Here we go

One time I was in a meeting and the UX Director fell asleep (like he had done before) but this time did a little quiet snoring. I was cracking up. A few other people noticed but he was off to the side so most just tried not to wake him and eventually he woke up.

I sang in front of the clients to demo an app for 30 seconds. It's a dating app that allow users to sing and record a song and send it to other person. It's a famous way of courting here in the Philippines.

That was my ridicolous and embarrassing meeting ever. Hahahaha

Large corporation. CEO tells everyone to attend this mandatory meeting via the internet.
I work remotely. I can't log in, meeting is full. But our colleagues have made a parallel meeting just for us in the meantime, where I could hear them make fun of the meeting, which is basically the CEO showing some Powerpoint slides to a room with 10 people. Nobody can either see the slides (bad camera or connection) or hear the CEO (crap microphone). 1000+ people watching this "mandatory" meeting that lasted for an hour. Nobody had any idea what it was about in the end. Just slides and muffled voices.

HR Project update meeting.
Duration: 1h
Content:
1) recap of previous meeting
2) overview of what we will discuss in next meeting.

boss: What the fuck guys! Why didn't you go to the meeting this morning? Have you checked your google calendar?
me: But, but it is scheduled to tomorrow, google calendar says that.
boss: Who put that date?
me: You
boss:....
boss:And fo you double checked it?
me: What do you mean?
boss: Double check! Check if what is in the google calendar is correct!
me: But that doesn't make any sense.
boss: No excuses!! Next time you must double check!

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

I was forced to attend a meeting about a project I wasn't part of.

School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S

P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...

*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)

Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.

Please don't use SIGKILL, USE SIGTERM

6 hours, with non developers, to decide on the font size of a website. Had to listen to 6 hours of pseudo psychological bullshit about how a 16pt thin Helvetica or something made people "feel".

And I'm a backend dev... I haven't written a line of css in two years... I only interact with the website through functional tests.

Recursive meeting...

We had a meeting whose agenda was to plan another meeting.

Senior Devs made the Program Manager cry. Dev Lead did nothing to stop it from happening, Program Manager Lead was in shock.

Was in a meeting with my boss. I complained about there being too many meetings and thus not enough time at the keyboard. He told me that I should turn down meetings I feel I dont need or feel are unnecessary (no point in me being there if I dont feel i contribute). Point taken . I stood up and left. He later told me he appreciated my honesty and would try to keep are meetings to the point in the future :D

There was this couple who were talking on the phone and neither of them would hang up,asking the other person to hang up.
So we did it for them :)

Awkward Meeting, right ?

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

It was not a meeting but a class. We learned to program in Java.

Using notepad....

We were starting a libre software project and needed some basic stuff like email accounts, cloud storage, calendars for scheduling, etc. So we start to talk about using services that didn't agreed the patriotic act of the USA. That lead to the omnipresent topic of Google's control over our lives. Then we moved to Microsoft's crimes against humanity for preinstalling windows, and at the time when we were discussing if Steve Jobs were a fraud or just a salesman, we realized it was getting late and we had nothing set or even decided. So we create a Google account and went home.

The whole devteam entering the meeting sitting there for a few minutes realizing the one who placed the meeting was not there. With questionmarks almost painted to our forheads we silently agreed on leaving and going back to what we did before the meeting.

So I used to do some freelancing in web development last year, nothing too fancy just some simple PHP websites. Comes the worst meeting in my life. So I am from India and we have a lot of long lasting business here being passed on over generations. TL;DR the guy was the owner of a very old business which was actually very huge and the guy was educated too, so I assumed that he'll be sensible as compared to other people.

