Ran into a girl who I had a crush on in high school at a bar last week. Hanged out for a bit, but then I had to run catch the last train home.

Today I get a message from her that reads: "Hey, it was nice to meet you last week. Can I call you some time, there's something I want to tell you. 😉"

I think to myself -- sweet and say that I have no meetings today, call me whenever you can.

A couple of minutes later she calls me, and the first thing she says: "I have this app idea..."

fuck, shouldn't have hyped myself up.

My employer keeps sending booze to our houses.

Officially meant for coronaproof zoom social meetings where they play stupid bingo games and quizzes on Friday afternoons.

Why they're sending 2 liter bottles of Rum, 3 bottles of rosé wine and 12 cans of craft beer for the 6th week in a row... I really don't know... I don't even attend the zoom meetings.

All I know is that during breakfast, rum is better mixed into coffee than through cornflakes.

Anyway... Why was this a rant again? Oh right. Can I sue my employer for baiting me into an addiction? 🤔

So, a couple of weeks ago I started a temporary job writing code mostly for DB purposes. I noticed during that time there was a specific person just copying my code and not giving credit in the meetings. So I decided to put a small, quirky, joke in my last code just to see if the person reviewed it before presenting.

FF to yesterday, the person did not check the code and he presented a table with a field called PENIS Contract Length in our zoom meeting.

Not sorry at all

Meeting for reducing the number of meetings...

So the remote manager who won't reply to my emails or slacks, won't invite me to meetings with product / design, won't ask for my opinion on deadline dates and won't tell me whats being said in meetings (despite repeated effort on my part to change this);

Has decided to send an angry email, cc'ing a bunch of people, about "constant deadline slippage" and poor planning on our part focusing on features that should have been de-prioritised.

ahem
*clears throat for maximum yelling rant-ability*

<rant>
I HAVE BEEN EMAILING YOU FOR FUCKING WEEKS ASKING TO TALK ABOUT THE DEADLINES YOU FUCKING COLOSSAL ASS CLOWN.

I'VE BEEN REPEATEDLY TOLD THAT THESE FEATURES ARE A MUST HAVE AFTER ASKING TO DE-PRIORITISE THEM, AND HAVE TOLD YOU THE DATES ARE NOT FEASIBLE.

ONE MORE, ONE MORE EMAIL OR BAD COMMENT AND I'M EXPENSING A TRIP OVER THERE, TO KICK YOU SQUARE IN THE NUTS AS HARD AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. I'LL HAPPILY BREAK MY FOOT OFF IF NECESSARY, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT.
</rant>

... the above is work appropriate to email back to him and all the higher ups right?

Yesterday's (scheduled and adhoc) meetings:
10:30-11:00
11:00-11:30
12:30-1:30 (adhoc)
1:30-2:30
4:30-5:00
6:00-6:20 (adhoc)

Today's (scheduled) meetings:
9:30-10:00
11:00-12:00
12:30-1:15
1:30-2:30

Tomorrow's meetings include a 1:1 with my boss who will invariably ask why I'm not done on this "should take a week" project that I've had for a week, despite that he just unblocked me on yesterday morning, and I've had nothing but meetings since...

Fucking hell.
They fill my day with shit spaced out just enough to waste practically my entire freaking day so I can't get anything done, conveniently forget this, and then have the audacity to yell at me for not finishing my tickets. Of course I didn't finish! You all were too busy blabbing at me every day for the past fucking week! (Oh, and do they listen if I have something to say? Of course they fucking don't.)

Also, as a secondary rant, the product douchebag files tickets (usually complex as hell tickets worded to appear trivial) with enough missing information to make missing large sections of them easy. If I ask him for clarification, he tells me to read the ticket, and if I insist, he gets all exasperated and quickly zooms through the site faster than I can follow, shows maybe half of what's in the ticket, and asks why I don't know how to do any of this yet. After I finish his shit ticket (and true to his douchebag nature) he blames me for missing several of those pieces he never outlined or showed, and insists that I obviously don't test anything. And because that's clearly not douchey enough, the fucking sack of shit also goes behind my back and trashtalks me to my coworkers, tells them he can't trust me to do a simple fucking thing, and that he's given up on me.

What the FUCK is wrong with these people?

Client: Why doesn't this process work?

Me: For the exact fucking reasons I said it wasn't fucking possible like three fucking times in two separate fucking meetings you fucking retard.

!dev

Just for fun, during meetings I look up “toxic workplace checklist” (and variants) and then score my employer.

So far they’ve scored 80% and higher on all lists except one.

Now that I’ve decided to leave, none of it bothers me anymore. It’s so freeing.

Manager: Why are we missing our deadlines?

Me: Cause we don't own any of the codebase that we work on and have to literally beg to other team for code reviews and deployments, for which it takes long mail chains and meetings. An even before that we(devs) have to explain to them what/why are we doing things, because our Product managers are a bunch of NoGood AHoles. And after all that we finally do some development, in whatever measly time we have left.

Manager: I know all that, tell me why are we missing our deadlines?

Started working at a large company with promises of a great framework, stable environment and bleeding edge tools, decentralised working environment, only to find visual studio 2010, no git, no project management tooling whatsoever, all documentation stored on svn, no slack or other modern communications platform, still using uploaded word documents as documentation for projects and meetings, so yeah I can truly say :/

Waiting for a meeting, thought I might as well show off my XPS sticker game.

ALSO, FUCK MEETINGS. MULTIPLE HOURS WASTED FOR SAYING THOUSANDS OF SHITS AND LIKE ONE USEFUL THING.

Edit: legit forgot pic

Recipe: "baked developer"

you will need:

- 1 day = 1 story point
- 10SP per sprint
- every team member must deliver all the SPs.

Now for every sprint slap on 20+ hours of mandatory meetings, mix with 2-5 days of ad-hoc tasks, which must be addressed, because they are blocking the release/other teams/prod, and make sure all the devs try not to spill no matter what, and you get a perfectly burned out team.

Brittle/crispy on the outside, mashed/soft on the inside

enjoy!

Once had a classmate schedule a meeting with me to "go over something" for a project we had together. (Not a CS class, but it was a general education class.)

I agree, make time on my schedule for this meeting.

I get there and they say "Yo I just wanted to let you use my flash drive so you could make some changes to the PowerPoint I started last night. Just get it back to me a few days before the project is due and we'll look over it together."

You asshole. Go fuck yourself.

This lesson taught me to ask what meetings are about in order to prevent this bullshit

Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.

Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"

Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.

Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"

As an introvert & junior dev, I'm so frustrated with video conferencing meetings:

1. People interrupt each other and change topics all the time.

2. People disregard the host's agenda.

3. Meetings are starting to be recorded or secretly screenshotted in the very moment I am frowning because my internet connection is getting bad.

4. The meeting chat turns into a side discussion if the host is not addressing things in the chat and setting the rules clearly.

5. There are lots of buttons missing in my company's VC tool that would display my current status to the other participators, e.g. a no "I agree", "I disagree", or "I have something to add". All I have available in my VC tool is a "thumbs up" or "applause" reaction that stays next to me in my picture for very long 10s...

6. Webinars via VC tools are super uninteractive. To make it worse, there is no pizza, no free drinks and also no side conversations and no walking to the station together with the other nerds.

7. There is no way to tell the person speaking that you haven't heard them clearly or you would like them to explain something further in a big group meeting. It's too embarrassing for me to interrupt or let everyone else know in the chat that I haven't got it.

Bottom line: I HATE video conferences without a good facilitator that involve more than 3 people and would like to write my own VC software but I'm already kinda feeling drained because all these chaotic meetings stress me so much :(

12 - 1pm is lunch time. What the hell is it with this team and arranging meetings for this time, does nobody eat?

*Propose new time*

Justification: ... i'm fucking hungry

I hate the meetings, let me code for once!!

