meetings - people just remember you as a whiner - doesn't matter if you're right or not.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
We take bets on how times my boss will say Action Item, Paradigm Shift and Mission Statement.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Bored during meetings? Why not try some of these neat little exercises, not only will it make meetings more interesting but your fellow workmates will become suddenly more alert and maintain a respectful distance:
During a meeting:
Discreetly clasp the hold of someone's hand and whisper "Can you feel it?" from the corner of your mouth.
Draw enormous genitalia on your notepad and discreetly show it to the person next to you for their approval.
When refreshments are presented, immediately distribute one biscuit to each of the attendees then systematically smash each one with your fist in front of them.
Wear a hand free phone headset throughout. Once in a while drift off into an unrelated conversation, such as "I don't care if there are no dwarfs, just get the show done!"
Write the words 'he fancies you' on your pad and show it to the person next to you while indicating with your pen.
Respond to a serious question with "I don't know what to say, obviously I'm flattered, but it's all happened so fast.
Use 'Nam style jargon' such as 'what's the ETA?', 'who's on recon?' and 'Charlie don't surf!'
Reconstruct the meeting in front of you using action figures and when anyone moves re-arrange the figures accordingly.
Shave one of your forearms.
Draw a chalk circle around one of the chairs then avoid sitting on it when the meeting starts. When someone does eventually sit on it, cover your mouth and gasp.
Turn your back on the meeting and sit facing the window with your legs stretched out. Announce that 'you love this dirty old town!'
Walk directly up to a colleague and stand nose to nose with him/her for one minute.
Mount the desk and walk along it's length before taking your seat.
Reflect sunlight into everyone's eyes off your watch face.
Gargle with water.
Repeat every idea they express in a baby voice while moving your hand like a chattering mouth.
Gradually push yourself closer and closer to the door on your chair.
Hum throughout.
Pull out a large roll of bank notes and count them demonstratively.
Bend momentarily under the table then emerge wearing contact lenses that white out your eyes.
Drop meaningless and confusing management speak into conversations such as:
'What's the margin, Marvin?'
'When's this turkey going to get basted?'
'If we don't get this brook babbling we're all going to end up looking like doe-eyed Labradors'
Produce a hamster from your pocket and suggest throwing it to one another as a means of idea-exchange.
Use a large hunting knife to point at your visual aids.
Announce that you've run off some copies of the meeting agenda for everyone. Then hand out pieces of paper that read:
My Secret Agenda
1. Trample the weak
2. Triumph alone
3. Invade Poland
Recollect them sheepishly and ask everyone to pretend they haven't seen them.
Attempt to hypnotise the entire room using a pocket watch.
Leave long pauses in your speech at random moments. When someone is prompted to interject shout 'I AM NOT FINISHED'.
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
We had Conflict Resolution meetings in high school.
The "Conflict Manager," as they were called, actually followed a script for the meeting, from a paper in plain view of those in attendance (the two kids that were fighting).
I still remember the script (I had a lot of those meetings), and it went like this:
"So, you both agree that you are here to solve a problem?"
"Student X, what is it about Student Y with which you have an issue?"
"Student Y, what is it about Student X with which you have an issue?"
"Now, what can we do to resolve these issues?"
"Do you both agree to take the steps we have outlined here?" (Always "Yes.")
"Do you think we will need to see you two in the future?" ("No.")
"Well then, thank you very much."
And so it would be, until we fought again and were dragged into another Conflict Resolution meeting--held by a different CM this time, so as not to give the appearance of repetition. But like I said, I went a lot.
The coolest voice ever.
My old boss was fired I believe solely on the basis that the engineering meetings we were having were useless. It was actually quit sad. He had the meetings mostly to just keep up with the progress of our assorted projects. The fact is all the projects were so distant from each other that most of us just sat around listing to
reports that had nothing to do with us for over an hour. If you manage well meetings can be kept to a minimum. Also their are so many project software packages out there (MS Project 2004 "shudder") that meetings are becoming more extraneous.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. - Adam Smith (1723-90)
Even better are foreign trips, which are the same, but you get an all expenses paid holiday to boot. And all this while earning a salary. It almost makes me want to become a manager.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
My favorite meetings are the ones where the boss tells us "Okay, you guys get together and figure out how to do this." He then shows up to the meeting and proceeds to tell us what we're going to do. When we try to explain that there may be better options, he pulls out the "I've got 31 years of experience" card, and ends the meeting...
:)
We just wait until he leaves the room and then get back to work
gets the grease. I've seen it happen on several occassions where a request is repeated at every opportunity, even though it is continuously shot down by. Eventually either the parties giving the logical BOOM are missing in action or just get tired of saying "No, that's stupid because of XYZ" and fail to prevent the ensuing waste of time.
Sad, but true.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Public educaiton in the USA is a wack meeting. First we teachers are given a few days of preplanning where we are at school working, but we have to go to about 8 meetings in 3 days to get caught up on the latest state imposed paperwork. Next you have the Superintendent showing up telling us what he would like to see without actually saying anything for about 30-45 minutes. Then when it is nearly over and he gets that I need a Subway look in his eyes someone raises her hand and asks the question... "Why do you think your ideas will change anything?" At which point any student caught pulling the fire alarm could easily get enough money from a collection from the faculty to hire a really scummy lawyer to get him out of trouble.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
..could be used for something a 100% more productive. As a developer i get summoned to all kinds of meetings. I am one of the architects behind a rather large application that we sell to our customers. The most unproductive kind of meetings i am called to are the ones involving our sales people. About 20% of my time goes to sitting in meetings with our sales staff and prospects selling the solution. These are not prestudies, they are pure sales-meetings where a short demo is run, and some fancy acronyms get passed around. When confronted by the fact that i could spend my time far more productively doing my actual job, most of them stated that they dont feel comfortable on their own with our product (its moderatly complex). So this past week i spent a couple of afternoons teaching our sales-reps the system from the ground up, in the hope that they will be able to do things on their own from now on.
The other meeting time-sink are the weekly department meetings. Specifically the part where everyone has to tell everyone else what they have been doing the last week. This consists of 1-2 hours (we are 5 employees) of mind-numbingly boring monologues from people who like to hear their own voice. Please send help.
... and why not learn a little more about communication in general ?
Theme Centered Interaction (Ruth C. Cohn) immediately comes to mind, and the article also links to CSCW.
CC.
Either you're a bully or a wimp. Either way, congrats.
Actually, sometimes meetings serve a purpose. Or are planned that way. Sure, you could argue that we could have cleared the same question by email instead of having a two-hour meeting, but still. We could have just stuck to the point, explained the architecture to the client, or viceversa, answered a few questions, and been done with it.
But no. What I hate is the wiseguy that just has to ask _something_, _anything_, just to show participation. Among my "favourites" are(favourite poster children for euthanasia, that is):
- people who ask something that's been said before. Repeatedly. Bonus points if it's something obvious.
(Yes, for the 5'th time, we _are_ saving the data in an Oracle database.)
- people who, obviously, are stuck in a "misunderstand it" mental mode.