The meeting was in an expensive cafe and he paid for it, he even told me upfront that meeting is on him. Great, right? So we sit down, order some coffee and then start discussing what he needed.
The guy needed an ecommerce website built with backend and logistics system integrated. We discussed possible designs for the website and stuff too and so far the deal looked promising to both of us.
I explained him the cost estimate and told him that I would email him the final quote from myself once we discussed server cost and shit.
So now comes the bargaining part where he asked me to give him server and domain for free.
At this point, I suspected that he didn't know that servers and domains are not something that you make. You have to purchase and renew them periodically.
So I told that guy that he didn't understand the cost estimation and explained to him that X is the cost of making this fucking thing and Y is its monthly maintenance cost, if he wanted annually could be done too. And this Y did not include server and domain costing.
Now came the fucking tide, the guy straight up turned to his shit and told me I am lying and trying to con him. So I gently asked him if he had ever gotten any website made. To which, he said No, but he knows how the costing works.
I was like "Bitch?". So I calmly tried to explain that that's not how websites are done, delivered and maintained.
He didn't seemed to be understanding and kept on fucking repeating that he knows his shit and blah blah.
At this point, I was like "Okay. Fuck this dude then. I can find another project. " and then I told him that he'll need to find someone according to his needs.
Interestingly enough, the guy called someone and then walked out of the cafe while talking on phone. I waited for 5 minutes and he didn't come back so I decided I would pay for my coffee and leave. Turns out the guy had paid his bill before my arrival and ditched me with the excuse of the call.

But oh well, I think working with such an idiot would have been much worse than paying for that coffee.

One time was in a meeting with clients from abroad (big company with some offices in the US). After the meeting we went to a restaurant with the clients. Then one hour later our CEO shows up and starts tanking beers like crazy and gets super wasted. Then starts asking the client if they have a job for him in the US. He doesnt want to run his company anymore because all his employees are fuckung idiots blahblah. Then he asks me you understand right you have seen my employees they are fucking stupid. Uhm yeah dude I work for you... *awkward sillence, continues chugging beers, changes topic*

My most ridiculous meeting was a meeting that I couldn't attend.

When I was working as a freelancer my companies CEO and me were invited by a client from another country (6 hours flight & hotel).
The meeting was scheduled for the day after our arrival.

After breakfast the CEO told me he would pick me up at the hotel lobby at 2pm. I waited for some hours, but he didn't come.
Later that day he told me that he met with the client already at 10am.

I am sure he told me the wrong time, because he was afraid that the client would try to headhunt me.

I was working from home and had a long skype meeting. It was boring and I knew I wouldn't need to say anything the whole time. At the same time my girlfriend was in the mood so we did it on my desk with one headphone in my ear in case somebody asked me a question.

Definitely not the worst meeting, but the most memorable for sure.

HR meeting about flex time. They rounded up the entire engineering department for an all hands meeting.

Started off "we're not here to single anyone out, and no one's getting fired", and then proceeded to shower an employee, lets call them G with praise because they worked late the one day they brought in an investor.

The rest of the meeting was a guilt trip for the entire group. Great use of company time. /s

A meeting about my "future" as my old company kicked me out after 5 years.

My first performance review as a graduate:
Boss: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
Me: "ok whatever, what can I do to get the rating I'm suppose to get?"
B: *lists job description of a senior developer* ... "Interview candidates, mentor juniors, start a project and make me profit"
Me: (if I can do that as a graduate, what am I doing here?)

My last performance review at the same company:
B: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
M: "ok what can I do to improve?"
B: *lists everything I did before the first performance review that wasn't expected of me*
M: (LoL funny, I just wanted to hear your response because I know you'd forget about the first review. Another reason to validate my resignation)

Brought in a meeting a really good idea. One guy out of 9 sayd, that it's stupid and we could not use it.

1 week later the same guy proposes the same idea to the boss and team. Took all the merit and when I confronted him, he denied, that it was first my idea.

Fuck my life...

Most ridiculous meeting I've been in? Sooo many. Here is the first.

Mandatory box knife safety meeting. Why? We worked in the same building as the warehouse, and the safety manager made it mandatory everyone in the building be trained.

We walk into the meeting...
Trainer: "What are you guys doing here? You're developers."
Bob: "Adam said this meeting is mandatory for everyone."
Trainer: "Yea, but not you guys. You'll never touch a box knife. Just a sec, let me run out and find Adam."
<2 minutes later>
Trainer: "Sorry guys, Adam is not budging. He said everyone and that includes developers."