One of my top 10 worst meetings, was for an interview for a job I really wanted. The guy started off the technical interview by asking me about language features that had been replaced since before I started learning the language. Told him when I started learning and his reply was:

"Yeah I see that on your CV, but come on, you MUST know this stuff".

eh no asshole, because its been removed for 4 years, you MUST know its not relevant

One of the dev in my team literally asked us (other student devs, professor, and a guy from the company we were working with) this question during a weekly scrum meeting:

"Who is this Jason you guys keep talking about? He never showed up to any of our meetings!".

A bit of context: we were 6 weeks (halfway) into our FINAL YEAR PROJECT for a bachelor in software engineering...

I thought at first he was joking...

Coding has impacted my life the biggest by having 'scrum' meetings with my family over dinner. I start with..
"What did you do today?"
"What are you doing tomorrow?"
and variations of (depending on the responses from the first questions)..
"Anything I can help with?"

It really opened up the channels of communication with my family. It's not unusual for dinner to take up to an hour.

Quite the contrast of my childhood where dinner was a "better to be seen than heard" experience and eating fast and leaving the table was a competition with my siblings.

If I spend 50% of my time in meetings, 30% of my time doing things for support/helpdesk which I'm not allowed to automate, 10% as a technical consult and 10% helping other devs... am I even a developer anymore?

Laziest dev thing I've ever done.

An annoying "I-do-nothing-but-delegate-and-make-fuzz" manager proposed to create a new application with redundant functionalities, that would take me at least half a year to build.
Practically, the app would never be used and I didn't want to put effort in that monstrosity.

So, naturally I...

Pressure the right people, schedule numerous meetings, become the project manager for all internal applications and... I cancel the project.

Fighting against management is my daily struggle.
I reject the notion that more management, meetings and reports makes me work faster.
Want it done in time?
Stop wasting my time and interrupting me when I'm deep in complex thought. Let me do what's necessary and put in the hours if I have the energy and time.
But you damn better pay me for it.
I do not care for your praise, when I make the impossible happen time and again in days that would take months.
I expect your praise in the form of higher numbers going into my account.

Free breakfast before work starts
Overtime if working on weekend
Decent coffee
Quick meetings
New and fun challenges for every new project

Show up on time.

Be prepared.

Have a list of things that need to be covered if you're leading the meeting.

Stay on track, don't let people start talking out of one tangent, I tend to suggest people discuss it afterwards or email about it.

Take the meeting seriously, otherwise other people will not.

Know how to talk a language everyone understands. Sometimes people with key info just aren't very technical.

Following Ely's golden rules for meetings, my meetings are rarely longer than 20 minutes.

Been working on this project for a month now. Everything is going fine, meetings are short and to the point. But then...

Client: "I'm leaving the project, this is the new person taking over."

Me: "Hello new client."

New client: "Burn it."

Me: "Uhm, what?"

New client: "Throw what you have away. It doesn't meet our new specifications. We're starting over."

Me: "Ok..." 🙃🔫

For once I would like to have a scrum master who doesn't try to be a psychologist and just helps us adhere to whatever methodology we are supposed to be following.

We are developers, we know we're dysfunctional, we like it that way and stop telling me I have to wear pants to meetings!!!

Meetings about meetings that we're going to have to discuss the need for the next meeting wherein a potential followup meeting will be scheduled to meet for the meeting.

Things that pissed me off on Monday.

1 - that bastard of a jerk whom you have known since childhood, pulling your legs in front of your gf

2 - few minutes of "_ _ _ is typing" placeholder text showing up after asking something in IM

3 - the increasing number of appointments/meetings for the rest of the week

TBC

This big multi-million consulting company hired me as freelance. They did it in a hurry, because "the project already started, it is a very important client (a bank) and we need your expertise by YESTERDAY".

In the first THREE WEEKS I had meetings with their own project managers, their client's project managers, techies, sales people. No one was able to tell me what do I have to do, but:

1 - they asked me for very detailed estimates plus a release plan
2 - f**k your estimates, we need this BY JANUARY 16th

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

I realized some time ago that when people ask you to do something and it is too generic, if you keep pushing for an explanation they end up getting angry at you as if you are the stupid one.

So funny, I'm always doing it on meetings now and laughing inside :)

So I studied for a long time about scrum, convinced my boss, his boss and our team to consider it, everyone liked it but seems to don't understand it very well.

I organized meetings about it and everything...

This week the majority of our team will attend a Google event about scrum in another city.

Guess who is not going?

What the fuck is wrong with the designers? We have had meetings with the client, a proposal drawn up, a project spec written, budget agreed, witeframes drawn up exactly to spec. Designer involved in all stages for input and ideas. Now the designers have the wireframes, they are supposed to create based on these. No they make up what goes on the pages that bare no resemblance to the wireframes in terms of requirements. I am fucking fuming. I have sent the designs back with a note. Please provide designs based on the wireframes.

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

Fuck you and your bullshit Teams meetings.
I hope you die a painful and slow death while your servers burst in flames and you hang yourselves.
You schedule 4 of them, then bitch about how developers aren’t getting any work done.
Maybe if you didn’t suffocate them with your bullshit meetings they would.
I am looking forward for the contract to expire or in this project so I can finally get some peace.

Fuck your stupid meetings. You deserve to be arrested and shot by the Gestapo (or KGB, whichever you find more evil).

Our CEO suddenly wanted to work with an outsourcing company to build the product. On one of the "sale" meetings I asked a guy from that company:
- Can we interview developers before they join our project?
- Our company is responsible for the quality of the service we provide, - the guy replied
- What are you going to charge us for?
- For all the hours developers worked
- So your service is developer hours, and we'll be obligated to pay for all the hours they worked regardless the code quality or the performance, right?

So it seems outsourcing company is only responsible for their time sheets to correspond to real hours worked? :-)

We call such a companies in Ukraine - a galley

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

Life at work these days:

Manager: we’re not getting enough done
My calendar: 1/3 week filled with scheduled meetings

Manager: we need to use ChatGPT intensively. We'll go a lot faster.
Me using ChatGPT to get it to write an automation script: 2 hours wasted with no success
Me starting again from scratch to write the script: 15 minutes to achieve the desired result.

Thanks for your advice boss

Its been a few hours, and i was busy with meetings but

THANK Y'ALL FOR 10K ++

I remember wk20something, when i joined devrant. I was just starting a job as a data analyst, and the wk at that time spoke to me on a personal level, so i wrote a quick rant and didnt give it much thought. The next day i opened devrant and had like 100++s and a bunch of comments. Since then ive met a lot of awesome people here and im happy i clicked the install button back then. Thanks cfox and brogus for the opportunity, love ya.

Already got a longboard as a 10k-day gift :^)

If you think meetings are bad.

Have a day full of license renewal and price negotiation talks regarding technical products.

It's funny how you can blatantly say: We don't need feature XYZ, we get it for free via BLA.... Yet they still present it in all glory.

Even better when they don't even know their alternative / competition products...

X: "our tool is better".
Me: "We have tool XY. Doesn't cost a penny, does the same, we don't need your tool".
X: "No it doesn't. Look at all the features we have *screen share presentation* with long explanations".
Y: "Yeah... You've certain additional features, but the basics are all present in the tool that we use, so my statement remains the same".

These meetings are really mind boggling insane.

Even more insane when you get the price offers.

The cloud only madness is absurd.

Sure, we move 50 terabyte plus to the cloud from premise, no problem. *🤡*

Not that we haven't told them explicitly that cloud only isn't possible....

The worst: every motherfucking company does it for every stupid single craptastic product...

You cannot even swoop it up in a single meeting... Every company. Every single product.

*booze liberate me from madness and remove the filthy stain of humanity*

A few weeks ago, I was joking with a friend with how PMs aren't able to understand how weird are dev time estimations and how much they love meetings.

He: "Well, we can make a meet to estimate the hours of doing that"

Me: "Or better: We can make a meet to estimate the meet of estimations"

Three days ago, we are with the PM on the weekly meeting. In a part of his lovely speech, he asks:

"What if we meet the Thursday to estimate the weekly meeting for estimations?"

Obviously we laughed instantly, and he 'forget' he spoke that.

Manager: we should arrange regular catchups, I have several Monday morning, how about 10:30, that'd be 9:30 your time?

