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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."
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.
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!
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.
The worst is The Devils Advocate. He will argue one side and if he doesn't get the desired result, he will begin to argue the opposite side. These people are worthless and should be strangled as quickly as humanly possible.
When I worked at AT&T, we were given beepers. When we were called into a meeting (AT&T doesn't have small short meetings...they are always marathons), we would request someone page us in 10 minutes. If the meeting was worthwhile, we stayed. If it wasn't, we bolted. That was fine until everyone else started doing it and it looked like a bomb threat had been called in.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
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
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
You've obviously never worked for The Storyteller. The Storyteller will call a meeting, ostensibly as a means of assessing progress on the project du jour, and then turn it into a one man show about what he did on his vacation to Bimini, how his brother-in-law is particularly worthless, why he decided to go with forest green instead of black on his new car, the great/horrible movie he saw over the weekend, and so forth. Then, about 57 minutes into his one hour meeting, he'll glance at his watch and realize that time's almost up, at which point, he'll say something like "So, is everybody on track for this week?", which is everyone else's cue to lie about how well things are going. After all, The Storyteller didn't call this meeting to hear about your problems - he called it to tell you about some aspect of his personal life, and thereby tell you about his problems...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own 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.
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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.
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"
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Also, a fair amount of suggestions are horribly short sighted, or uninformed. Like, when IT suggest, well why don't we simply build systems in house for this job. Well because i have a contract with Dell saying I won't do that, and in return they cut the company a great deal on the other 300 pcs we have to buy and replace every couple of years, not to mention the parts and service waranties that automatically are updated to four hour on site, by having this contract.
Well, if you actually tell your employees that, rather than throwing them some BS bone to go chew on, then you're already a few steps above most of the other managers out there.
Employees that can trust their bosses and feel like their bosses trust them have much higher morale (and productivity) than those who feel unappreciated or distrusted. If you just swat away your employees' suggestions with a careless remark or a counterpoint that everyone knows is BS, then you've become the manager that we all hate.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
It's for storing as many key/value pairs as you need.
Some people just cannot grasp this concept. No, really.
Though I usually add a third column named "source".
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
In an ideal company, things would run that way. However, "real" and "ideal" are very often opposite directions on the compass.
In a "real" company, most often things are not like in your "but Dell cut us a deal on 300 PCs, translating into exactly X hundred dollars saved."
They're more like some manager declared a dysfunctional product as a corporate standard, because they got a 10,000$ discount. But that decision has cost the company about 2 extra man-years of expensive contractor programmer fees, just to work around the many bugs in that product. We're talking _hundreds_ _of_ _thousands_ of dollars lost, because of that 10,000$ discount.
Seen that happen twice. Literally.
Why did it happen? Because there that foot soldier knew the product and its limitations better than the manager. If the self-appointed "general" actually listened to the soldiers saying "this weapon can _not_ do that", things would have been far better.
You want analogies with the army? OK, I'll give you just two random examples:
1. The american civil war was a blood bath. Why? The minnie ball.
The grand strategic vision of the generals was built upon the past reality of the smoothbore musket. So everyone marched to the limit of the musket's effective range, neatly aligned, shot mostly for the suppression effect, then charged with the bayonets.
Now enter the rifles. An early rifle had three times the range of a smootbore musket. Not only that, but the hollow minnie ball would expand and break in the wound, causing a fist sized exit wound.
So those soldiers were ordered to march and align at a distance at which firing resulted in a bloodbath. Again, and again, and again. No matter how many times those soldiers saw the catastrophe happening, no matter how sickeningly high the losses, those "wise" generals stuck to their grand vision.
Maybe listening to a foot soldier wouldn't have been such a bad idea?
2. When France first got their Gattling guns, someone decided that it's an artillery piece. Based on its size.
So the soldiers were actually ordered to start firing it at 10 times its actual maximum range. By the time the enemy actually got in range, they'd be completely out of ammo.
Again: maybe listening to a foot soldier wouldn't have been such a bad idea?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Often, there'll be the offer of some booze as an incentive to people to attend with a show of willingness.
Of course, after a few beers you're that little bit more likely to tell your cow-orkers just how much you revere them.
You could've been describing my last job. Except with that manager it was "Are we on track?"
..." just to hear, "So we are on track."
If we answered with anything more complicated than "Yes" or "No" he would get all confused until we distilled it down to one of those.
We couldn't say we hit some snag that's taking a little longer and go on to describe what we were working on because then he'd respond, "So we're not on track." Then we'd say, "No, we are, it's just that
Finally we'd just say, "Yes."
Meetings got shorter and shorter the more we understood about them. "Are we on track?" "Yep, sure are."
Why have meetings about projects if the managers really don't want to hear anything about the projects?
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.
