Having worked in nonprogrammer roles… I think the only people that like meetings are upper management - across departments.
They don’t really even “like” them but they’re basically the only thing they do that makes it seem like they do any work.
It’s like grabbing a broom when your boss enters the restaurant. Better to pretend you’re doing something.
Though a lot of them do just like the sound of their own voice.
Scrum is just something I have to endure in order to get paid to program. The worst is when you’re working on something hard and your status hasn’t changed substantially from the previous day. “I did a bunch of things that didn’t pan out, so I only really have an expanding list of things that are not the problem. No, assigning someone to help me is unlikely to resolve the issue faster.”
“no, having a meeting about it won’t help, it will just waste my time that I could be using to figure out the problem.”
I just don’t go the meetings, if they actually need me my boss send me a DM asking me to enter, otherwise she just tell me what I need to know. Only when she can’t participate on the meetings she ask me to enter and told her if they talked about something relevant for us.
Tag teaming that shit like wrestlers.
Making programmers attend meetings should be considered a hate crime.
At some point in the future, someone will understand what I mean by “I haven’t had enough time between meeting to read the necessary materials” because I can’t learn shit from verbal discussion.
If that ever actually happens, i firmly believe I will get more time to actually do work too.
It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:
“Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”
“And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”
“It says ‘working on project’.”
And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.
Well, at least they can see the baby steps that way I guess.
But I’ve always wondered if I’m actually terrible at my job or if PMPs, Scrum Masters, Management, etc, can’t actually fathom that I have absolutely no way to roughly estimate how long something can possibly take that ive never done before, and I have no evidence someone else has done it before.
When I was younger I got so frustrated with it I asked if anyone else on the team wanted to do it instead, and there was a resounding no, but it’s feasible so you should keep at it. And eventually I get it working but the whole time it’s demoralizing with the amount of “why are you not done?”
And now I just give the exact details that goes straight over everyone’s heads anyway and ask if they need me to switch my priorities.
Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.
I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.
No. If you need babysitting you have the wrong guy
Guess I’m a programmer
You use Lemmy, that’s something at least
Here here!
I love meetings about the general idea and concept of a project that takeip the “doing” timeof the single person that will do the work.
One of the first things my new boss did was to cancel the daily standup meetings that were enforced by the previous management. God, what a great decision. I’m finally getting shit done instead of having to talk and endure bullshit every day.
I call it the numbing hour. It’s only scheduled as a half hour but it always runs for nearly an hour. I never speak for more than two minutes, I just stand there as my motivation to do literally anything for the rest of the day burns down to zero. Sometimes I wake up 110% motivated with a list of stuff I can’t wait to get done, fortunately the numbing hour is first thing everyday ensuring that I am always fully neutralized.
Not when you’re working from home and being a dad at the same time. Got my kids nap times aligned with meetings. “Oh, sorry to cancel last minute”
Fuck me, I gotta align this shit all over again tomorrow.
I have gotten a couple meetings to be something we ‘skip by default’ where we keep it on the calendar but someone only starts the meeting if they actually need something.
Dramatically cut down on meetings without any problems so far. Now it’s just occasional and way shorter because we get straight to business and then drop the call.
Sounds like it would drive some socialites insane.
I love it.
test
passed
Test
TEST
TESTS
Sysadmins too
I just don’t understand why they apologize.
They could probably write “You’re welcome.” and get a bunch of thank yous back.
