Someone turn this into a 9/11 meme
“They’ve hit the second lunch break”
The nature of the meetings has changed somewhat:
Inhuman resources indeed.
Inaccessible post lacks text alternative.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
- usability
- we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
- text search is unavailable
- the system can’t
- reflow text to varied screen sizes
- vary presentation (size, contrast)
- vary modality (audio, braille)
- accessibility
- lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
- some users can’t read the image due to lack of alt text (markdown image description)
- users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
- systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
- web connectivity
- we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
- we can’t explore wider context of the original message
- authenticity: we don’t know the image hasn’t been tampered
- searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
- fault tolerance: no text fallback if
- image breaks
- image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
I suspect the pervasiveness of (high) functioning illiterates explains the existence of those meetings.
- usability
I mean, all jokes aside… I would legitimately rather have 16 hours of meetings in two days than have that same 16 hours of meetings spread throughout the week with small breaks in between. At least there’d be 3 days to actually get stuff done uninterrupted.
Apply compression so the empty space gets truncated and it’s 1 hour. Filter by relevance and it’s 10 minutes.
I had a two hour video call with 20 people. The entire meeting was a executive assistant reading slides that could have been an email.
Then, uncertain people weren’t paying attention, tried to get each person to read a slide. She started with her coworker, who complied.
After the manager passed because he was too busy, every other person passed. And nobody wanted to participate. Furious, they tried other modes to relay information.
Anyways, now we get 2 hour recordings, with I-shit-you-not QUIZZES, testing us on what’s in the recording, then in the meetings, talk about it.
Mein Beileid.
Schedule those work from home days well and you’re okay!
My ADHD would make me want to kill myself if I had an 8 hour meeting twice a week.
I don’t even have ADHD, just strongly introverted, and my brain would just get fried in the first day of 8 hours of meetings.
I had a boss that did this quarterly meeting where he’d schedule two full days to review everything he heard piecemeal once a week and it always ended up taking 3 and a half days. It was hell and we all hated it. The whole office had to sit in it, no one got any work done, and most of us fell asleep. No decisions were ever made and it was just to give himself the feel goods about telling his boss he knew what was going on.
Horrible boss. The running theory in the office was that he hated his family and didn’t want to go home
I had a boss who went home at lunch, without coming back until 6:30 the next day, because he was actually on holidays…
Poor family.
The running theory in the office was that he hated his family and didn’t want to go home
I have legitimately seen this happen. It’s a very real possibility.
I used to teach a class on a niche piece of the Linux kernel and how to do “stuff” and I had about 2 hours of content that I lead directly and then the rest of the day was me struggling to not fall asleep up front
To be fair, I never lead meetings anymore and struggling not to fall asleep is still a good portion of my job.
Eh, if they want to pay me to sit in useless meetings and not doing my job, so be it. 🤷♂️
The frustrating part is having those meetings AND demanding you complete your work tasks.
Like yeah my productivity went way down, because I’m in this meeting with you, asshole!
I’ve been blessed to not have had that level of asshole of a boss. That would suck.
It’s not about “what is getting done”. It’s also knowing why and what thing need to be done and finding efficiency in ordering the tasks. There is getting a temperature check of the team. Meetings have more meaning than “now you can’t do one task”. You’re still working but helping others do their job too.
You underestimate how many meetings I’ve been called to attend where my feedback is never elicited.
This seems like a skill issue. You’re in the room to provide your perspective or to deepen your own understanding of the initiative at hand. Not chiming in with your perspective or having any documented takeaways/clarifying detail is on you. If the meeting is really not a value add at all, skip it and make it known as to why.
Yeah, but we have no way of knowing if it’s a skill issue on dohpaz42’s part, or a skill issue on the part of the people inviting them to the meetings. Some meetings can benefit you/from you, others simply can’t.
👍
As someone who has had 2 all day meetings, it can be hell.
Day 1, one dude talked THE ENTIRE FUCKING DAY. He did not stop to have a drink, he didn’t eat when lunch showed up, never went to the bathroom. Just one 8 hour long, uninterupted monolog. We had 3 bullet points to discuss that day, three. He went from 1 to 2 to 1 back to 2 on to 3 back to 1 now to 3 over to 2… Fucking painful.
This person should be studied. Like, full vivisection, take the brain out and weigh it. Try and find the insane mania core and see how to remove it from others.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this guy before in comments. He was a wild character with 0 redeeming qualities that I know of. He was also painfully combative on any concessions or requirements that his team had to do and at times actively drove the project into reverse due to his active ignorance of the machine our team made and his team controlled.
Hell yeah filibuster the workplace!
I started this job like 3 weeks earlier, I was still on the honeymoon period for working there.
100%
3 days of uninterrupted work! I could move mountains.
I would want at least a day between those two though. Multiple full days of meetings in a row would be awful.
Finally somebody who properly did the math and understands that 8-5 is not 8 hours.
Of course 8-5 would be 8 hours with an hour (unpaid ) lunch.
Exactly. But most people just say 8-5 is 8 hours without thinking about it.
Isnt a standard workday of 8 hours called 9-to-5-job?
In the UK the default full-time workday is 7 hours, 9-5 with an unpaid hour of lunch.
Well I did a search for 8 to 5
So it seems Dolly is in agreement with you
The time periods of from 1 hr before to after the meeting are generally dead zones for me.
I was gonna say idk that the full day thing makes sense but consolidation in general isn’t a bad plan.
Is this the three-day workweek we keep hearing about? Because I’m not getting anything done on those meeting days.
This would save me a lot of time each week.
Good lord, if only this was sarcasm.
Where I primarily work we have one meeting per week for 1 hour…and it’s glorious.
Other places I work love their stupid agile shit so we’re talking minimum 2 hours of meetings per day generally + one on ones + ad-hoc meetings + support meetings. It’s useless, middle-management pandering crap.
Oh god this reminded me of something I heard touted while I was studying for my PMP exam
This was when covid was a thing people cared about and we were saying WFH was the new normal. One thing PMs were obsessed with was “bringing the open space office culture to the home”
One way that was proposed to do that? Have an all day meeting where everyone joins in and anyone can talk, like they’re in the office.
A friend of mine works in a wicked neurodiverse, geeky company. They telecommute from all over and have a virtual campus with proximity audio and rooms you can move your little character to encourage the spontaneous conversations that happen IRL. He said it really worked for him. He demoed it for me and it was adorable, pixel art, iirc.
The all day meeting idea sounds like hell.
I’ve heard and seen this sort of things before but never heard anyone who actually used it. I’m stoked to hear that it’s actually something that works for folks! In my neurodivergent brain, I think I’d get a kick out of it.
Was it Gather? My team uses that, it’s great.
Update: I asked and it was Gather Town.
I suspect it was https://workadventu.re/ because IIRC they self-hosted–my friend showed me the mothballed, just-moved-off-of version, so he wouldn’t run into co-workers. But, I could be wrong.
Extroverts don’t believe in introverts.
That sounds good on paper, but the more I think about it by applying it to the current team dynamics at my work, I feel like within a week, nobody will be showing up to the open zoom meeting. We’ll likely use the first hour and a half for our regular team sync up, then nobody will re-join. If anyone has a question or wants to say something, they’d just post in the slack channel.
It looks like a joke and feels like a meme.
Hm, 3 days without meetings sounds nice though…