B - Ok guys, here we are to decide who's gonna do what.
What part of the app needs to be developed
P1 - The UX
P2 - The Statistics
P3 - The calls to the server
Me - The flow of work

B - Uhm, right, well scratch that, I'm gonna need you to make a website for a costumer.

Me - But this app is due to the next two weeks!!

B - I'm sure you'll manage.

Backstory: Offering manager brings a project through a few months of requirements gathering / feasibility study etc. Project spends 8 months with a R&D team to flesh out. Our team gets 6 months to turn it into a ship able product. 4 months in, offering manager calls a meeting.

OM: ok so you are all working on project X, well I need your input on something

Team: Ok, go ahead

OM: what do you think the app needs to do?

Team: ... I'm sorry?

OM: well we've been looking at it, and we don't think it does very much compared to existing apps. We need a killer feature but we don't know what. Any ideas?

Team: well we were looking at project Y originally, which was a lot more advanced. But you pulled the plug in favour of this.

OM: yeah, believe me customers will want project X a lot more. It just needs to do something interesting ... you know what I mean?

Team: not really, if it doesn't have anything, why did we go for it?

OM: ok I don't think I'm being clear. Point is, if anyone has any ideas let me know, we need to ship it in 2 months and it needs to be killer

I handed in my notice that week and was asked why ... let's just say I told them.

A popular social media website in my country (which my friends and I were working on it's new design) was hacked and everyone on the dev side of the website was invited to the ministry of communications, believing we were going to discuss security of user data. The other guys (working on the back-end) were friends with the CEO (if you want to call it that) and naturally came to the meeting. They started to talk about the girls of their city. Meanwhile about 1.2 million user data encrypted with MD5 was out there.

In a former company we had a CEO that was no developer but thought he knows better just because of googling stuff.
One meeting was a very ridiculous one. He told us which technology we should use for the new project. All of us developers objected and agreed on something better.
It ended in he yelling at us and calling us stupid and incompetent. This meeting lasted almost a whole day.
I left the company soon after.

That would have to be the meeting we went to to plan a meeting. At the clients offices on top of it, so a 20min drive one way to sit in a meeting room to plan a meeting.

Every standup, we had to make a skype call to the other office in UK. At that office was the QA lead and for this project she was on our team. One day she came in late to the standup and just looked pissed or sick or SOMETHING. This was particularly strange because usually she was incredibly cheery and "the life of the meeting" in a sense. After everybody's update, she was asked if she had anything to say. She started fucking mumbling some shit I couldn't hear because of the bad audio quality, then she progressively raised her voice until finally she was yelling and cussed out the PM, ending it off with "ALL FUCKING BECAUSE OF YOU, <PM>!!" Everybody was just fucking speechless and confused as fuck. Nobody understood what her fucking issue was, but the PM (on my end of the call) was not taking that shit! "LOOK LADY, I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPLAINT IS BUT THIS IS COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE." Blah blah, he gave it to her good, told her they needed to take it offline, ended the call abruptly and then turned to all of us and said, "Jesus Christ, what drugs is she taking?" To this day I have no idea what the hell happened but it's still one of my funniest memories at that company.

11 months ago I was tasked to audit 58 computer and 6 servers including network speed analysis. In the meeting with the client & stakeholders, they asked my boss how we will achieve this. He replied... "Pen and Paper. We have interns to capture all info into a spreadsheet ". GEEEEEEEZUS!!!

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

(the meeting)

I've had a non-IT world colleague ask me to build a website, I asked if it's a static website like resume etc with no database & stuff. I quoted $1000 if that's the case since that's minimal maintenance
He goes he needs a simple website, like eBay to sell his products. Also need features like Amazon, integration of various payments. And this and that.

For $1000 !!

I felt good that he thinks I can make an e-commerce site but f¢k that thinking man.. I told him to hire a freelancer and told him about few sites.