(E.g., no, just because there are two columns in the table, it doesn't mean you can only store two attributes. There's a reason why those two columns are called "key" and "value". It's for storing as many key/value pairs as you need. No, seriously. You can stop asking "what if we later need more than two attributes?")
- people who take some irrelevant detail -- often a tangent or metaphor used -- and, by Jove, they have to get that detail cleared out in detail.
(E.g., if we're discussing the workflow engine, you can jolly well stop picking on the exact font used in the dummy screenshots. Yes, you'll get any font you want, but you'll get it from the GUI team. Can we move ahead already?)
- the more extreme case of the above: people who ask something completely unrelated and completely irrelevant.
(Believe it or not, the "anyone else likes wood?" from a Dilbert strip actually happens in some real meetings. Just replace "wood" by some other completely irrelevant topic.)
- the client PHB who just is affraid to reach a conclusion, and instead just _has_ to show that he/she/it manages. So each time he/she/it will want something else wantonly changed.
(E.g., dude, we already gave you a template editor for those reports. Can we please, please, please not go yet again into whether to use landscape or portrait? Just use the editor and print them diagonally, for all I care.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, only to expect different results.
This was always something I keep in mind when performing IT frontline troubleshooting. But thank God I am not one of the PHB's who need to keep this in mind when in pointless meetings. Which reminds me of another quote that was said during my days of working for a Fortune 500 company while at their CHQ in meeting after meeting.
Me: You guys have meetings all day. How do y'all get any work done in between?
PHB: That's the idea!
Let us not forget the "team-building" meeting. Nothing like hanging out with people from work that I can barely tolerate during the work day on my own time. Yay!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Meetings are always going to be inefficient because language is hard.
As clearly demonstrated by the writing in this article.
This Rands person has some very good points. Still (and feel free to mod me down for saying so), it's hard to take advice on organizational makeup from someone who gets "here" and "hear" mixed up. (That being said, I think I'll carefully check my grammar and spelling before I post this...)
oh boy. i was on a team building weekend, skiing in the italian dolimites, with two girls and a guy from my company. it was the best four days holiday i ever had. i guess that kind of stuff either makes or breaks the team. definitely worth trying though.
It really depends on what people are attending the meeting, and that the goal is with the meeting.
In my firm (not mine, but I like to think so) - we conduct a friday meeting, where the different departments talks about issues, something to be changed etc. It's my understanding[1], that it's always the bosses that are talking, and even when they try, they really can't wring out information from the employees. Especially if it evolves feelings etc. (say a personal/professional conflict).
So it depends on people, and how much they 'believe' in the firm. Ie. are they ready to admit their faults/fault regarding a case, and are they willing to take a punch to get it resolved. Usually it turns out that the bosses have to spy around to detect such thing, or get the information from a third party.
The meetings I attend (which is mostly with the bosses) are on a different level. I have never attended such meeting without getting a issue resolved - simply because I do not fear for my position. I always have the studies to fully concentrate on, and the job salary after done studying is much better than my current. So the position of the employee matters a lot, and what personality they have.
It's strange, that in a small company like 'mine' (we aren't more than 12) - the communication is still lacking in many areas, and conflicts are allowed to reach an unpleasant level before steps are taken to resolve it.
[1] I don't participate in these meetings, since I'm studying at that time.
To organise work in a project, you (almost) never need a meeting, use ICQ, use e-mail (person to person or a list), frequently , and you dont need a meeting.
I work for a meeting-happy fortune 500 company and here's what I've learned about it. The only way to stay out of pointless meetings is to not have them happen in the first place!
There are many people in depts that I work with who meet 8-5 monday through friday. These people constantly try to include you in meetings and frequently try to set up recurring meetings (the real beasts). You can sit through these things and try to be "cutting edge" or you can sleep... or whatever, but there's always the same outcome. Nothing gets done. This is because these people live to meet. That's what they identify their importance at their jobs by... "Whooo... it was a busy day... I HAD MEETINGS ALL DAY!!!"
Ok... here's how you do it. If it's a customer in the company (or another)... you HAVE to do the following:
1. ALWAYS APPEAR BUSY - of course you're not... but you have to give this impression. They know that as a developer, your time is important... and if they think that the meeting will really set you back, they're less likely to schedule it.
2. If it's more of a when can we do it meeting... take care of it (or start and have the answer to it) before you get there. This leads to shorter meetings. Then remind them... "I'm busy... I have to get back and work."
3. A recurring meeting is something you fight as though your life depended on it. These things will suck the life out of you... do whatever you can to convince the customer this isn't neccessary.
There you have it... not the complete list, but a good start.
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
"My input was neither wanted nor needed and you'll be sending out a mass email to cover the subject of this meeting anyway. Was it really better to have me in this meeting than out on the production floor getting work done?"
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Management's means for proving they add value 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time they're held by actual worker types, they're short, and things get accomplished.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You haven't lived until you've had the Meeting on Meetings. These basically consist of some exec talking for about 40 minutes about the structure of meetings meanwhile not following his own advice. The meeting concludes with an extra hour of a video about meetings.
Oh and the first rule of meetings is to 'Keep it under an hour.'
I really did just accept a meeting request for a pre-meeting for a meeting which is a pre-meeting for another meeting.
I have misplaced my pants.
by hiding all the chairs. If nobody can sit and get comfy, it goes a whole lot faster. Not serving food or drinks cuts out the obligatory social time that takes up the first 15 minutes while we finish our danish.
Top ten reasons to stop procrastinating: 10.
'bout the same value as the The Useless Topic Wack Jobs...and in this case we have both.
What is this...'Point Out the Obvious' Monday?
Terrible meetings seem more common in large companies. I work in a largish company, but since most of my meetings are in a small division of a largish company I can see this tendency in effect. The rare times I have gone to a cross platform meeting involving people from the IT dept, the sales dept, and management, all of the disastrous characteristics of corporate meetings rear their brutal heads. I learn nothing, PowerPoint is used and abused to no end, and the company spends allot of money having me there. More often than not though, the meetings with my team (sales only) are very useful. They are short, informational, and involve no PowerPoint at all. Pens and boards. We meet once a week with a solid agenda and never deviate or spend more time than we have to.
Chances are, you are an incompetent boob.
#1 - To get input, feedback, assessment
#2 - To build a steering committee, advisory panel or think tank
#3 - To get status reports, discuss findings, issue congratulations
#4 - To think out loud, out of the box, in the box, or around the box.
Meetings should only be held to:
#1 - Inform a large group of people the same information at the same time
#2 - To complement managing expertise with technical expertise, when dealing with clients, vendors or intracompany issues.
If you are frequently appearing at meetings that serve no other purpose than to give the person running the meeting a "clue", don't go. Inform the sorry sack of shit that you have responsibilities too, and when you have a job to do, you do it yourself. Meetings only serve to dillute authority, interrupt the work day, and to create unnecessary management overhead.
The stereotypical Pointy Haired Boss, and his idiotic meetings are true to form parody of the post-victorian management structure of the Baby Bells and former components of AT&T. Whereever former employees of either group (and there a lot of them) go, incompetence follows.