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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
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# Modus Ponens
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Har. Har. Responsibility and authority. The "guy" had the first, but not the second. He was responsible for keeping some HD space open so that whatever app could run. He did not have authority to fix the problem he needed to fix to do his job.
:)
It happens to me all the time. A problem happens. I have a fix. I can't do it because it is not my call. Well, if it is not my call, why the **** am I responsible for fixing it?
Something like this happening is most often, IMHO, a sign of bad management. You've got incompetent manager here somewhere. Because obviously this guy's job was not setup correctly. Fix the manager and you will "magically" fix the problem. Strange, huh?
Except that in most cases, like in mine, the management refuses to be "fixed". They'd rather keep doing the stupid thing because they refuse to take professional advice from a professional they hired to dispense the advice. In the field that he is professional in. No amount of logic, written proposals, budget analysis, and common sense will budge them. ****** idiots. But then again, the business' clients are even bigger idiots so even if the stated purpose of the business has nothing to do with what they are (not) providing, money keeps rolling in. So yeah, who cares if thingamajig that is supposedly crucial to our job breaks. Who cares if the expert you hired to take care of the thing told you months ago, in writing, repeatedly, that thingamajig needs to be reset/fixed/replaced.
Blah. I am just somewhat annoyed. I was dumb enough to sign a yearly contract with my current employer. But in a few months, I am goooone. To a place that actually (gasp!) wants to know my professional opinion on things, and is giving the authority to fix things. All they want is results, and they trust me to give the results to them...
Yes, it really does depend on what is being discussed or decided. Often though, it's difficult in advance to make the call.
Here is a nightmare example of an email meeting over a billboard (large outdoor) design.
Being new to the subtlties of email meetings vs face-to-face ones I agreed with my partner graphics designer to have the design emailed around until it was approved. A simple problem to be solved right?
No. This design was bounced around for 3 months with touch-ups and/or complete redesigns every 1-2 weeks. Then, the billboard in question was leased by someone else which meant the whole design was useless since our next available billboard was of a different size and shape.
After another 3 months of designs, modifications, etc... went on we FINALLY had the design that the principals liked.
One week later, I get an email that said (paraphrased) "The billboard lease company wants too much to use their board so go ahead and forget about the whole project".
Because of the case above, and with my experience now, I realize that the whole design & approval process could have been finished in one day. We should have created several designs in the morning and had a 2-3 hour meeting that afternoon. Those 2-3 hours would have been spent tweaking the chosen design at the meeting and approved immediately.
Instead, we ended up spended several hours a week responding to emails & making design changes only to find out the whole thing was a waste of effort.
The one thing I did like about what happened in that case is that for the short time before I quit that company, any time someone asked us why we were running behind on any particular project my answer would invariably be 'We're still trying to catch up from the 100 or so hours we spent on the billboard project'.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
In fact, yes. Unless someone were to come at me screaming "die! die! die!" and waving a big old medieval axe, or something equally dangerous, I couldn't tell preoccupied from dumbfounded from annoyed, if my life depended on it.
However, that's also the reason why I prefer interfacing to a compiler than to a human. My boss says I'm even good at it. Of course, I can't tell if he's serious about it.
I can live in society, even have friends, mainly by having learned quickly stuff like "if you can't tell when you're getting on someone's nerves, better not say something which might get on their nerves." Or like "if you can't tell when someone's interested in your topics, do everyone a favour: listen first, and pick one of their own topics." Or like, "if laughing and screaming are the only two signs you can recognize, you might as well go for making people laugh." Etc.
Still, the issue remains: I can understand a compiler, I can understand assembly, but humans are somewhat of a black box to me.
So, as was said before, I find it hard to believe that mild autism can cause someone to be unable to follow more than 2 sentences in a row in a technical presentation. Autists are known to be bad with humans, but good with computers. If there was someone I'd trust the most to follow a spec and implement it, it would be another autist.
But again, I'm no medic. I wouldn't really know.
But, as I've said, you _can_, to some extent, use logic instead of empathy. Which is all I'm asking for in return. If logic tells you that there's not much reason why someone would really need to know the exact font size _now_, please do trust that logic, and don't waste everyone's time with that question.
You may not be able to empathically tell that I'm bored out of my skull. That's ok. So I'm telling you: those irrelevant questions bore me out of my skull. Now use that piece of information next time you think of showing some activity in a meeting.
You may not be able to empathically sense that everyone else would _kill_ to get out of that stupid meeting room after 3 hours straight. It's ok. I understand. So I'm telling you.
Stick to the topic and be prepared to make some concessions. Keeping everyone there while acting like a spoiled brat (whether it's "no, it's _my_ architecture and I'm not changing any bit of it!" or "no, _I_ want every single detail _now_, and none of you are leaving until _I_ am satisfied") is just boring everyone after 1 hour or so. "Informative" uni-directional meetings get boring even faster.
Now use that knowledge in the next meeting.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.