Maybe we'll see a thousand dollar e-commerce site, haha I only hope the payments part is secure 😂😂 I ain't buying anything anyways. I'm 99 % sure nobody's gonna do it and next time we talk, he's gonna be like 1000 and a 50 haha

In a stand-up my PM and Client discuss about their kid's name. 😣🤐

The sales guys ate all our pizzas. Utter waste of meeting time.

"For me, it means..."

For me it was not one specific meeting, but rather a series of meetings with a customer over some years.

It was like the movie "groundhog day", it was the same all over again.

We had this technical term, and our customer had his own definition of what it meant and what it's supposed to be. No need to say that his definition did not match the one the engineers and developers of the world had agreed on.

At least a dozen times, i convinced him, but as soon as the meeting ends, it's all reset and we start at zero next time with his new or old definition of what a definition should mean. Sometimes i was just sick and tired of it so i let him explain how it is while i just stared into the void. Didn't matter he told me once, it will happen again next time again, like it never happened before.

"You're all being made redundant"

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.

Call at 5am, meeting in the office at 5.15am, leave office at 5.30am on route to airport because the customer doesn't know how to use the system. It turned out to be nothing :/

I've traveled all the way from Chile to Ecuador to ask requirements for an already won project, just to find out it was already taken by a local company.

Meeting of 10 minutes to review and grade a project that took months to make. Apparently your supervisor giving you proper attention is not important enough, compared to him getting his food delivery.

I was forced to attend a attend a meeting because I was wearing formals and had already completed my work.
They introduced me as a UI guy and thought the client won't have any changes in UI because it is a per there requirements. Apparently they were wrong.

Being called into a meeting where you get fired for an argument you had with your CTO. But the CTO left 6 months ago and the sales department are suspiciously low on deals in the pipeline...

Shame really, I loved that job and the Dev team was great, shame the directors were bastards.

Wasn't even going to do this but here it is.

Meeting to start every single day. Every day I have said what is assigned is not possible in any way. Nobody listens or cares.

Fast forward a week, my team is deadlocked with an issue that cannot be fixed. Morning meeting kicks off, topic gets brought up by me and the immediate response is, "Why have you or anyone else been looking into that? We've known for weeks that is an issue."

A guy came from another city, just to teach a little bit on how to improve productivity, and after almost 2 hours of him telling stories about his life and career, in five minutes he told us to delete games and facebook from our cellphones, and only focus on learning and work related apps... And He tried to sell us the complete series of books and videos with the full content on productivity in the end...

A meeting but we never talked nor shown anything

best 10 minutes of my life

Just about every meeting goes the same way. I (or a different developer) explain something to the client and they agree and say it makes sense. Great, that takes 5 minutes. Then the project manager jumps in and says the same thing all over again but takes twice as long and confuses the client. By the time I (or the other dev) are able to clarify to the client the boss jumps in with a random comment that is either completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand (showing he wasn't paying attention) or that undermines all we had done up to that point. At this point the project manager then sums it all up with something like "great meeting" and "we'll send you an email". Now both the client and I are confused about what is going on... After the meeting the project manager again reiterates everything that we had already said. A simple 5 minute meeting is now 45 minutes long. So. Stupid.

Marketing meeting. They don't care about programmers and they don't want you to talk but they would assume you have said yes to everything they asked for

A full day discussion with 'non-designers' to decide on a repeatative abstract image that is to be used for background in a website.
A fcking full day..
What the hell!!

And the final selected image was the same that we started with.

Every meeting. Period.

At the product backlog refinement the product owner told us (the devs) how the database model must be designed! He said he knows it best, because he knows all the requirements. 🙈

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...

Phone meeting with the makers of a program the company uses regularly:

Me: "so I believe you received the list of problems we have run into recently, can you walk us through how to make the changes necessary to fix them?"

them: "we see none of these errors"

me: "that's impossible, we had all of them yesterday, they crashed a few servers"

*checks version number on program, it's different*

me: "hold on one second"

*checks computer log, they were logged in this morning before I came in*

I figured out they received the list, fixed it, and then turned to us and said we didn't know what we were talking about because none of the errors were there, because they wanted to look superior.