Basically, in a nutshell, very regular meetings, premeetings, planning sessions and group sitdowns are the sign of an incompetent manager who relies on everyone around them to fill in their own inadequacies. They are more often than not poorly educated, not knowledgable on any recent technologies or trends, and are only efficient at the politics of companies that will spend $24 million for a red coffee stain logo.
They cannot understand what their employees do for a living, but feel that they aren't working hard enough, so while they enjoy a strictly 9-5 schedule (with plenty of golf thrown in) the management beneath them actually deals with the day to day running of the place, and the managers above them actually are running the big picture.
These middle managers are nothing but shit-clogged information filters. They don't understand neither the ground up technology that drives their business, nor the top down business rationale that also, drives their business. They cannot communicate between the two groups, and really serve no other purpose than to insulate upper management from the commoners below.
They hold meetings. That's what they do. They employ sycophants instead of visionaries, and kill the spirit. After 25 1 hour meetings in a week, how the fork are you supposed to get anything done?
I resent it when I get pulled into a meeting. People know this. So if they pull me into one it's usually for a good reason.
Now, here's my rule. If a meeting lasts more than 10 minutes it's wrong. If the meeting get's to the 5 minute mark and we have not yet accomplished anything, I take over the meeting, determine what needs doing and split it up. I then declare the meeting over.
You should never ever do something at a meeting. You talk about what needs doing, briefly and then go back to work.
My company is not very corporate... I'm told it's worse at big companies. I can't imagine how people can stand it.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
... is today's Dilbert online (9th Feb)
a pointless meeting.
Clicking on the link got me a message from Websense about "adult content". Yeah, it's adult - children have better sense than to get stuck in these meetings.
--RJ
true for most cases but let's say you need to meet with a colleague who accuses another person of making sexist remarks.
"ok, sandra, calm down"
"but he squeezed my bum and said it was really juicy!"
"well, he's hardly wrong there... but! we start with an agenda!"
"AGENDA?! I just want you to fire the bastard!"
"OK, point 1: fire... bastard...! point 2: discuss your ass. Do we agree on the agenda?"
"sob."
My previous boss loved meetings because she never wanted to have to do any real work. A meeting was a place for her to gossip, chat, eat and waste other people's time. Anyone she didn't like would get chewed out or have crappy assignments piled-on during meetings. :)
It is my belief that most meetings really are time-wasters, existing only to reinforce the self-importance of those in charge.
When my boss was told to start rotating the chair for the Employee-of-the-Month selection committee between us supervisors, I ran them with an iron fist when it was my turn. Since I was also expected to complete all of my usual duties as well(salaried means no overtime), I interrupted anyone who got off-topic and brought them back to what we were doing. I may not have made friends that way, but I cut 3 two-hour donut-fests a month down to two separate 30 minute meetings per month.
When her boss found out from another department head who sat in on the meetings how I had taken charge, he decided he liked my methods and promoted me to another department. He apparently also told my now old boss to cut out all non-essential meetings and keep any meeting she had down to a half hour. Was she PISSED.
Flash is the Herpes of the Internet.
your.opinion >
In our company, which has several offices across the globe, meetings are the most longed-for events of the day. They last for at least three hours every day, and at least half of the staff participate.
Needless to say, meetings are held in yahoo conferences with an occasional videocam. Most view them as the everlasting Developers vs. Marketroids struggle, but I find them fun. Well, at least we can laugh all we want at them and they will never hear us unless we will use the mike, which we won't.
Not to mention that typing a lot is tiresome for many people and it's much more often that something really useful is discussed in a conference -- and the 'meetings' are all logged for future reference -- without all the bragging and self-show typical for live meetings.
___
On Slashdot, Russians comment on YOU!
Are you Lonely ?
Don't like working on your own ?
Hate Making Decisions ?
Then Call a Meeting !!!!
YOU CAN...
- SEE people
- DRAW Flowcharts
- FEEL Important
- IMPRESS your collegues
All on Company TimeMEETINGS
The pratical alternative to work.
If you'd met mine you'd never attend any of his meetings.
Brings a new definition to verbal diarrhea!
Worst
It's always the others that are the "useless meeting wack jobs", isn't it.
Fact is, anybody can become an annoying and unproductive participant in meetings when the circumstances are wrong. And one person's useless verbiage can be a productive contribution to someone else, while your erudite locutions and insightful analysis may just be considered "hot air" by everybody else.
So, worry about your own contributions first, don't try to second-guess other people.
The ones I really can't stand is when you have two upper level management, or some sales weasel and management together.
They always feel the need to keep the verbal farting going to explain how they have a keen grasp on the blindingly obvious, which is followed by the other trying to show just how much they understand the same thing.
VP: Of course one of the other reasons that we're interested in Voice-over-IP is the cost savings. We can't keep paying the phone company $30 per line. This will allow us to redirect those funds elsewhere.
Sales: Of course the savings are great. The phone company has been able to get away with charging what they want for a while as they are the only game in town, but now with Voice-over-IP you can save some of that cost for use for some other project since you no longer have to pay $30 per month per phone.
VP: This will allow us to then spend that money in some other areas where it is needed as we'll no longer need to pay out per line.
And it goes on and on. Makes me wanna kill myself. Of course anything you try and say to let them both know how foresightful they are and move along instead just makes them think that you don't fully understand the situation and they start to explain it to you again.
God...sometimes I feel like I live in "Office Space".
So are many gay men. Your point?
(With bad project managers)
So be sure to show up and be quiet. Pay attention or you may miss an opporutnity to have tasks assigned to somebody who isn't present.
...as a meeting. If you want entertaining cynical hummor about how to suffer meetinghood, read the "Meetings" chapter in The Dilbert Principle. This article is a crude imitator's windy first draft by comparison.
And yes, 90% of the time is wasted if you take a narrow "information transfer" point of view. It isn't. Steven Pinker said it best in The Language Instinct:
(We might add superstitious, egocentric, paranoid, deluded, projecting, as the case may be.)
I hate it when people will ask questions about stuff that they could just look up in google after the meeting. As long as you understand the basic concepts of what they are talking about, go back and look up the stuff you weren't too clear on. Most meetings i've been to are useless. I could have read an email in about 2 minutes compared to an hour long meeting. I admit that some meetings are important though. Motivational meetings are good sometimes. Sometimes they try to have a motivational meeting just to motivate, and the speakers are not motivated. WhatsAPro
Mark
Recently went to a mandatory *shudder* all-employee meeting because the VP was in town. Big, big company. Anyway, the morning of the meeting, the head of operations comes around, and he hands me a slip of paper. It has a topic on it. It seems like nobody asks questions at these meetings, so they decided to hold a "focus group" to come up with questions. Then they took those questions, and gave them to people to ask.
I was surprised by the whole thing, so I didn't get a chance to say no. I was actually given a topic, not a question. "The use of the rating and ranking system in the company" They use a ratings and ranking system in the company, commonly known as "rank and yank" where all the managers have to rank their people from 1 to N. Then all the managers get together and put their lists together, aka horse trading. Eventually, there is a top 15%, bottom 15%, and middle 70%. I decided that I wouldn't just ask what it was, I would ask them a hardline question about it. Something along the lines of "Why did we choose to implement a rating and ranking system, even though the only people it really benefits is upper management?"
