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."

Comments

Try being a high school teacher

[secondsun]

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.

Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Meetings can be beneficial...

[AppyPappy]

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.

What I've learned about meetings

[pudge_lightyear]

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.

I have a personal 10 minute rule

[spottedkangaroo]

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.

Re:Meetings can be beneficial...

[general_re]

The worst is The Devils Advocate.

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...

Planted questions

[gosand]

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.

Re:Meetings can be beneficial...

[Cutriss]

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.

Re:Meetings can be beneficial...

[Moraelin]

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?

Re:That's a good question

[Anonymous Coward]

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... :)

Re:Jesus Christ.

[Moraelin]

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.