Me inside: dude, we both know I struggle to be up in time for the scrum at 10, do you really think I'm going to be any better at 9:30?

Me outside: How about 10:30 after scrum?

Manager: OK, that works, I have half an hour between meetings

Me: Thank fuck.

"Most unproductive meeting of career?"

2 stories

Story 1:

Company had 5k people working for it. We all had to attend a meeting about holding effective meetings.

Rule 1 was to have an agenda for all meetings and associated information so that people can come prepared.

In my 19 years at that company I and one other guy were the only people who followed that rule. Including the executives (never followed it).

People thanked me for doing it all the time... then they'd hold their own meetings and no agenda.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Story 2:

VP of our department would hold meetings and INSIST people ask questions / get upset if we didn't ask questions.

We were also told what we were NOT allowed to ask about.

At one point there were complaints that support was replacing too much hardware. So after lecturing everyone about replacing too much hardware ... nobody was allowed to even mention that the hardware was actually shit.... but we were supposed to ask questions.

Same VP would come back to us and moan about how he just couldn't get resources for our department... like bro that's your job don't whine at us about it, do the job...

Dude was just a weak man child.

I stopped caring about managers loving endless meetings and priority shifts.
They pay me to attend to meetings.
I'll give them what they want.

But if they ask me if the feature is done, I make them attend a meeting for that.

My team lead is off this week and I was selected to be the "acting team lead". So far I have attended 73648283 meetings. Please pray for me!

Manager: "hey I'd like everyone to join this global meeting"
I saw about 30 people, something was off, certainly didn't feel global, I felt like I shouldn't be there.

I dug out the original meeting and it's for Lead PMs. Our manager isn't even attending, what's up with that, is he trying to make us take meetings for him?

Someone once told me my manager was an idiot and he confirms it like once a week pulling stuff like that.

There's only one pro for this whole day light saving thing when you live in a country which doesn't do daylight saving:

You'll appreciate it better when it's over :-/

As if 10 PM meetings was not bad enough, now it's going to be at 11PM for the next 6 months 😭

Fuck our new project manager.

Literally all she does in her time is schedule meetings for others and send us emails stating that X needs to be done by date or why are we delayed with Y. Then she even manages to completely screw us with the meetings she schedules.

Today I woke up to seeing a beautiful gapless column of colorful rectangles in my dairy.... for today. And last time I saw this Monday it only had 2.5 hours of meetings!!

Now a lot of us from our team had the Friday afternoon off so it may be that she did this beautiful piece of artwork during that time, in which case she could somewhat rightfully say that we should have taken a look at it. But we actually have a convention to only schedule planning meetings for Mondays which these fucking aren't and even if she hadn't known this, who the fuck schedules a ton of meetings to Monday?! from a Friday afternoon?!?!

By the way the new pretty pink and orange meetings I have today are about actually important topics in between which I would normally appreciate to grab a tea or at least use the fucking restroom. Officially I only have a 45 minute lunch break all day.

Oh and naturally she sets up the meetings as organiser so that we can only suggest her new times and can't change it on our own.

But naturally PM lady never actually attends the meetings because she wouldn't understand shit. So when my fav female colleague, Sammy and I joined our 11am meeting, the first thing Sammy said - well after I greeted her by "wtf" - is to just leave the call on while we grab brunch.

So here I am sitting in the close by park with my brunch and thought I could use the now extended lunch break time efficiently by ranting my ass of and asking you guys why the fuck such people like our PM get paid.

Never had one due to this trick I borrowed from an old friend.
So we all know about those meetings where its all crap flying around right?.
First go in there with your alarm clock set on vibration every 7 minutes(trust me on this-makes you look important and you ought to be somewhere else)
Actually the alarm is a reminder that you need to bring yourself back online.
At this point just listen to the speaker for a couple of seconds(especially if its marketing dept) and being the engineer your are; rephrase parts of their presentation in a question-comment hybrid( at this point you're the wisest looking person in the room)
Now go back to thinking about that pizza slice you left in the fridge as they discuss the "lean production" methods that they can use based on "your opinion"..
To more happy meetings..cheers

As a Java developer I didn't write a line of code at work for about 2 months. Been so busy with meetings, doc, governance, architecture decisions, running after people for approvals,... I really miss coding.

Anyone else does this?

I can't for the life of me maintain focus during long boring meetings about new designs etc. For 2 years now I've gone by doing all kinds of stuff during meetings and only ocassionaly join in when I totally disagree with something.

Often I only need to chime in at the end anyway, either meeting notes get shared or I ask someone what was discussed the previous day.

Makes me realize how much time gets wasted

Trying to explain functions to my coworker and why they should be used even if powershell scrips don't 'need' functions
I've explained it 5 different ways across multiple meetings when they've gotten stuck on something.

At this point I've decided 1. I don't have the patience or brains to be a teacher..., 2. I'm going to have to review every script they ever fucking write, 3. I'm never letting them work on anything critical or time sensitive for big clients. (Small clients ehhh) I'll fight my boss to avoid that headache lol

Performance Review: You’ve slowed down.

My head: I never get to code cause all we do is meetings. Like no shit I have slowed down. Why the fuck do we have 3 days just full of meetings that I don’t even contribute to ?! I’m not gonna do overtime for this shit

Me (actually): Ah, shucks! Guess we can work on that huh?

"As a leader, you should lead by example and work every day, every hour, give 150% for the dream of the company! We are detecting that people aren't giving everything to us, so you should be harder on everyone else to ensure we can deliver!
Also, your 1:1 meetings with the team should be on the Sundays to avoid spending company time on feedbacks. There is no time to feedback if you need to deliver things!"

Fuck right off with that. Will beatings continue until morale improves? Maybe seniority will arise from the gashes of the lashes on the interns.

Been wearing sunglasses to the office for a few months now because I'm sick of bright screens, light themes of co-workers, the daylight outside that shines through the windows (I moved to another desk further away from the windows), the ceiling lights that are always on (even when there's daylight from outside, thanks boss) and people expecting me to have my eyes open in meetings when there's nothing to look at so now I can just close them and switch to "standby" while I'm still listening.

I am a devampire.

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

I hate dumb ass meetings that have nothing to do with me but people invite me just for the kicks

Time tracking. 😡🤮 If I’m salaried and only working on one project for one client, why the hell should I waste my time making weekly reports of how many hours I spent coding, reviewing pull requests, and sitting in (mostly pointless) meetings?

My boss has gone for a long vacation from last week and will be back in Feb. And office feels soooo awesome and fun. No office politics, no senseless meetings. Just pure work in peace.

I wish he doesn't come back only....

I wouldn't have known stack overflow was down all day if it weren't for devrant, because even though I'm a "software engineer", I spend all day in meetings and fixing environment issues.

Management wants weekly update meetings on some "super important" work. Fine.

But for the past 8 weeks they've been late to the meeting or moved it or cancelled it completely. They keep telling me if I need help, let them know and they will get me the help I need no questions asked.

The one time I ask for help they have done literally nothing.

Glad it is so important to them.

Before implementing a feature that is one hour of work for one developer, let's have four meetings about it, a user survey, specifications and endless discussions on resources.

Took me looooong looooong time to understand that the primary work in a managerial role involves meetings and calls as the *main* thing, not something you do sparsely to stay aligned with the team, so them calling 3 hour long meetings might feel like a waste to me but for the manager it is what they would consider proper work.

At least that's my current hypothesis in trying to justify the time that's 90% wasted.

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

I assume this only happen in my country (Malaysia). We have multiple inconsistent lockdown...

So most of us went from working in the office to Working From Home. During this time Our employers expects us to clock in to Zoom Meetings or Dingtalk meetings for 24 /7 , microphone must be turned on and camera must be turned on at all time, other wise it consider as a void(that means salary deduction, not consider working) .

Employers here have the mentality of ""IF I DON'T SEE WHAT ARE DOING WITH MY OWN EYE , I CONSIDER YOU ARE NOT EVEN WORKING.".

I'M sick of this shit tbh.

I don't know what's wrong with my job..