Well, the meeting ran long, and some of the planted people got to ask their question, but not me. Wow, you could really tell that the questions were planted too, it was embarassing. So after the meeting, I talked to the op director and asked why they didn't just give the questions to the VP instead of making it seem like people were just coming up with them? He said that it was the VP's idea to plant the questions in the audience, and he did know what they were going to be. He just wanted it to look spontaneous.
I still can't quite believe it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
randsinrepose.com got bounced by my employer's websense filter for "Adult Content". How fitting is that? I had to proxy through my home server just to get a look. I see no naked chicks, so I can only imagine the "Adult Content" is the useless meeting article itself. Looks like the 'man' is trying to keep us down. c.
drink beer, and let the water run the mill
HLUAGHLUAGAGLHAUG
No meeting should ever last more than an hour. THe individual calling the meeting is responsible for defining the agenda, which defines the information and the problems to be solved. Everyone needs to know why they are there and what to expect. If neccessary discussion is moved off line once the stake holders are identified.
THese rules are so simple I can't understand why supposedly educated and experienced managers can't get it right. It is a simple organiizational task.
Sometimes an hour is too short and it dribbles over to 1 hour and 15 minutes. I don't think I have had a 2 hour meeting I was running in years.
If you are not the person calling the meeting demand an explicit written agenda, tell the person calling that you have some important tasks to do right after the meeting and if it is going poorly push to have the discussions taken off line of from sub-committess.
Simple organizational principals which work over 90% of the time.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
i usually get stuck attending some webinar or the like spawned by management reading some ad from a trade magazine on the toilet... the idea should usually be flushed with the rest of the BS that comes from them....
decisions are never made, conclusions are never drawn, and usually too many man hours are usually wasted with little more than an increased stress level on our part...
and its our fault we couldn't make it work in our $@#&*@'d up environment... stupid salesmen...
Parent is dead on, and I'd take it one step further: don't attend meetings that have no agenda if you can at all avoid it. There are some "crisis" meetings that cannot be avoided, but if you get called to a meeting ALWAYS email the meeting organizer and ask for an agenda -- "Reply to all" can be you friend here, because it puts the "public eye" on the meeting caller.
If they reply with something vague or don't reply at all, you're off the hook. If someone asks why you weren't at the meeting, you can just say that that you were busy with X and that the agenda had nothing to do with your projects.
There's no escaping some meetings (called by bosses, crises, etc), and sometimes a meeting without an agenda gets called specifically to submarine people who won't attend an agendaless meeting ("We met yesterday and discussed your project..."), but not participating unless an agenda is prepared can definitely help prevent yak sessions where nothing gets done.
I used to work at this company that had meetings all the time. People were meeting happy. I finally realized it wasn't because they actually needed to have them, but because everyone was extremely lazy and clueless and wanted to look busy enough not to be fired.
When something would break somewhere in the organization, *EVERY* manager would get on a conference call together. So you have 20 managers on this conference call, and no tech guys. So, you have 20 people, clueless about technology trying to theorize where the problem lies. Then, they would call random tech people and *MAKE* them reboot machines and network equipment until the problem went away. Even if someone found the problem, it was always "try rebooting first, that will fix it faster".
A meeting was also where it was decided that putting an IP Stack on the old Novell 3.51 fileserver was too dangerous, and they needed to continue to use IPX (and make me route it on their already fucked up network). But, they needed it backed up and the backup software needed the IP stack. So, they ran a script every night that installed the IP stack, did the backup, and then uninstalled the IP stack. Fucking brilliant.
Any meeting where a new project or new equipment was being ordered for something was attended only by managers. When one of them would make a suggestion, everyone would just agree because it sounded to them like a good idea. "Hey everyone, we're having trouble with this application we built which originally worked over dialup, but now that it's on the network, data comes back too fast and it crashes". So instead of just fixing their damn app by increasing the buffer size, they tell us (the network guys) to SLOW THE NETWORK DOWN for the app.
There's a poster on despair.com that says "Meetings - None of us are as dumb as all of us"
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Almost all of the meetings I attend on a regular basis have the exact same problem. No agenda, or weak agenda. Meeting organizers, take note: spend time on your agenda! Itemize the subjects to be discussed in the meeting, note who will run with each particular item, and give timeframes for each. Then, publish it at least a day in advance.
The next most important step is to write minutes afterwards. Too many times I've attended meetings where everyone nods at the end of the meeting, and they each walk out of the room with a different idea. Publishing minutes to everyone who attended makes sure everyone is on the same page.
your manager, or your manager's manager, or your manager's manager's manager, reads some article in some stupid trade magazine while sitting on the toilet... and an idea is spawned...
several stupid meetings later, you're trying to figure out how this stupid product, which doesn't quite work right, or isn't quite ready for prime time, is going to work in your environment...and if it doesn't, its your fault!
I've found that an effective technique to keep meetings under an hour is to schedule them right. Scheduling a meeting for 4pm doesn't work as people don't seem to mind sticking around late. But schedule a meeting for 11am and everyone wants to get out to lunch. Works like a charm.
ThunderCube: Two interns enter, one intern leaves.
I remember the CEO coming out to give us a pep talk on how great the comany was doing and that we should all just keep working hard. My one question was "So, are you personally buying or selling your stock in the company?" Not only did he not answer the question, he seemed downright pissed off at me...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Cache request? Post of the article, please?
And I wonder why websense has this filtered as adult content. Something I'm missing here or unable to see? Sheesh, looking at google cache of site it doesn't look like strictly adult content. Blah!
Thanks!
Reading the article, I came away with the feeling that a class (meeting), and departmental status meeting fall into the same category.
Most of us are in the communications business. As DeMarco and Lister pointed out, most of the problems we deal with are sociological, not technical. This cynicism expressed in this article will not help you solve your sociological problems.
And expanding on buzzword betting pool: Buzzword Bingo
On a semi-related note, read Cringely's column on the evil that is a Powerpoint 'stack'.
is the same one I hear every damn time we have a meeting.
Boss: "James. JAMES! Are you reading/posting on slashdot again?!?"
Of course, I always am. Stupid meetings.
Oops, gotta go.
I've noticed the nervous laughter from other participants when I raise my hand in a big meeting. I've been complimented (well, I took it as a compliment) for having the nerve to ask certain important questions that everyone else was to timid to raise. But not until today did I know I was a wack job.
Actually, this explains a lot...
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Aah, but how do you do it? Do you just let it sneak out and make everybody wonder where it came from? Feh! Do it like a man! Push your chair back, stick both feet on the edge of the table, cock your ass up in the air, and let it fly! You blow a big, thunderous, cheek-flapping cloud across the table right into the new intern's eye and I guaran-goddamn-tee you that that meeting's gonna be over "toot" suite! High fiber was my best friend the day the boss proposed renaming all our software "my..." because someone on a "task force" thought that that would be a great "paradigm shift."
I paradigm shifted my bowels right the hell outta that room!
