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This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.
Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.
The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.
At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...
So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!
Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.
'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'
Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!
I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.
So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.
Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!
My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.5 -
"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"
There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.
One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?
If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?
Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.
How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?
What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"
The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?25 -
I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!
Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.
This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).
People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).
To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE
Now it's story time...
---------
I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.
We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.
The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.
So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...
"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"
So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...
"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."
10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.
We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"
So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.
(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)
PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."
ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."
<PO then shuts up in disbelief>
ME: "So are you finished?"
PO: ...
ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"
PO: Yes, for now.
ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.
PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?
<I expected this>
ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.
PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.
ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?
PO: I have other things I do then.
ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.
PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.
ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.
Then I walk away.
That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...
PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.
ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE6 -
Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.
Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.
Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.
We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.
Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.
Sick & tired of this shit. -
You go web developer when you can't handle real software development.
I don't care how pretty your website look, I don't care how many million request you can handle per second(you are probably using frameworks that happens to be the best only for 3 months, then you go another one). I don't care if we would be worse without web in general.
The basic truth stands though and you can't handle it.
And this is not even a :popcorn: post.75
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