-I am an opensource developer

-But my colleagues ask for ITIS issues

-My manager asks to interview 20 people in 2 hrs

- asks to prepare a KT schedule.

-Asks to attend few meetings

- And asks the status of the sprint task everyday

Typical managers 😣

Starting to get really pissed off with the hierarchy in my department that my manager keeps insisting ‘doesn’t exist’ but it clearly does when the other team manager is her best friend, to the point where they go on holiday together, go to each others family parties, etc.

Manager goes on holiday for two weeks and other TL gets on her high fucking horse lording over my team and uninviting me from meetings that she thinks I ‘don’t need to be in’ when the majority of the project is mine..

But my manager hasn’t appointed a deputy.....

Currently quadruple booked for meetings at this time slot. I'm picking the one where the most smack down needs to be laid down.

How am I supposed to get shit done, when you assholes set meetings for half the day?!

Meetings: A great place for people to come together and listen to themselves talk.

Whoever at Zoom decided that this button needed to be at this location on the Touch Bar ought to be fired.

Out of a cannon.

Into the sun.

Or at the very least doomed to have their desktop or webcam shared at random times during sensitive meetings. It is for the grace of God that the client didn’t catch me straining to hear the awful acoustics in their conference room.

In my previous job we had a monthly meeting, where we had to discuss all periodic meetings we had to attend. This meeting was only for non managers, and we created a sheet of pros and cons, which was than reviewed by managers on specific meeting for that purpose, and then we had a meeting to discuss those points with managers.

Quarantine, WFH and sleep combo is really not working out for me.

I'm unable to sleep. Therefore I'm wide awake at 4AM, but will sleep for 12 hours when I eventually manage to fall sleep. But then, I have meetings tomorrow and won't be able to sleep all day.

Overall, fuck covid.
Thank you for listening.

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

34 meetings on calendar for this week.

It's not even Monday noon yet.

Even the almighty creator does not know how many more will be scheduled during the week.

Please tell me something wrong with me, and whole world is working like that! It can't be right! Or could it, and I'm just one sad fuck who don't know shit?

So... We've got:
1. Jira reporting (agile style with cards and shit)
2. Task timers (via application integrated to Jira in order to count how much time we spent on a task)
3. End of the day email reporting with description of what we have done today (Jira is not enough?)
4. Daily morning meetings with a team leader to report what we're gonna do today
5. Git merge code reviews for each finished component (that lasts for hours)
6. Weekly status meetings
7. Working hours reporting with a fucking fingerprint

And on top of all of that, the developer is the one who just writes the code - team leader decides how this code is gonna look, what will be written first and what last, what libraries will be used and so on...

Who schedules meetings for 4PM on a Friday?

The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.

So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.

Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!

What an awesome feeling it is to have three meetings sceduled for tomorrow and not have made any preparations for either of the because your workload is somewhat a fuckup and you also just don't fucking give a shit anymore.

Quitting at the end of the month.

#funtimes

No fuck off we don't need a team meeting about it.

We shouldn't need to go in front of a panel to begin with, let us get on with our job and let us automate the shit so sprint planning wouldn't be so difficult

Let's start by saying: God do I love programming and hate work!

My dream job would be a place where I get to write quality code for something that's actually useful and makes sense to people (or a group of people) without all the usual job bullshit; all the politics, fucking useless hours of meetings, the pretentious ass holes, and the useless mindless product owners with good pay to live comfortably and some organization (not being a complete disaster). It's only a dream though...

Our stand-up meetings last for 1 hour. Everybody talks for 5+ minutes so they will seem look "productive" in front of the managers.

Unscheduled meetings are the worst.

You preparing whole day to leave early for the day, then manager suddenly puts up an unscheduled meeting. Oh great isn't it!!

I’m done with people that derail meetings and discussions.

While I want to seek feedback for an Interface that I wrote, these attention seekers decide it’ll be the perfect opportunity to bring up the topic of “how functional programming paradigm facilitates better encapsulation”.

Everyone else follow suit. I try “time checking” and bringing the talk back on track. Never worked.

I’m concluding that meetings are shit and a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME.

While my manager whos daily work involves docs, meetings is rocking with highly speced Laptop.

And here I am working on a really old and out of date laptop spending half of my day waiting for things to finish... 😕

Currently literally sitting in a meeting about meetings. Like for real, the topic the last 15 minutes has been what the difference between 3 of the daily team meetings is.

Then the dumbass who booked this for two hours says about one of the others "an hour is long"

We have a badly out of shape but functional product , the result of a "if its not broke don't fix it" mentality. The only thing manangement cares is our next release and making meetings to plan other meetings...

Now comes the time of the security Audit (PCI)...

Manager : oh noooo the audit will fix this issue, quickkk fix it !

Us : welllll its a lengthy process but doable, we just gotta do a,b,c,d,e . Part a is essentially what we need the rest are refactoring bits of the system to support part a since the performance would be shit otherwise

Manager: can you do part a before the audit starts ?

Us: yep.

Manager: do it . Oh and pop those other issues on JIRA so we can track em

Audit completed....

Manager: so we got through ok?

Us : 👍 yep

Manager: okayy, take those other issues..... and stick em at the bottom of the back log...

Us : huh ? *suspicious faces*..... okay but performance is gonna be poor with the system as it is cuz of part A....

Manager: yeaaahhh * troll face* ....about that.... roll it back and stick that too at the bottom of the log. We got to focus our next release. Lemme schedule a meeting for that 😊

Us : faceplam

"What do you do for a living?"

I go to meetings, write Jira tickets, and occasionally I code

So today I was asked by another department in my company to help them make a logo. They have meetings they have named Pulse (stupid healthcare.) So I made them a logo of the word Pulse with a red ekg then a long line after as if it was flat lining. I hope they either don't get it or get it and never ask me for such things again.

I must admit I like Microsoft a lot, but today, I hate them. Yesterday the Windows 10 anniversary update was pushed and I was forced to install it. As I had a day of meetings I did.

This morning I started my laptop and and browsed to one of the web apps I'm developing for my client. The website didn't work. Turns out Microsoft uninstalled all specific Windows features, such as IIS, MSMQ, and much much more. Guess I'll be spending my time this morning or day to reconfigure my system. Happy anniversary Microsoft.

Too many to count, but this one useless meeting stands out the most.

I was working as an outside dev for software corporation. I was hired as an UI dev although my skill set was UI/engineer/devops at the time.

we wrote a big chunk of 'documentation' (read word files explaining features) before the project even started, I had 2 sprints of just meetings. Everybody does nothing, while I set up the project, tuned configs, added testing libraries, linters, environments, instances, CI/CD etc.

When we started actual project we had at least 2 meetings that were 2-3 hours long on a daily basis, then I said : look guys, you are paying me just to sit here and listen to you, I would rather be working as we are behind the schedule and long meetings don't help us at all.

ok, but there is that one more meeting i have to be on.

So some senior architect(just a senior backend engineer as I found out later) who is really some kind of manager and didn't wrote code for like 10 years starts to roast devs from the team about documentation and architectural decisions. I was like second one that he attacked.

I explained why I think his opinion doesn't matter to me as he is explaining server side related issues and I'm on the client-side and if he wants to argue we can argue on actual client-side decisions I made.

He tried to discuss thinking that he is far superior to some noob UI developer (Which I wasn't, but he didn't know that).

I started asking some questions and soon he felt lost and offended. We ended that discussion with conclusion that I made my own decisions on the client-side. That lasted less than 10 minutes.

So I just sit there and eat popcorn for next 4 and half hours listening to their unnecessary discussions where some angry manager that did programing decades ago wanted to show that we are all noobs and stupid.

what a sad human being.
what a waste of time, but hey I got payed for this 5 hour meeting.

Why do we post here? Is this just an outlet for our intrusive thoughts? A therapy session for things we can't articulate in meetings? Being able to say controversial things we are not allowed to say other places?

It feels like this place exists outside of time and reality. It really is refreshing, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes really offensive. Things that exist here that would not be tolerated elsewhere:

1. alternate ideas of software, sometimes politics, theories of existence, people liking javascript
2. ostream (I love you man)
3. bullying
4. saying what you really feel
5. telling people to fuck off

What would we do without this place?