The account manager on my project who never talks to us except when somebody dies called a meeting. We all walk in expecting to be canned or something and before we are all seated he starts blabbing. We all look at each other with the what the hell is he talking about look. So he and our team lead just blab at each other the whole meeting. It's like we're watching these two hot-heads have a private chat in their office! It goes on for about 1/2 hour meetings over we all walk out. No one has any idea what the hell that was about. I went back to my desk and worked on my resume. Still haven't found any yet but I still get paid at this joke of a job in the meantime.
You sir (ma'am?!) are my hero!
imagin weeble,
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
MOD PARENT UP, YOU WHORES!
Jesus, I'd pay good money to see that. Next time they schedule a meeting here, I'm gonna load up on Taco Bell on the off chance that our PHB proposes another "tiger team." That asshole *still* can't tell us what that really means.
You can always play "Boardroom Bullshit Bingo". You get all your co-workers together and set up cards like in bingo. However, instead of the usual numbers, what you do is fill in each space in the sheet with a timeless phrase of managment bs such as "out of the box", "synergy", "maximizing potentional", or any phrase that has the word 'motivation' in it without the word 'money'. You then set up an agreed upon sign to alert the others when you have won (for example: tapping the table with your pencil) since shouting 'bingo' in the meeting would not only look odd but also would alert the management as to what is really going on. Then during the meeting you all sit and look like you're paying attention and wait for the manager/management to start the spouting. As each phrase is uttered, you cross it off and hope for the win.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
We try to play games in meetings. An easy one is to try to get laughter from a coworker at the worst possible moment. Harder is the "don't say a word" game. I'm the champ so far at that. Amazing that you can get invited to a meeting and go through the entire meeting without uttering a sound.
At the moment we are really busting our bits because we are so close to the deadline for the project. For the same reason we each spent over half a man-day last week in meetings.
*sigh*
Let's not put too much blame on the guy asking the out of place question.. though I know we all focus our blame on him at hte time. If his question is out of place, it should not be answered at that time.. rather, the person with the answer should say "We don't need to do that in this meeting, come see me after" or whatever.
If the meeting starts with an Org chart, get the hell out.
Wonderful parent post, though I'm going to argue for a different alternative to the big hopeless meeting.
Sure, you could argue that we could have cleared the same question by email instead of having a two-hour meeting, but still.
It depends on who you're working with, obviously, but I've found that often a meeting is a MUCH faster way to resolve something than email. An remotely complicated issue can be better figured out face to face.
People often don't realize their faulty assumptions, and will write out a whole email based on that one flawed idea -- and once they've spent that much time working out a solution, it's damned hard to rewind them all the way back to the beginning, ESPECIALLY in an email where you have to walk on eggshells to avoid insulting people (and you're going *nowhere* after that happens).
My usual answer is the "unofficial" meeting, where no invitations are sent and max 3 people are involved. Then as soon as the invalid assumptions get trotted out, I can offer up the confused-but-trusting look and tactfully sort that out before we go on. And I can MOVE ON as soon as I see that we're all on the same page again, which is also impossible via email.
I'm with you all about larger meetings... most meetings with more than 4-5 people are doomed unless the format is really locked down and there's someone running the thing who's really on-track and not afraid to shut down the jokers, the random-question-generators, the class-participators, the eternally-befogged, the story-tellers, the tangent-surfers, the argument-incitors, the pickers-of-nits, and all the other highly-valued team members that can't be left out because they're, well, on the team. Unfortunately, that's a rare occurance indeed.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
PHB: We're having a meeting to discuss employee retention.
Dilbert: Tell them that employees quit because there are too many useless meetings.
PHB: We won't be getting into reasons at the first meeting
Phemur
did they know there was this discount with Dell?
Prolly not. So, why do you have to dis them when they offer what looks like a good suggestion when viewed from their viewpoint? Why dont you share that "better perspective"? We are not dumb, you know. And you might get a few good ideas from it ( dont pass them off as yours, though, be man / woman / whatever enough to give credit where it is due. ). It's a whole lot easier to charge that hill when you know that the hill to your right is also being taken. It is easier to hold there in the face of resistance when you know there is another unit you are supporting. And what, aside from your ego, or making you look important enough to keep, is stopping you?
The reason most of you "managers" get where you are is not because you are inherently superiour. You got on the bus earlier, and where lucky enough to get a good seat. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it is little different than the old "divine rights of kings" arguments handed out during the aristocratic days to support the failed notion that the King should rule.
As to the "right to a job", I ask you, are you any better? I'll bet you think your "management position" entitles you to a thing or two. Examine yourself.
RE: The military slant. It's all fine, but recall that the should be making sure that his/her/its subordinates have sufficient knowledge to step into his/her/its role in the case he/she/it is removed from that position. Anything less is not acceptable. Now in business, the need is different, but if you arent tring to bring along to your level those currently subordinate to you, then I would argue you are not doing your job. It only works because most of the other "managers" out there are not doing it either.
Also, you need to watch out for the command from the rear problem. The people at the front *know* what is going on in front of themselves better than you do, and Hitlerian rantings from your bunker about holding till the last man will kill morale and make your team far less effective.
Know why Rommel was such a good General? He spent a fair amount of time at the front. Yes, he spent time in the rear as well, but he moved down to the front to see what was going on before he made his moves. I would love to meet *one* business leader who did that. ( Yeah, and maybe you could live in a cubical, before you tell me that it is good enough for me. I *might* believe you then. )
emt 377 emt 4
NOW I CANNOT GET TO MY PRECIOUS JERKCOMICS
;sljfowsnkjflsdhkjnfs isndiunsdfiun usnefiunsiufniunesd w eiufhsidufnisundfiuwe nwuen unef
HURABBALBLRBABUAAL I'M UTTERLY DONGLESS
FATTEN ME UP AND KNEE ME IN THE BALLS
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't lick so many fat pricks. It's like vomiting up spurt.
jnseroijsdof
Having worked for a few large and small coporations, one of the biggest indicators of the corporate culture is how the meetings are conducted.
For one company, when I was in a management position, it was drilled into us not to come to a meeting without a specific agenda. If there was no agenda, there was no meeting. Period. Do not call a meeting unless you are actually attempting to do your job better.
For another company, meetings followed no timetable. They would drift in and out of discussions, and often the people invited to the meeting shouldn't have all been in the same meeting. You can't have the marketing people trying to hammer out strategy while the tech guys are trying to figure out how to make the products link up.
Some companies only have meetings to convey information. Sometimes these are large meetings designed to look like town meetings, but just as the article stated, only a few idiots believe that. I try to avoid these meetings. You want me to get some information about the company? Send me an email. I don't care if nobody else reads it, I do and I don't lose two hours out of my day.
My meeting rules, from my personal experience:
1. Don't go to any meetings unless you have an agenda. It doesn't have to be printed out, but you need to have some goal for the meeting beyond just sitting and talking.
2. Do not have mixed dept meetings unless it's a getting-to-know-you meeting. If it's a meet-and-greet, then say so up front. Every time someone tries to divert the meeting, just say "Let's table that discussion for a more focused meeting". You don't want the sales people talking shop while the tech guys are staring into space and vice versa.