Fuck those guys.

The team leader call us for a serious meeting, and he wants it to be productive,

Leader: "we shall not procrastinate anymore. We don't have time left. We should not just talk random bullshit like we did the last few times. Aight?"

We all agree to be productive.

We also set a few main subjects and decision to be discussed. Then, we all get into the meeting room seriously. In a meeting, we try the idea of the upcoming project. But we suddenly went off topic. Then, My friend talk about L4D2. Then we start playing. And, I say, why not try some GTA5? I proudly reboot my expensive laptop from Ubuntu to Windows and playing GTA. Then, we start spotify and talk about song.

We laid in the sofa and talk sexually. My friend introduce me his favorite AV and we compare our manhood's size.

It was 4am already. One by one the attendee fall asleep.

It is lIke... the survival gamr of sleepiness? xD

Only my best boy friend and I were left awake, talking about ourselves, watching the beautiful midnight city.

Then, 2 of us ourselves start to talk about project idea. It is something cool and crazy to think about, like a friend making app. The 3 hours of brainstorming is gay and romantic.

"Okay, so we have the outline. let's sleep, baby" So we sleep till the noon. We wake up. Some left. Some were still sleeping. The birds twitter in the bequtiful skyline.
I did not forget to upload my idea to discord after going home in the morning. End of the meeting. Barely any goal was met in the meeting.

Those days, we make attempt of productive meeting again and again but end up procrastinating everyday. We had meeting in a small bedroom and it was our meeting room. We played different songs, tasted different wines.

And, finally one day, my friend say "I feel that it is much productive to work alone in a separate room. So we won't get distracted by each other."
Another friend: "yea..I know it is harsh... but yea... true... let's work alone"

I almost eant to cry. But we cannot indulge ourselves in the moments of dreamy romance.

We should start real work and don't be gay.

Got pulled into a meeting that should have been an email about requirements for something I was building. It was basically 3 people arguing the whole time and trying to decide what they specifically wanted.

They even called our other branch and started arguing with them.

Total time: 2.5h

My company got drunk in the meeting decided to go out to town and live it up ... we got loads of work done... I swear...

Easy. I was in just 1, but i heard what they were all about. They happened weekly.

This boss mainly ran his hardware renting business. The software for that hardware was often optional, but they developed and sold that as a seperate company with almost the same name.

The guy had no idea what development meant. What it means to test. Everything he knew was hardware, and it just never really clicked. This means that bugs and non linear development cost for a feature were confusing to him to a point that when brought up or conflicting, he would look confused, and walk out the office without another word.

This guy would bust in, usually monday morning and call a "meeting"
They gather in the lunchroom as thats the only place everyone fit, and the guy would go on a 3 hour monologue on god knows what.

It was never positive and always full off complaints and idiotic ideas that the senior developer had to break down until as if talking to a big toddler, on why they do not work.

As a result everyones day started mizzerable, nothing got done. The software package was full of logic flaws. And everyone wanted to quit but didn't have the energy to invest in that.

During that internship 1 guy was fired. In the 2 months he was there he litterally did jack shit. And if he did anything it was the bare minimum, committed broken but compilable, and then wait for revision requests.

Yeah that place was a shitshow. I loved it, but never again.

Any meeting involving our UX team. They get a program to drag and drop pictures of pieces of the website and then wonder why the devs implementing it don't want to

A colleague insists that I be part of a meeting with DHL so I would learn something extremely complicated that they would need an IT.
Me: they probably need network assistance and I am only being dragged
Figures it's just a PDF form to fill the requests for collection! And they needed a technician to learn how to f@&$! Fill a form

"you've worked with nagios before haven't you? Can you give a presentation on it" 'sure' in the meeting: so tell us about opennms

Meeting for a warehouse job, where computer skills were required...
Worked 9 months there.
Me and boss was fired, he had very personal Wird ideias... And cause was a know it all never asked, never researched...
His ideia: take work from the office by giving werehouse employees full access to clients...
Best compensation I ever got by behing fired... And gained my worst enemy.