Meanwhile my intrusive thoughts:

My 12 year old bag, now with graphics, goes with me to client meetings and acts as a deterrent for clients talking shit/fake knowledge or cliches.

Next time I have to negotiate a contract I'm gonna ask for x hourly but 2x for meetings

Fuck meetings

When I told John our newest colleague “I understand your frustration but you need to calm down because collaboration is key”

John:
Okay okay okay, I get it. Collaboration is key and all, but these meetings freaking killing me. We need a better balance, where we can have effective meetings that actually drive progress without sacrificing our precious coding mojo.

At the end of the day, I just wanna do what I’m f*ckin paid for. But these damn meetings are killing my vibe, and it's downright frustrating. Can't we just get back to the good ol' days of actually getting sh*t done!

{Bro is in for a long ride}

So a few weeks ago, our PO really scolded my team for not letting him in on our release planning meeting. His rant went on for about 30 minutes, just one long monologue about why he should be invited in the future.
Apparently he wanted to know details since there were some important fixes in the release, which I suppose is fair (though the rant is really not necessary).

Fastforward 2 weeks, we invite him again. He accepts, but never shows up. We decide to start the planning anyway, since we don't want the release branch blocked because someone didn't show up.
Immediately after the meeting, we write him with the new release plan. And he starts ranting again about "planning without him" -.- ..

1) Stop yelling at the team you're supposed to work with. Talk with the team about it - I'm sure they'll listen.

2) If you demand being in meetings, show up - or at least decline in advance.

3) You have no right to rant about "not being part of the planning" when you were literally invited for a planning meeting 2 weeks in advance. No meetings were overlapping, so there's literally no excuse..

So fucking tired of priority shifting. How the hell is anyone supposed to get shit done with 500 fucking meetings and between each one you're told do something different?

This is critical you must do it now! No this!

My response, fuck you I'm going home my head hurts let me know what you'd like me to code and when you've decided add a day for annoying me.

My boss:

Doesn't manage the fucking agile board..

Doesn't call for meetings when we need...

Decides randomly for sprints duration.

Decides to do whatever he feels better with an obvious lack of thought.

Decides what to do based on assumptions instead of FUCKING ASKING THE FUCKING CLIENT!

Oh you stupid piece of shit how many time do we have to go over me explaining you how planning works and you pretending to agree?

Starting the week with a 3 hour meeting to discuss importing Customer data to a new crm, if I should be allowed to take the time to do it or not.

I finished it last week and already imported the data to the syst enviroment and scrubbed it.

I spend more time Waiting for meetings and attending than doing the work.

Reserve a meeting room for 30 minutes. Sit in there for 2 hours straight and don't give a shit if someone else who reserved the room wants to have it.
Learn to plan your fucking meetings!

Biggest teamwork fail? This is the general way we do business where I work right now:
My boss didn’t want to be the kind who hovers, always micromanaging. He also hates the idea of taking programmers away from their work for meetings. Sounds great, right? This has resulted in:

• All non-lead devs being excluded from all meetings other than scrum (including sprint planning and review meetings). Nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. They don’t think we “need to know.” This means most of our day is spent trying to figure out what needs to be done, rather than getting anything done.

• Our remote boss making dozens of important decisions about our platform, never telling us, and blaming us for not forcing our lead to be more communicative.

• Pull requests staying open for weeks, sometimes months, because nobody has definitively decided what version we’re actually supposed to be working on. This means our base branch could be any of them, and it means PRs that have been opened too long need to be closed, updated, and re-opened on the false promise of someone actually looking at it.

Just ranting here... but I think our biggest teamwork fail is happening right now, with all of those things ^

Why can we all relate to almost every rant for wk24?

Devs could rule the world! Why do we have to endure all of the same crap from India to the UK?

(The recurring meetings and the 'Dynamic Requisits', as I call it, are what bugs me the most!)

Why isn't this ready for testing yet?

Could it be that despite multiple meetings emails and face to face conversations none of you have provided me with what I actually need?

Yes I can create you new email and SMS campaigns. But I need two little things first.
1 The template text.
2 The sign off forms from compliance

Without them I can't do shit. So stop chasing me on where we're at because I've been chasing you on this for two weeks.

This shit here is why I'm the grumpy It guy.

The week where you have so much to do on different projects, that even if you manage to work on all od them a bit it feels like nothing has been accomplished.
The point of being so tired that even the mildest sickness feels rediculously awful.

And it's friday. I manged to do some work for one of my bosses but the work I want to do didn't really get done and now I have two meetings in which I can say I started doing xyz but couldn't finish it due to bugs and exhaustion. And for the other project I wrote documentation.
Well.
T_T

Got a new guy. Having a dumb meeting. New guy is humblebragging. It is making the dumb meeting longer. I feel angry. Like Warren Moon must have felt in 1995. He is a PhD. That's probably why. Ugh.

That co-dev who WOULDN'T TAKE NOTE at meetings or brainstorming but will keep on asking you for details afterwards. WHAT THE HELL DUDE! i have no problem with you being that lazy, but kindly get out of my face. What a bug.

Smartphone manufacturers these days, imagine how meetings to come up with ideas for new products go about.

Product manager :ok people,what can we do to make our next smartphone 'different'.

Employee 1: let's add more cameras
Employee 2:Let's kill the notch
Employee 3:Let's include the buzzword AI in all of our marketing
Employee 4:Let's put 8Gb of Ram in our phone
Employee 5:Let's just do all of those things and also give it a screen with a ridiculous aspect ratio and unnecessarily high resolution.

I fucking hate corporate environment. We have a weekly meeting in our tech department where a team is chosen at random to present the project they're working on, architecture and such. You know what? We have fucking documents, for both product scope and technical architecture. If you're interested in our work, go fucking read our docs. If you have a question, slack us or send us a fucking email. Why the fuck do I have to attend a 1-hour meeting every week for this bullshit. Oh and some dude from upper management has a brilliant idea: from today they decide to host 2 such meetings per week, 1 within the tech department, and another within the whole company. So we had to attend the same fucking meeting twice in 1 week!!! Fucking genius!
I'm so fucking tired of these meaningless meetings, but attendance is recommended because "this is how you reach staff level" as they told me. Fucking bullshit. I may try a few more years for the sake of financial stability, and then find a small shop where people just leave me the fuck alone with my codes.

Just finished and published iOS and Android app. Now they want to change some colors in the app theme. Never mentioned it once during weekly meetings about the app. Even tho I asked them for input. Now I have to spend half my day recompiling and making new screenshots for the store.... #fucklogic

Making calls, meetings, and "brainstorming" half-baked features or designs or any other slop bullshit for 12 hours a day?

Wow, you are an impressive "startup bro"!!!

Coding, testing, running emulators, tests, reading technical documentation, ensuring product success in the real world, and implementing efficient full stack software for 12 hours a day?

Fuck you!!!

These are the expectations of management. Just remember, what they do is "extremely difficult", but you are simply just a resource queue that takes input and converts it to real-world implementation.

Give me a fucking break

You are a developer and you will only log time you're actually working. This means you will not be logging time spent in meetings, chasing for specs, requirement clarifications and similar. You must log 8 hours each day.

^^-- wtf?!? Is anyone else working in similar conditions?

Nothing distracts me more than people eating in an otherwise quiet office. It makes me so livid that i usually leave the room for a coffee refill or bathroom break and hope they are done by the time I'm back.

I can code while holding a conversation, I barely even notice when people do phone calls or skype meetings next to me, but hearing people chew and breathe through their nose while smelling their lunch just annihilates me.

New team in new company is awesome, no meetings for standup just post in slack channel, less meetings = work feeling less like work for me

What are your thoughts on working for a company that give their devs jira tickets that don't have any descriptions? I work for a big organisation (It's actually in the top 3 biggest companies in the country I live in) and I work in a team that has quite possibly the worst agile practice I've ever seen. We get tickets without any descriptions at all. The worst bit is then we get pressure from project management for not delivering things on time. Do they actually realise how difficult it is to deliver something without any business requirements? I have to have a million meetings before I even know wtf the ticket is about. It's incredibly annoying.