3. Some people work by talking, some work by doing. This isn't a statement of laziness; it's just that different jobs require different interactions. Programmers work by sitting at their desktop writing code. Marketers work by grouping together and talking through their concepts. Don't confuse meetings with work when it isn't,but also don't assume meetings accomplish nothing.
Some groups DO have meetings all day and they DO accomplish something. For most tech guys, any time away from networking or hacking is time lost.
But if you're a tech and you call a tech meeting to brainstorm architecture for a new project, that's still worthwhile work. It goes both ways.
As one of the few people in this corporation who is willing to get involved in fixing things, I'm often asked to sit in on meetings so the dept heads can "pick my brain", or as it more commonly know "take credit for my ideas".
I've gotten in the habit of responding to these e-mailed or phoned requests by saying, "I'd be happy to attend but, I was in an industrial accident some years ago. Many people find my appearance....disturbing."
Works every time.
I do desktop support and at one job I was asked to go to about 8 hours worth of database meetings each week that I had nothing to do with. For the first couple of weeks, I tried to pay attention and input my opinion, but I found I really had no opinion on what they were doing with the various tables. I was sort of upset that I couldn't actually be doing work during this time but the boss insisted that the entire team be there.
Eventually I settled into playing chess on my palm Pilot at all these meetings. Eventually, somebody raised a questions about what was said several hours earlier in th meeting and somebody said "Ask Marc, he's taking notes." While I was slowly realizig they were talking about me and came out of my chess game, my co-worker looked over at what I was doing and anounced "He's playing chess!" Everybody just shruggd and went back tot he meeting. From then on I stopped gong to said meetings and stayed in the office doing work and nobody ever ever bothered me about it.
Does it really matter if the meeting is useful or not? I get paied the same if I spend all day in useless meetings or if I spend the day being productive.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Dude, I recognized the articl writer as a windbag, not a player, and bailed on it immediately. Too bad I read the first 15 paragraphs or so...talk about going nowhere and wasting time...
(Pet peeve: check your grammar and cut/paste errors before you publish stuff)
man rtfm
The definition of "real boss" is that the real boss has no boss.
The real boss can issue policies like:
"If a meeting is scheduled which involves more than three people and lasts longer than a half hour, everyone in the meeting is fired."
The real boss can simply not hire middle managers, thereby solving all possible problems with bullshit liar fuck bastards, office politics, wasted money, engineers who can't do their jobs, etc. with a simple two sentence policy.
To paraphrase Mel Brooks: it's good to be the real boss.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I was a producer at a public radio station in the Midwest. This means that every staff meeting was filled with middle-market talk show hosts whose one marketable feature is that they love to talk and talk. Those are some awful meetings. One goes on and on, then the next one feels they haven't been listened to then the next. Man, it's painful.
When I ask this question of others, I usually at least get several seconds of stunned silence in response. Asking this question of others often tends to annoy and frustrate them just like it used to do the same to me, so it won't make you friends with them, however. But it sure cuts through the crap.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
In fairness to them, this may have been on purpose: they were probably clinging to the distant hope that, given enough repetition, eventually the kids in question would figure out how to go through the darned script on their own....
--Bruce Fields
I was just wondering, has anyone here participated in official business meetings online? If so, what online chat mediums did you use (irc, icq, or some internal system)?
I'm wondering how the flow and format of the meetings go, if people actually participate whole heartedly.
Or do people just screw around and start flame wars?
When I was a a tech for Global Crossing, we had text pagers that any servers we were responsible for would send error messages to. Most people kept them on vibrate as the beep was really annoying. I was on the security team, so the IDS also paged me when a certain threshold of suspicious activity was received.
Anyway, if a meeting dragged on for too long and seemed useless, I'd pick up my pager, look all freaked out, and hurry out of the room. This trick caught on with most of the admins. Management thought we were so dedicated to our network.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Please allow me to fill in those gaps! *grin*
Conflict Manager: "So, you both agree that you are here to solve a problem?"
Conflict Manager: "Student X, what is it about Student Y with which you have an issue?"
Student X: "Student Y keeps giving me shit for using Windows and fueling the evil empire even though I didn't pay for it."
Conflict Manager: "Student Y, what is it about Student X with which you have an issue?"
Student Y: "Student X is a fucking tool and a n00b for not being 31337 enough to love the process of mastering Linux, FreeBSD, or any other Open Source OS."
Conflict Manager: "Now, what can we do to resolve these issues?"
Student X: "Nothing. Nothing at all. Student Y's bigotry will go on until he grows up and breaks away from the Slashdot herd mentality. Everyone being 'different' and 'noble' like some new age vegetarian in a futile, destructive effort to sculpt self image and core beliefs."
Student Y: "STFU n00b"
Conflict Manager: "Do you both agree to take the steps we have outlined here?"
Student X: "What steps?"
Student Y: "OMG, a future PHB!"
Conflict Manager: "Do you think we will need to see you two in the future?"
Student X: "That depends on how much abuse and belittlement I can take."
Student Y: "Not if n00b over there finally realizes that his kind is soon to be extinct as Linux continues to dominate the market and keeps making Microsoft ph34r!"
Conflict Manager: "Well then, thank you very much."
Please note that the poster does not have anything against Linux users. Rather, the poster (a former Mac evangelist and current NT, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris user) has something against people that are closed minded due to an elitist attitude. I could have just as easily replaced OSS with MacOS, BeOS, or OS/2 for that matter.
-Lucas
Hurry, someone strangle him immediately!!!
...wiki's. That is the bottom line. It is hard to ponder tricky technical issues anyhow during meetings because one's mind is focused on how you appear rather than the content. Occasional meetings, fine. But, they are not the best place to weigh and solve complex issues.
Then again, the less important face-time is to a manager, the more you are likely to be outsourced. So perhaps we should somehow learn to live with meetings. For example, sometimes there is a hot babe in the meeting and one can focus on her mouth when she is talking and imagine her giving you a hummer. Makes the time fly, among other things. Just be careful when standing up.
Table-ized A.I.
Getting invited to too many meetings? Just sneak a page or two into the presenters slide desk from one of $$$$$exyGal's journal entries. See, por ehemplo, Huge tastefully explicit nipples at Mcdonalds
You only use 2% of your DNA
I had that infliction once, it hit me one morning after having 13 burgers at the local greasy spoon the night before. SPent the whole morning with assburgers.
I used to work in a place (a very good company, all things considered) that actually had a group of people holding regular meetings to try to figure out why there were so many meetings.
I once attended a meeting where the PHMs spent 40+ minutes arguing over whether to use the word 'exit' or 'quit' for the product GUI.
I think we wound up using 'close'.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
There is no difference between types of meetings. Any categorisation is completely unnecessary. The only people who like to go to meetings are people who offer the company no other innate value.
We learned early on that you have to hide when everyone is leaving for a meeting, and if you ever get caught, move slowly towards the meeting locale, so you can backtrack when the coast is clear.
People who like to go to meetings are the scourge of the industry. They often go into politics. Which is probably good riddance.
