I thought you would say 30 minutes a day, and here I thought “hey not so bad”. 30 minutes a week?! We opened every workday with 45minutes to 1h and a half “stand-up meetings”. We had full days dedicated to talking about scrum every now and then. Nothing ever got gone, nothing worthwhile was ever discussed, it made my hate my profession. Man I am not going through that ever again.
You sound like you worked at my last company also. Scrum is good in principal, but in practice it was just another thing people used to pretend they were valuable rather than actually being valuable. You know you’re doing it wrong when you have to have meeting about how to have meetings before each meeting.
We didn’t have a scrum master but a new development leader implemented it in practice and managed it amazingly. He really made sure that time isn’t wasted and the meetings were short, concise and everyone loved it after a few months. Work processes improved greatly, they used to be in chaos because management were (and still are) a bunch of imbeciles and supposedly didn’t listen to the developers regarding how work processes should be improved.
But then his probation was over with a 3 month period of notice, and upper management started fucking with him because he refused to sign a legally binding contract of responsibility for the entire company’s infrastructure which wasn’t part of the deal, and was out of his scope (leading the development teams != being responsible for the entire company’s infrastructure).
They started going behind his back and slowly destroyed what he had built and after a while he couldn’t handle it and resigned effective immediately because they threatened him with a lawsuit regarding something he didn’t have anything to do with but was management’s fuckup.
This is the whole story affirmed by my coworkers and him, some of it I saw real time but I’m still on probation, looking for another job. This dev lead guy really liked some of our work for and told us if there’s an opportunity he would want us to come with him and keep working together, just the company sucked ass. And I’ll gladly do it because he was amazing.
I think it is a common theme where the people in control both want “things to improve” while simultaneously hating any change that might threaten the backward-ass way they like to run things. The more the place is in need of change, usually, the stronger they resist.
My story isn’t as extreme, but at one place I worked the owners just burned through amazing managers, always butting head in stuff they barely understood. Ultimately we ended up with someone who didn’t like confrontation and who would let the owners do as they wished, which sort of defeated the purpose of this new role.
i always thought it was peak laziness to basically go through entire work days and stories by just chaining endless meetings. Barely any heavy lifting ever gets done, people just spit just enough nonsense to preface the next meeting. I much prefer small corporations where the product (still) actually matters.
Do those managers actually believe they’re making things better? At that point you’re wasting so much time talking about being productive instead of being, you know, productive
As the other commenter said, it is all busy work to make themselves (and anyone else who care) feel productive. It looks good, calendars are filled with important-sounding discussions, and they’re also the ones getting the “praises” when they announce what “their” team is doing in various meetings when higher ups are present.
They looked and were very busy in the office, never sitting in one place. I think remote work essentially reveals that they’re essentially just casually chatting on zoom all day long. The decorum is really what makes things look important.
On a final note, I had to replace my manager for 1 month, and I inherited a ton of 1h+ meetings every week. It was ridiculous, I felt like cancelling meetings most week but I didn’t want to look like I was slacking off, so I was basically just doing the equivalent of standup meetings with the various teams and devs and cutting it short. That’s it, a bunch of people telling me their progress for a few minutes a day and I was effectively replacing my manager on top of my actual role. Whenever something blocked progress I would simply tell people who to connect with and ask of they wanted me to setup a meeting or preferred to use the live chat. That’s about it.
It makes them look productive tho. Their calendars always look full, because they are really busy being in all those meetings. The circular logic works out just fine for them. They are all input, they have no outputs.
When I was supervisor at my old job, that’s quite literally all I did. The title at this position is technically a step down, but everything else has improved.
Better pay, benefits, full wfh, and work load is 1000% less.
So glad my boss trusts our team. Quite literally only have a 30 minute meeting with everyone, once a week.
Very rare they ever ask anything from us. If they ever do, I make sure it’s a priority and it gets done.
I thought you would say 30 minutes a day, and here I thought “hey not so bad”. 30 minutes a week?! We opened every workday with 45minutes to 1h and a half “stand-up meetings”. We had full days dedicated to talking about scrum every now and then. Nothing ever got gone, nothing worthwhile was ever discussed, it made my hate my profession. Man I am not going through that ever again.
You sound like you worked at my last company also. Scrum is good in principal, but in practice it was just another thing people used to pretend they were valuable rather than actually being valuable. You know you’re doing it wrong when you have to have meeting about how to have meetings before each meeting.
We didn’t have a scrum master but a new development leader implemented it in practice and managed it amazingly. He really made sure that time isn’t wasted and the meetings were short, concise and everyone loved it after a few months. Work processes improved greatly, they used to be in chaos because management were (and still are) a bunch of imbeciles and supposedly didn’t listen to the developers regarding how work processes should be improved.
But then his probation was over with a 3 month period of notice, and upper management started fucking with him because he refused to sign a legally binding contract of responsibility for the entire company’s infrastructure which wasn’t part of the deal, and was out of his scope (leading the development teams != being responsible for the entire company’s infrastructure).
They started going behind his back and slowly destroyed what he had built and after a while he couldn’t handle it and resigned effective immediately because they threatened him with a lawsuit regarding something he didn’t have anything to do with but was management’s fuckup.
This is the whole story affirmed by my coworkers and him, some of it I saw real time but I’m still on probation, looking for another job. This dev lead guy really liked some of our work for and told us if there’s an opportunity he would want us to come with him and keep working together, just the company sucked ass. And I’ll gladly do it because he was amazing.
Edit: added some context and grammar
I think it is a common theme where the people in control both want “things to improve” while simultaneously hating any change that might threaten the backward-ass way they like to run things. The more the place is in need of change, usually, the stronger they resist.
My story isn’t as extreme, but at one place I worked the owners just burned through amazing managers, always butting head in stuff they barely understood. Ultimately we ended up with someone who didn’t like confrontation and who would let the owners do as they wished, which sort of defeated the purpose of this new role.
i always thought it was peak laziness to basically go through entire work days and stories by just chaining endless meetings. Barely any heavy lifting ever gets done, people just spit just enough nonsense to preface the next meeting. I much prefer small corporations where the product (still) actually matters.
Do those managers actually believe they’re making things better? At that point you’re wasting so much time talking about being productive instead of being, you know, productive
As the other commenter said, it is all busy work to make themselves (and anyone else who care) feel productive. It looks good, calendars are filled with important-sounding discussions, and they’re also the ones getting the “praises” when they announce what “their” team is doing in various meetings when higher ups are present.
They looked and were very busy in the office, never sitting in one place. I think remote work essentially reveals that they’re essentially just casually chatting on zoom all day long. The decorum is really what makes things look important.
On a final note, I had to replace my manager for 1 month, and I inherited a ton of 1h+ meetings every week. It was ridiculous, I felt like cancelling meetings most week but I didn’t want to look like I was slacking off, so I was basically just doing the equivalent of standup meetings with the various teams and devs and cutting it short. That’s it, a bunch of people telling me their progress for a few minutes a day and I was effectively replacing my manager on top of my actual role. Whenever something blocked progress I would simply tell people who to connect with and ask of they wanted me to setup a meeting or preferred to use the live chat. That’s about it.
It makes them look productive tho. Their calendars always look full, because they are really busy being in all those meetings. The circular logic works out just fine for them. They are all input, they have no outputs.
When I was supervisor at my old job, that’s quite literally all I did. The title at this position is technically a step down, but everything else has improved.
Better pay, benefits, full wfh, and work load is 1000% less.