I'm supposed to be the introverted, non-people person! But the client meetings I'm in for my college senior project go off the rails into awkward mumbling unless I step in and take the tiniest bit of effort in driving a meeting.

Am I doomed folks to become a BA or other person dealing with clients all day, pls end me now

Writing a new tool, and it's looking pretty slick so far.

This is much better than meetings upon meetings. Maybe I should ask for a demotion so I can be writing code more often?

Someone wrote to me on linkedin for a php job. I had enough time and accepted the interview. We set it for the next day at a time that both me and the recruiter wanted.
I waited for him to even contact me until 5-6 hrs after the time we set, to tell me he was busy with meetings (wtf you wanted 14pm). I gave another chance and we set the interview the next day at the same time.

I waited for 2-3 hrs. This time he wrote me back even later, it was almost midnight to tell me the same excuse.

Is this a red flag for you? Should I even consider working with this guy?

In my case, low motivation is usually caused by askholes who bitch about broken AF code, which ALWAYS turns out to be theirs, infected with their own idiocy.

Definition: ASKHOLE
- A Person who constantly asks for your advice, yet always does the opposite of what you told them.

Pretending I'm in back-to-back meetings & general avoidance (when possible) seems to work.

Dev hours for a 2 week sprint is eaten by countless meetings and the deadline will not move. During sprint planning all meetings should be stated there or there will be number of hours allowed for the meetings as it will eat development hours.

I hate meetings all of a sudden during development.

Like half of my meetings, that could have been emails. Yesterday I was waiting for some person for 20 minutes and then, he only asked me about credentials for test environment. He sure had to schedule a meeting for that...

Any senior types out there find that you’re losing your coding “chops”? I’m involved in so many OS/Middleware upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, status meetings that I can’t code to save my life anymore. I can review and guide design, but I struggle to generate new code. I can get a new dev going really quickly though - is this just a natural progression or is it game over for me? I feel like if I had to get another job, I’d be very unsuccessful. They call me a leader, but I think I’m just a slave.

I am working with a team that's producing tons of new services..
And me being a fresher, reading new designs every other day with God knows complex implementations and business requirements and attending design review meetings(where I can barely understand anything)
having a great learning curve..
Hopefully, I survive this period and cope up with the inputs...
Note: Just don't ask what's my contribution.. I am gearing up for the D-Day to make my impact(not a negative one).. 😎

Calling for a meeting to talk about things that delayed the project and these idiots can't acknowledge the fact that such stupid meetings played a huge role. This is the 10th meeting this month. WTF is wrong with y'all.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

"we need to reduce the amount of meetings" said the super-duper senior enterprise manager who invited me to 20 meetings for the next 2 weeks.

To be honest, I haven't figured out yet what he is actually doing 💅

I sometimes hate my boss (CTO in a medium sized company). Despite that he is a real genius, he changes his mind every fucking day, only because he has 'thought through' a fucking problem which should not be in his concerns. That is my job you fucktard! You haven't been coding for 20 years and now you tell me how to do my job. But then when I need valuable input from you, you SKIP my scheduled MEETINGS FOR WEEKS!

JUST LET ME DO MY JOB, I'M NO IDIOT, BUT YOU GIVE ME THAT FEELING THAT I AM ONE!

A subservient idiot of my CEO who thinks he is my boss has asked me to document our daily standup meetings.

Today I put together all the reasons this is a waste of time in my head: nobody reads these, if you read them once every 2 weeks what's the point of writing these everyday, you don't understand what we do, this takes time away from us actually accomplishing shit.

He was out for kidney stones today. He is in immense pain, but I cannot lay the logical smackdown I had prepared upon him.

Bittersweet

Meetings would be better without people.

I mean I like the IDEA of meetings...

Honestly I'm the type of person who if I could would schedule lots of meetings to make sure we're all on the same page, and to be sure the thing is going to do the thing everyone wants / get their perspective, etc. I really want to KNOW what the folks who are going to use this thing need / want / what works best for them.

On the other hand I know that meetings are often more like:

Me: "Ok let's so here's our data, now tell me what fields they want to edit and so forth."

People: "All of them."

Me: "Uh, no you don't want that or they'll break everything ... X, Y and Z require those fields for A, B, and C to work."

Me: "Let's go field by field and you tell me if they need to edit it, and why."

People: "Yeah this first one they have to be able to change this one."

Me: "Wait no, that's the primary key for that table, I don't know why that's on this list but no you can't change that."

People: "Yeah we have to be able to change that."

Me: "No, you can't, do you even know what that number IS?"

People: "Um... no ..."

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

My current job makes me want to question my life choices.
Its a complete burnout.
I do 9 to 6 never 6 though its always 7 or 730 come home exhausted, and still on almost all days need to attend to customers after hours. Customer meeting at 8.30pm are quite consistent occuring. Being a developer, debugging meetings I can understand to a certain extent, but why the f i am preparing quotes and pitching products.
Want to prep for new job boom no time left to do so other than weekends.

When QA isn't smart and you spend way to much time talking and in meetings.... "Listen, we are only testing for new bugs related to this fix, if there is a pre-existing bug, document it and move on".

QA finds a pre-existing bug and stays fixated on it for 3 days....

Not sure if a rant but.

How many of you guys gets so bored durning meetings on all the none important stuff or not related to you that you just start codeing instead?

I have these hours long meetings with analist that can talk calculations all dat long, how usefull they are, wich analyses you can do for them. I really don't care. Just tell me the formula and I will make it. Do not care whether A is voltage or the amount of pink clouds on sunday.

I want to work with managers with introverted personality who wouldn't call you or setup zoom meetings for stuff that can simply be texted.

Every general meeting with a CEO who has never tried the freaking product or prototype and has zero technical knowledge.

As well, just about two out of three meetings with a HR person.

I've had meetings with a CTO too where it legit could be a boring handbook or email used for inducing sleep at night.

Why would I strive to be productive if 90% of my work consists of me waiting for approvals, access, credentials, attending meetings about meetings?

Just went an entire day at work without a computer.

I know we usually rant about meaningless meetings and waste of time conversations but they are great for avoiding work while seeming very busy and productive.

have been working on a small project in the last couple of months. a few client meetings we are discussing a timeline feature for orders and assignments. the calendars (yeah a few on one screen cuz ... yeah) the client keeps complaining that they should look differently and in the same time says "Design is not important *designer-guy-he-works-with* can change it once we are done"
me - :/

side note: the calendars are tightly coupled with the js code powering them, so yeah ... looking forward to it
..

I work on many projects at work. There's divisions of teams and each team typically has one project. Each one of those projects have weekly Sprint meetings.

That's great! For the team. That means each team has one meeting a week so it's not too disruptive for those individuals.

Me on the other hand? I've got my hand in all the buckets. I'm on every team. I'm the only person on every team. This means I get to go to every meeting.

Let me rephrase that:
This means I -have- to go to every. Single. Meeting.

Which means I have a meeting every. Single. Day. Even if I didn't touch that project that week.

It is literally THE biggest waste of time. I sit there in a 1-2 hour long meeting saying absolutely nothing, not even being spoken to. I could be working on other projects.

And these meetings normally interrupt something I'm working on. Conveniently in the middle of me being in my zone. It makes me completely un-motivated to work for the hour before the meeting because why bother if I'm just going to get interrupted? And then it takes an hour to get back into everything after the meeting because everyone is fooling around or complaining about the meeting.

So that's three hours of my 8 hour work day completely wasted.

Why doesn't Skype of business have an application for Linux? Every company meeting where a developer isn't involved is run on sfb. Being on Ubuntu it is hard to attend any such meeting. Any meeting between developers is on zoom so we're good.
We can't really convince every one (other than developers) to start using zoom.
Do we have any other alternatives? Is this a lost cause?

Totally hands off. Haven’t touched code for about 2 months at least. Just concentrating on organising things and meetings.