"Yeah, are you wearing eyeliner" to a guy, obv. "Did your Mom pick that tie out for you?" "Who do I see about getting the last 2 hours of my life back?"
I've always been amused by scripts like that. I have an almost irresistable urge to jump out of the lines of their script and force them to think. Few things are funnier than watching someone struggle to make reality fit the template they have for "how reality should be".
"Student X, what is it about Student Y with which you have an issue?"
"My issue is that Student Y is a spineless lackey of the teachers, and actually believes that pre-rehearsed scripts are a good idea. What do you think? Do you think this rote rehearsal is helping?"
"Student Y, what is it about Student X with which you have an issue?"
"Well, uh, I used to think you were capable of thinking for yourselves despite the script, but you've just proven me wrong. So I guess we don't have an issue anymore."
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
So I read the entire article and then I realized... the joke's on us...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I used to excuse myself, saying I needed to use the restroom. Then I wouldn't come back.
Unfortunately, this strategy made it into my yearly performance review under the "Needs to improve" category.
(If anyone hasn't guessed yet, this was at a very large chip manufacturer.)
Well two actually.
The first: Manager of Operations: "No one will be laid off as long as I am here." Two weeks later he was fired, a month later the layoffs started.
The second: The manager of my group had mentioned that Java was going to be the new standard soon. Every meetingwe had with her, the same annoying guy would stand up and ask when we were going to get training on the "new Standard". A year after her announcement and we were still using Dynasty, but this guy kept asking, even though it was apparrent that we were never gonna switch.
A meeting of 10 people each each earning an average of 50K year costs $100 an hour.
This applies to email as well. I spend a lot of time typing out answers to questions in email ( everyone likes to have a "receipt for my answer")
IMHO any cost/efficency conscious business person should teach people to ask themselves the following questions when requesting information:
1. what do i want to know or what do I want to communicate?
2. what is the fastest way for me to ask/tell my point and what is the fastest way for those I am communicating with to respond?
Steve
My former employer used to make us attend quarterly meetings where a marketing type would show us Powerpoint slides for a couple hours in a darkened room.
Believe me, the time goes by a lot faster when you doze off, and you come out feeling energized to do some real work.
Unfortunately, the real world is a lot like high school, just with much higher stakes.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I am posting too late for anyone to see but anyway. At my last job we had some useless meetings happenning sometimes so at one of them I just decided to stenograph, take notes on what people are saying. Of-course it is funnier to me since I know these people, but still, here it is:
.. (fifteen more minutes)
.... (another half an hour)
Meeting: Architect, VP, PM, BA, Tester, DBA, QA Manager, Developer1 (me), Developer2.
1. Architect is going over the use cases, he is saying: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah, blah.
PM: What? OK.
2. BA: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
3. Architect: blah, bleh, bleh, bleh, blah, blah!!! WTF?
PM: What? OK.
4. QA Manager: Blah???!!! I have to do work? BLAH #)$! *twit @%@$!
5. VP: Blah, Bleh, Blah, Bleh, Bleh, Bleh, Blah, Blah, Bleh, blah, blah, Bleh, Bleh, Blah, Blah, Blah.
6. QA Manager: ?
PM: What? OK.
7. VP: Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah,
(goes on for 5 minutes)
8. Developer2: WTF?
PM: What? OK.
9. Architect: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, DAO, blah, blah, blah, EJB, blah, blah.
10. BA: Blah, blah, quering mechanism... (what???) Blah.
11. Architect: ?!!!
12. Developer1: ?!!!
13. Developer2: ?!!!
14. QA Manager: Buy on eBay! (his other business)
15. VP: Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, (5 minutes) Blah, No Limitations, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, (5 more minutes)
16. PM: What? OK.
17. VP: Blah, Blah, Blah, (5 minutes) years of experience, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, (ten minutes)
18. QA: bbblllaaaaaaaabbbbbhhllllaaaaaalllllllbbbbb.
19. VP: Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah,
20. BA: blah......
21. VP: Blah, Blah,
---
Can you guess whether we solved the problem in that meeting?
You can't handle the truth.
It is the person that asks something just to appear intelligent. Like their question is so insightful that people will drop to the floor and grovel at their genius. I hate that dweep and I think that is the person the poster is making reference to.
I like your military reference. To add:
Straight from the U.S. Army leadership handbook, FM 22-100:
Keep Your Soldiers Informed
Knowing 'why' you're taking this hill instead of that hill will put a stop a lot of dumb questions and increase trust in both directions. Sometimes there's no time to inform everybody. But if you've generally done a good job of rumor-control your employees will give you the benefit of the doubt when you can't.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
touche :-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
The following is a true story. Only the names of projects and managers have been changed to protect the guilty...
Third Sextant project estimation meeting this week. Previous two meeting have not gotten the engineering man months below eighty, the goal is twenty. It looks impossible. The basic problem is that Sextant is a hard realtime embedded medical imaging system using QNX. Marketing is demanding that we use a new Windows-only workflow management solution from a third party, called "eSynerge". Just the massive redesign to fit Windows into the hardware and software architectures is going to take sixty engineer months.
The directory says, "Let's play make-believe. If you had a magic wand and could change anything about the project, would could we do to lower the resource estimate?"
Me: "We could make a requirement for the eSynerge package to perform all of the software installation."
Director: "Good idea. Unrealistic, since we have no control over eSynerge, but a good idea. Any others?"
Bob: "Require eSynerge to provide a hard realtime NT kernel."
Susan: "Require eSynerge to perform all image processing in realtime."
Mark: "We could make eSynerge do everything. All we would need to do is sit back and write process documents."
Director: "Good, good. Now we're getting creative. Let's see what the magic spreadsheet says. Wow! We got the estimate to under eighteen months! I'm going to go take these number into the vice president."
Us: "What?!?! You said to play make believe! Those are all impossible requests! We were joking!"
Director: "I know, but I'll include all of your 'assumptions' as footnotes. The vice president is going to be so happy to see these. Geez, you guys were really productive today."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Over the years I have come to accept useless meetings as a fact of my job - and even though they should frusterate me I have pretty much become numb to the whole experience. What still gets me every time, however, is the dolts who for whatever reason (personally I think its probably that they like to hear themselves speak) seek to extend the useless meetings as much as possible with useless conversations while the rest of us are anxious to leave and get back to our work.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
This quote is Roll On The Floor Laughing funny.
"First, you can assume all the engineers are players -- they've got technical knowledge they may throw on the table otherwise why were they invited? "
How many times is this the case ? More likely the meetings original intent is to get the engineers and other techies to sign on for a load of work that will have no merit. This is called a
"corporate vision"
This document was written by a guy I used to work with. I gather that nothing has changed since I left that company. Enjoy.
The Art of Competitive Conversation:
Top Ten Ways to Annihilate the Opposition
Other titles: "Congressional Protocol"
"Robert's Rules Not"
"Company Policy"
1. Seize the floor and monopolize the "discussion". Remember that just having the floor most of the time is a great power in itself. To achieve this, interrupt, intimidate and subtly ridicule your opponents whenever possible. As thrilling as it is to have all eyes and ears turned toward you, remember to keep a poker face and pretend it doesn't matter: your monopolization will go unnoticed if you are successful in pretending that you are, alas, just the only person present who has anything meaningful to say.
