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Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.
It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.
One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.
While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.
During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.
After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.
(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)
But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.
One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!
Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.
Weird and scary.
Very scary.
Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.5 -
Company organised a meeting with everyone for me to explain (again) why I'm leaving.
Basically participated to a meeting to say that I'm out of their company6 -
I had an old rant somewhere about the most unproductive meeting I’ve had.
It was when I joined a new team. I was asked to hold a meeting to solve the issue of why nothing gets done on time and nobody showed up to the meeting on time including the manager.1 -
I had a 15 minute meeting, organised by the MD, with the CTO and a principal engineer, to discuss what shade of yellow a button should be. Massive waste of time.19
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Hmm, Manager called us for a meeting to discuss our future plan
All we ended up listening he wants to open up his own caffe with library
:(8 -
One time at my first dev job, I had a one on one meeting with the international marketing manager. I was like two weeks into the job as a contract front end dev, and some how got placed into this random meeting with someone I didn’t know. Anyways, I show up to the meeting room, sit down, and she started talking about some ecom site that was going to launch soon. Then a list of features she wanted to get my insight on like analytic events, gdpr, cta modals etc I can’t remember tbh. After 5 minutes of her non stop blabbering I finally stopped her to say I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about, I didn’t know who the right person she was supposed to talk to is, and I only accepted the meeting because she said there was food(donuts). She was pretty embarrassed after that, but continued to keep talking for another 15 minutes about the job and how do I like it etc. Whole thing took 25 minutes, and I missed out on afternoon ping pong. Worst meeting ever.3
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"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.3 -
I had a job that was one big meeting for 6 months. I kid you not. We had our stand up, had another meeting that extended the stand up to discuss issues highlighted in the stand up, then we would have a scrum catch up type meeting then after that work until about 12 so an hour ish? Then a call after lunch to catch up about the work we’d done and make sure everyone was ok, then probably a backlog meeting, then likely a company wide meeting and then at about 4? Probably a meeting. I don’t know by this point I’d lost the will to live. One massive joke of a company I swear5
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The most unproductive meeting was definitely a day long meeting about “inclusiveness” with an emphasis on toxic masculinity. It was all the dev teams for a whole day which was ballpark 40-60 devs total. Most of us were like, “We have never even had a woman on our teams to alienate.” Eventually a dev hiring manager allowed the three female devs to leave half way through because they were being repeatedly singled out by the HR lady running the meeting.
The rest of us sat through another half day of the HR lady telling us on how bad we are because we are men.16 -
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.11 -
A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.
Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??1 -
Basically any meeting where "the big bald" (a.k.a our manager) was present...
It always started professional and alright but it often took only around 5 minutes before the asshat started bragging about "his past accomplishments", his life when he was younger and often a lot of shit that wasn't exactly respectful to women...
I'm not an SJW, nor am I the most "female-friendly" person out there myself...
But the things he said repeatedly, made me come really close just punching him in the face. -
I asked my former boss for some clarification via mail. Given a table, I was supposed to edit some user info in the company system. Had some questions on a few entries only my boss could answer.
Boss would organize a meeting, also inviting a more experienced co-worker I worked with. When the meeting starts, I get to know that my boss will join in a few minutes..... few minutes later, boss cancels the meeting. So it's me and the co-worker, who cannot answer my questions.
A simple mail could've solved it... -
The ones I said hi on microphone, grab wireless headphones and start playing fifa on PlayStation with friend, beat him couple of times and said bye.
Well maybe it was productive overall cause I had lots of fun. -
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.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻1 -
None in the last few years. But my supervisor was a gem that I wished I could pack in a bag and take with me elsewhere.
However, I can recall an old job that had a lot of "weekly" meetings that I used to sleep at. If you have a weekly meeting without an agreed upon or relevant agenda, chances are it's a snooze fest.3 -
I just had a meeting in which everyone discussed from starting what we will talk about in next meeting with same people
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Probably the one where we had an error, because the service from a thirdparty we needed to install used a fourthparty service that was behind a proxy. Due of internal reasons we needed to use our own tomcat instead of the standard tomcat. We made a meeting because we didn't found out at that point that the problem was the firewall that dropped the packages from the application. We replayed it to them (at that point it was in my musclememory) and after a month i got the idea to use tcpdump to see if the server is calling another webservice, which was denied by the developers.
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On a past project, every sprint planning was the most unproductive meeting. We were expected to fix all open bugs each sprint, so there was literally nothing to plan. How do you prioritize when the goal is “do everything”? 😂
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We met initially to discuss the requirements of the customer.
The customer had argued for hours in a damn video meeting with our boss, who apparently didn't know how to keep updated notes throughout the meeting.
The result of this meeting to discuss what the customer wanted:
He presented us with a 'spec' and a 14 hour video and said 'ok. so figure it out'.
This led to more meetings as I am not going to sit on my ass for 14 hours listening to people contradict themselves constantly.3 -
Student programmer's uncertainity principle
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It is impossible to do programming and prepare for college exam simultaneously(Especially the day before exam)
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