Manager in latest monthly review : “we’d like you to be more hands off”.

How!?

Hate leaving work feeling useless for only writing 5 lines of working code today.

4 hours of meetings, an hour of calls, 2 hours to find 2 annoying bugs and the rest waiting for an api throttle limit so I can test again.

Hoping tomorrow is better!

Debating on whether to quit my job.

Part of the reason it's hard for me to make a decision is there are a lot of good things about my job:

- almost all the projects we work on are blue sky; no technical debt anywhere
- great teammates; people help each other out and generally there's a good vibe
- reasonable boss; he's totally fine with me managing my own schedule, and since I get my work done, he basically never questions when and where I work
- about 1 hour of corporate meetings each week
- best healthcare I've ever had; basically everything is paid for
- 3 weeks PTO & all major US holidays
- free food; generally healthy office snacks and such

So why would I want to quit this environment?

- I hardly get to code anymore. About 2 years ago, I got asked if I would mind helping spec out projects. Since then, I've moved from writing code related to projects to helping my teammates understand the business situation so they can build the right thing.
- I'm in lots of meetings. So we have very few meetings for the company itself. We have a bunch of customer meetings, though. And progressively, I've getting pulled into meetings where there's really no reason for me to be there, aside from "we should have a technical person present."
- The sales people are getting tired of turning down clients that our product isn't targeted for. So they're progressively pushing to make products in those areas. Unfortunately, I'm the only one on the engineering team has any experience in that other tech stack. Also, the team really, really don't want to learn it because it's old tech that's on its way out.
- The PM group is continuously in shambles. Turnover there has averaged 100% annually for about 5 years. Honestly, IMO, it's because they're understaffed. However, there has been 0 real motion to fix this other than talk. This constant turnover has made it so that the engineering team has had to become the knowledge base for all clients.
- My manager has put me on the management track, but has been very slow to hand off anything. I'm the team supervisor, and I have been since the beginning of the year formally. When the supervisor quit last year, it basically became obvious to me that I was considered the informal supervisor after that. However, I can't hire or fire; I can't give a review; I don't have any budget; I can't authorize time off. So what do I do now? Oh, I'm the person that my boss comes to ask about my co-workers performance for the purpose of informing promotion/termination/pay increases. That's it. I'm a spy.

New temp PM: Right I now want you in 9am every day and I want daily stand up meetings with a daily email at the end of the night. Also, we are abandoning the PM tool we use for one I like.

Me: Nope.

I’m becoming really frustrated working with my current project. It’s like someone’s dog ate the requirements and all stakeholders are on a different page on what’s needed/wanted. I’m fishing for the info I need and try to decipher the vagueness I get. I know I could just call a meeting and try to get us all on the same page there - but I’ve been in a few meetings with this specific lot of people, and I know it’s just going to end up in much more confusion...

What's up with the meetings and schedules? If you involve 9 people for a 3 hour meeting, you're wasting 27 freaking hours and no it's not what standups mean. Startups! ugh

If you're a PO; Please don't make the sprint review take almost 2 hours. Put it in text, make tickets, make roadmap and show it me that way. I've forgotten 90% of the meeting by the time I speak to you in the next daily.

I hate meetings. Waste of fucking time, especially when all you do is listen to what the PO wants for 1 hour and then both sides forget it the next day.
Use-fucking-less.

Getting real tired of people posting meetings only for you to join when they end. How hard is it to have you meeting at the time you set it for? Holy shit!

Half of the day is spent on meetings, and the other half is spent hearing others saying, oohh but do we have a ticket for this task? Should we create a ticket for it??

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

I don't like many sudden unplanned meetings appearing during your estimated development hours. It consumes some development time and destroys your momentum.

We follow the 2 weeks sprint that contains sprint ceremonies like sprint planning, demo, retro, daily stand ups and backlog grooming meetings. My capacity should be less then 80 hours since there are sprint ceremonies and unplanned meetings that happen during development hours. Unfortunately, my capacity is still set to 80 hours and meetings hours are not deducted. This puts me to a disadvantage as I need to do unpaid OT/weekend work just to make up for the lost time consumed by meetings.

Those 1 hour/30 minutes meeting piles up thus consuming development work hours. So a simple example is that you have 32 hours estimated to finish a big user story but sudden unplanned meetings and sprint ceremony meetings will consume some of that 32 hours. I will bring this up in our next retrospective meeting.

Working from home is a cool experience for me, but video meetings are a hassle. Not because of the nature of the meeting, but because I need to be sure that certain giant pillow is not visible for the webcam.

Also, for some reason I'm the only one with a stable connection, so there's a large overhead of asking and nobody talking, because we don't know what just happened

"You need to learn Angular for a new project. You can do it in any free time you have."
Where "free time" is defined as:
Any time left in between working on priority tasks or bugs, bugs which have failed testing and the weekly array of meetings, tech sessions and meetings to discuss the progress in learning Angular.

That’s it! I have had enough of business development, design and other non-technical departments of the business! STOP making us technical types sit through your demo meetings and circle-jerking each other on how great everything looks and “how exited you are for the future…”!

Look, I’m all for enthusiasm but taking it in turns to make over optimistic comments feels false and nauseating!!!!

Reasons not to work here...
Windoze
Insurance
One line scripts with no help option
Java
Windoze
5am meetings, working 10 hours a day then getting on again between 9pm and 5am, to accommodate for employees in India
WINDOZE

Edit - can't forget the worst laptop track pad in history 😂

a first time project owner sets up weekly requirements meetings for a new project. everyone has input, but the project owner. 4 months into building the application to the requirements gathered, the project owner says, that's not at all what I want. 4 months wasted

I landed 4 clients recently, and now my day is mostly me sorting my calendar out for meetings.

Help. I'm suffering from success.

I’m thankful for my team. I had an upsetting personal incident and it was affecting my ability to be present. I even missed a meeting. They are giving me the space I need and rescheduling other meetings for me. It’s hard for me to accept compassion because I haven’t experienced a lot of that when I needed it. I was very distressed at the beginning of the week, but now I’m starting to feel better and getting back to functioning.

Manager said we need to use Queue. Several meetings after then I looked at prototype by 6 senior devs:

A QueueListener connects to RabbitMQ check for payload then *disconnects*;

A TaskProvider in ASP.Net.MVC.Core(whatever it is) listening http and dependency inject that QueuePoller;

A Visual Cron timer calls that http url every 5 minutes.

Wait for it: a set of database tables to store messages for another MessageProcessor.

It’s a XML to CSV file conversion project consists of 43 unique projects under a solution. I did it within 500 lines of Node with ElasticSearch and told we don’t use fancy new stuffs here.

So I snapped during pointing session and told the BA that I didn’t have time to explain software engineering to the team….then they proceeded to make up new requirements that the client didn’t ask for which resulted in more complex error handling that presents the user with a list of generic message; I try really hard to keep implementation details out of those meetings, because all it does is bog down the team and waste time, but I suppose I fell into that trap.

I've been a "firefighter" on our big money-making project for like a year now and probably will be for the next year. Every sprint, fully booked out.
However, this sprint, some people think I have time to brainstorm, learn new tech and attend meetings related to a completely new project.
"Will it done in 2 weeks?"
"How long do you estimate?"
I can knock up a rough version of your fucking application in about a week if someone grows some fucking balls and schedules me some fucking time for it. STFU and stop interrupting my other work. Allocate some time or shove it up your ass so far until you regurgitate it then swallow it again and choke on it.

The team in our office was forced to have, and I'm not kidding, TWO hours long agile meetings EVERY day. That's right, only 6 hours a day for work. Crazy managers

Anyone know what Safe Agile is?

We're doing project interval planning for next 2 days.... aka long meetings about good knows what...

To me it sounds like bullshit bureaucracy.... because you can't have Safe anything with a team full of monkeys...

That or I just don't like change and giving up control... Or sitting I didn't meetings all day... Especially since I'm deaf and the captions suck...