1. Successful interruption techniques:
1. Loudly blurt a short phrase, then repeat it two to three times with decreasing intensity while you finish composing your statement. For example, "What I want to know is...What I want to know is...", etc. The first word best cuts through attention to others if it is filled with hard consonants.
2. Start a side conversation with someone else in the group. This technique can be dangerous: serious loss of face can result if the person addressed doesn't turn theirs toward yours. For this reason the technique should only be attempted with "friends", not your toughest opponents. See below for other ways to use sycophantic sidekicks and people fearful of you.
2. Adopt a mindset that your top priority is to "win" the conversation and dominate other participants. Only pursue the true topic of the discussion as far as necessary to keep the floor and hold attention without making any noticeable blunders. Only offer true enlightenment if you have thought out your theory well in advance; if there are any small errors, your opponents will bludgeon you with them. Even though brilliant, you may expect your thoughts to be trivialized, trampled and ignored. Many wise ideas have been squelched because the presenter was not prepared to fiercely maintain control of the floor after their presentation, but paused long enough to allow another competitor to change the subject.
3. If foreknowledge and authority permit, set and control the agenda for the "discussion" without informing anyone. This prevents your opponents from arming themselves with information or prior consideration of the topic which might enable them to make illuminating comments. It also handicaps them emotionally, since most will feel left "out of the loop".
4. Change the subject. Combined with a skillful and abrupt interruption, this can be one of the most effective ways to shut down the opposition and seize the floor. Everyone will be disoriented and memory of your opponents point will not "sink in".
5. If another person manages to say anything, search for and focus upon any small error, however unrelated to the main topic. Loud and frequent use of the word "No" is recommended. For further instruction, refer to "Asserting Control: Development of Personal Identity in Two Year Old Children".
"But..." is also effective, but is a softer reprobation to be reserved for softer opponents. "No" implies that the opponent's statement is the opposite of truth, whereas "But" introduces the possibility that the idea, though invalid in its stated form, may still be worth considering.
6. If absolutely forced to consider and respond to another person's statements, and you can discern no error, remember to return fire with a volley of "ROT":
1. Reflect: Respond by posing another question, one that will not be answerable by your opponents without considerable effort. The deflecting question must be characterized as being absolutely crucial for any meaningful evaluation of the opposition's point.
2. Obfuscate: Rather than disagree, add so much additional information that the original competi
Thanks for your dangerous, unqualified opinion that you felt like sharing. Are you autisitic yourself?
I need to get going, but I'll hang around one more minute to answer this, then I need to get to work. Anyhow, here is the deal, you can't tell everyone everything, it's not always a good idea, and more importantly it's an abuse of information. The IT staff knew we had a corporate mandate to purchase Dell machines, they thought it was stupid. Because they could build machines off NewEgg cheaper. Where is my garantee these machines won't break, what's the turnover time, sure I can do this at home, but in the office, it's absurd.
You call me a troll, which I find interesting, because I don't understand, why I am trolling but you are not?
I offered clear concise information, you offered me a BBC TV series. Which wouldn't be very interesting if there wasn't some drama.
War, is won in the tactics, in the way you fight, in the will to fight. Don't tell me about war, because based on your analysis, you haven't studied much. Many a time, a smaller, worse armed, millitary unit has claimed victory, because of good training, tactics and will.
Churchill gave the vision, his lietenants made it come to life.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Yes, and democracy "should" be about the People's Will. Are you here to explain how this view differs from reality, or were you just sharing a worldview that, coincidentally, emphasizes the value of your current job in Management?
[SNIP] A fair amount of suggestions are horribly short sighted, or uninformed. [/SNIP]
And you as a manager do not feel the need to give your employees the correct information? What are the purpose of your meetings, then? Share the benefits of your elevated view of the terrain (to use your own terms) with your coworkers, instead of using it to assert your intellectual superiority over them. I'm sorry if I'm coming across sharply, but I've heard these justifications from so many piss-poor managers that it makes my head spin.
P.S. The workplace is not the military: lives are not lost when the company profits dip. People who think otherwise just make it more unpleasant for the rest of us.
==---------------==
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Employees are not soldiers. They are not troops. If they don't like an order, they will undermine it, argue with whoever gave it, slack off until it's changed, simply never carry it out, do something else instead, and/or quit.
Managers too often seem to think that everyone else is there to march up and down at their whim. When said whims appear to be random and illogical, orders don't get followed.
To return to the analogy, a good manager advises their employees of the upcoming terrain, the overall state of the battle, the reasons for taking a particular hill. If and when the employees offer suggestions for taking the hill in a faster way, or taking another hill entirely, or of pitfalls along the chosen path, the good manager will take these on board and adjust the plan accordingly.
Note also that a good middle manager will listen to their front-line managers, supply them with the information they need, give them the authority to change hills unless it's ultra-important, and be able to move their managers around on the field as required, taking into account what the managers report about the local conditions of the hills.
Until my boss houses me, feeds me, and equips me with the latest military technology, I ain't taking that hill unless I have a damn good reason.
Lazy being "just make a new key/value pair" when I really need 13 data fields, so I only have to pull one record back, not 13 pairs. It will save a lot of query time, god forbid you have to add a field later.
Unless of course it's just a two field lookup table
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
the best example of asperger's syndrome that the slashdot crowd might be familiar with is the character in war games played by eddie deezen. he keeps interrupting the conversation leading to:
Jim: "Mr Potatohead! Mr Potatohead! Backdoors are *not* secrets!
The thing was, I was just a temp worker doing simple click-the-button-make-it-go updates, and wasn't going to even be working for them when the new database was going to be roled-out. I had no reason to listen in on the conferences, since everything stated during the conference was sent out in an email later in the day anyways.
It was pointless, and usually, only 1 person ever got to speak during the meetings. When someone had a question the person hosting the conference would just tell them to send an email!
It was a complete waste of everyone's time, and could've been handled by email alone.
Out of all the jobs I've ever had, the only good meetings were the one's that my bosses had to attend by themselves. I can get so much more work done when I don't have a monkey in a suit peering over my shoulder, throwing shit at me.
The spirit of this diatribe is well meaning but it could use more work.
The major failing is the paucity of win-win conciliation. How do you deal with a windbag who is clutching onto a meager knowledge base that you can't effectively get to without going through him or her?
In this case you can't exclude them until much later in the "game". You have to engage to get through the BS.
In painful meetings, I just take notes: who is talking, about what, and for how long. I just quietly present the notes to whomever is running the meeting afterword and suggest what can be done to lessen the time wasting. Usually I start with stuff like: okay, during this 15 minuets you and Joe were talking about the upper shaping discriminator, did anyone else have to hear that?
I found it useful.
But then I left those kinds of jobs. I go to perhaps two bad meetings per year now. Yay!
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Maybe somebody wil read this thread ...
What about short, max. 15 minutes, meetings.
5 of these in a week equals 1 hour long once a week.
Does anybody have this kind of culture in their company?