So, might be the first time ever but I have a reasonable client. Oh wait, life isn't that nice!
Boss, stop picking fights over stupid shit with the client!
Boss, actually show up to meetings you called!
Boss, do you want to get us fired from the contract?
Boss, stop threatening the client! They hold all the chips here!
Boss, actually listen to my technical advice since you are not technical!
Boss, go die in a hole!
Boss, I want your job and paycheck you do nothing!
Boss, don't tell me you are tired and we can talk tomorrow when you kept me up until 3am the previous night then called an 8am meeting!
Boss, give everybody, including the client, more than 2 hours notice for a meeting, then get pissed when the client doesnt show. They have other meetings!

I'd been with the company for maybe two weeks, pushed some changes and updates to a client's site on a Friday afternoon as instructed by my boss, checked everything over and it's all fine.

Come Monday morning and this client is seriously miffed, not all of the changes had applied and the site was a mess all weekend. Turns out a bug with the caching plugin meant what we were getting in the office was different to outside.

Meetings were held and a new QA procedure was put in place.

Someone once forced my team to make something live on a Friday, that wasn't ready and wasn't tested properly. I said no and had to go pick up the kids from school. Found out later they made one my team stay late to finish it and push it live, even though I told everyone to leave on time.

Lots of meetings the week after where I got told off for standing up for my principles. Eventually reached an agreement.

At least some common ground was found and changes were no longer pushed before the weekend.

I lose all respect for people trying to schedule meetings with me when they write the time zone initialism incorrectly.

It is well into EDT. EST technically means you want to meet an hour earlier and that you live in a different time zone than everyone else on the east coast of the United States. But I'm just going to assume that you don't remember that really annoying daylight savings time shit we have to do twice a year and show up in EDT.

Meetings.

Too many meetings.

"Why do you explain...." 10kv electrical shock.

Explanation so everyone has the same knowledge.

"But CD ES process of LCE..." Water. From the emergency hose. In the face.

For fucks sake, we are using speech in a meeting so stop using motherfucking abbreviations you shit hole.

"We had bugs". Taking an hot iron and shoving it somewhere nice.

Explain - what the fuck are you talking about? What bugs? Tickets? Documentation? Implications of the bugs? Hate. Much hate.

Um. I don't know. Maybe. But if.

Thumb wrenches.

Please, stop wasting time, if it's non important, a " No " doesn't hurt....

Let me show you. (4k Monitor, 10 px font, bright neon colors, IDE looks like LSD trip in bad).

Crucification.

If you present stuff, good - but for christs sake, shove your motherfucking shitty IDE setting in your own arse and turn on presentation mode with neutral colors - bright or dark mode, I don't care, but readable without danger of seizure.

I can't stream my monitor right now because of "bla" "blabla" (some private shit that has ZERO to do with work).

I'll need some oxy if this goes on.

On wednesday we always work from 10:00 untill 20-21:00 because of weekly meetings with product owners who have a full time job besides being a product owner..

Its okay, we get free food and often have a couple beers, but the last weeks its been killing me...

Other people bail out because they want to do something with their friends that evening but I always feel like its a commitment we made as a team so as lead dev I should be there..

Think next week im going to bail out for a time

The meetings for SEO.
The SEO guy is really, really nice. He's patient, comprehensive, he's quite good looking and everything, but my boss is a total moron when speaking about internet stuff. He makes us repeat everything at least three times, he will note everything on a sheet of paper that he will lose and write again... these reunion last 2 hours and we have one twice a month. Uuuugh...

How to impress the extent of your power over your employees and partners:

1. Make the tech team spend inordinate amounts of effort to investigate someone stealing an almost worthless piece of junk, to make an example for the rest of the workforce.

2. Complain in "secret" meetings that the tech team is not up to the task of delivering the project.

3. Announce that the project will probably, but not certainly, be shut down.

So we have this fucking project that came straight out o Satan's anus managed by 3 fucking PMs that each of them seem to be on a different drug and none of them seem to talk to each other despite the fact that they don't shut the fuck up on meetings.

They end up asking for conflicting changes every fucking time... Like:
PM1: change this to red
PM2: change this ( same thing ) to blue
PM3: should be green

Every day I stray further away from sanity. Maybe I'll be the 4th PM in some months by this rate of craziness my mind is diving into.

Hold a meeting that the participants actually want.

The biggest time wasters I had to attend were:
- "generic weekly meet up of people not working together telling what's new on their side" (I don't work with you, I DON'T CARE)
- "management wants updates/wants to talk about doing instead of letting us do" (go read Jira tickets, and ffs stay out of the experts' field... They're experts in it for a reason)
- "no agenda, this is just to get to know each other" (I get to know people on my own terms, stop forcing what can't be forced)
- most Scrum meetings (some people need guidance, I don't! Your Scrum chains actually hinder my productivity! Can we please stop wasting my time and nerves?)

And the best meetings? A couple of coworkers realizing "hey we need to make a decision here, let's book a conference room together" and "hey you know your stuff about xyz, can you teach us what you know?".

Our client has put me and some others through at least 10 hours of passive lectures on non-development server management, nothing hands-on included. I realized today that I may be responsible for replicating some of the management processes (while supervised), and I think I start tomorrow. I didn't take notes on any of these meetings because the level of detail was overwhelming. I suck at communicating on time--can I still tell my PM I have about 5% memory retention on these lectures or did I royally screw up?

Meetings...

But I realise that the meetings are only for eating donuts 🍩 🍩

I’ve had meetings specifically for team A’s problems. Team B gets invited to assist. Within ten minutes the meeting was all about team B and none of team A’s problems were solved. “Team B” is notorious for hijacking meetings. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t feel qualified to speculate about WHY they do this...

Had a project estimation meeting with my manager yesterday. I told him that it will take minimum 3 months to complete the project, and he finally settled for 15 days.
Why do we have these bullshit meetings at the first place?

My company is supposed to be 'remote friendly'

Any request to work from home is a fight to get approved, regular days frequently get cancelled for vital meetings and best of all our infrastructure is so shit the VPN drops silently every 5-10 mins. Good luck doing a big merge or getting latest code.

Is there a hidden joke in the fact that stand up meetings/daily stand-ups share the same word root with stand up comedy? It would seem the creators of that pointless activity thought it naughty/mischievous, if not a humorous giveaway that those gatherings are more for fun, entertainment, a joke, and a platform for product managers to not feel left out from the development process

Hand over from another developer who handled our internal data pipeline. I tried to set meetings for the handover he kept canceling them. When I asked him why? He replied I'm writing a documentation so that you won't the meeting. After 3 weeks, he emailed me with an overview diagram for the data pipeline.

My reaction: Woooooooooot? You built this in 3 weeks. WTF

Story time:

I'm late for a meeting. It's between client, coworker and me. It's different from a normal meetings. So I ask my friend something along the lines of "How to connect to a 3 person call."

His reply: "Did you really just ask me how to connect to a 3 way."

I guess there's always time for one of those jokes -_-

y'know what's ironic? people rush over things and avoid meetings, documentation or just speaking to each other, all for the sake of productivity, not realizing that's what destroys the team

Why the fuck is debit cards that don't need a PIN for transactions even a thing? What is so difficult to understand or implement in a two factor authentication? Like do these companies have meetings where some fucktard proposes removing a crucial security feature and the others just nod approval?

There was a time i disliked middle managers (because i thought they were useless and just making bank for sending emails and doing meetings) but then a couple of them took sick leave for a few days and then i realized how important they were. When they came back, i was almost crying with joy 🤣

So just got news via comments about retarded devs leaving twilio creds. in their apps published to the app stores, attached below is an interesting snap of the document appthority has published, wonder who is getting beat up right now for leaking corporate meetings 😶

Group project meetings in uni. All of them. Noone ever speaks and you're trying to suggest ideas. Noone disagrees with you and when it's time for the next meeting, apparently everyone just did their own thing.. fml

Definitely the meetings. Not sure if the "Meeting to prepare for the Sprint Planning" or the "Planning meeting to prepare for the Meeting to prepare for Sprint Planning".

I know it sounds like I'm joking, but it actually happened 2 months ago.