When the manager doesn't show up to a meeting, we get everything disscussed sorted and even summarised in an email...simples! Yet manager insists on having "another" meeting just to go over everything we all discussed. We wonder why it takes twice as long... We have to explain EVERYTHING, just let us get on with it!!

This was shit funny.

One morning, one of my colleagues got a direct call from project architect that he has to setup a meeting to explain in depth the project he has been taking care of for months and prepare a presentation and send an invite. Two weeks later we are all invited to this meeting. This colleague acting as host of this meeting prepared for few days on the PowerPoint and also a well crafted demo. Then as the architect joins, this colleague starts speaking about his role and the project. Within a minute, the architect interrupts him and says 'shut the fuck up, I don't think you are ready yet for this meeting maybe we need someone more learned...so hmm....let me explain it'. And this architect then uses his PPT for sometime and then pulls up a whiteboard and draws birds and spiders telling every time to see system in it.

My colleague is screwed to shit and is incapable to speak when closing the call.

Later ahead 4 weeks, his PPT is retouched and recoloured and attached to a Wiki page created by a unknown fucker who happens to have direct mobile calls with this architect.

Who's is faulty or not or what happened it still shocks most when this architect joins the scrum call daily. Fuck him.

Sitting 3h in a bullshit claiming and blaming meeting called 'refinement' as 'the tech expert' while PO and customers fight how stories and bugs should be priorized and importantly enough they discussed why the god damn bugfix isn't alive yet that was promised to be deployed this morning.. I was up to deploy it right the time they said I really have to go to that meeting... Yeah.. Business as usual

I'm gonna spin this as ridiculously awesome meeting. My company is currently expanding the local satellite office in to a full site. Part of that includes building a local presence for recruiting efforts.

I was part of a meeting I organized at my alma mater between my executive partner and two deans of the college. I am leading the effort to help them align their curriculum with modern practices, training them on free software licences with my company, and more. As well, there's an opportunity to train students on an untouched area of big data in the medical industry.

Less than 2 years with the company and partners (local, national, and international) in the company within my work area are sending me kudos.

We were having a project followup and a colleague starts boasting to the client about her perfect school grades, so a friend, our tech lead and I start sending messages mocking her, so the tech leads bursted laughing in the middle of the meeting, then the pm asked him what was going on and he rated us out, since then he never uses his cellphone again during meetings.

As an intern a couple of years ago I was in a meeting about our department were having to many meetings. The outcome was two more meetings and a workshop about how to have more efficient meetings.

An yearly performance review meeting ... on my second day in at a new job.

I had to sit through a meeting, which we discussed how to make our meetings more effective. In the end, we decided we were being effective already and too much process was a waste of time

Every one of our sprint "planning" meetings.
We would sit and be told to estimate a bunch of defects we had never seen before. And then we wouldnt actually decide as a team what to commit to because it was assumed that we had to deliver everything in the backlog every sprint. This is what happens when you try to apply scrum to a maintenance team.

There are no meetings at the company I work for. GASP!!!
Well...we have one, now and again, but it is just an opportunity for the boss to update the support team with changes to the product and we (i.e. the software engineers) come for the free pizza. GASP!!! I would prefer that we have technical meetings, but it falls on deaf ears.

Scopechange and roadmap editing meetings, felt like a full team keelhaul 🤕

Attending two hours town hall meeting where 200 to 300 employees listen never ending show off of numbers and technical achievements he/she did

So we (group of 3) were out to a tech guy who was out sourcing some project. During the meeting we mentioned VCS, upon hearing this the guy was like "this is used by big companies". we left the meeting then and there.

Pulled into a meeting because a search didn't create a new table record for any result NOT found. Apparently, the user wanted dummy results to fill the table if what he searched for wasn't found.... And it was suppose to have nearly every column say "RECORD NOT FOUND". Just.... Why....

A meeting to discuss synergy and other business fluff lingo.

A meeting where the client's UX evangelist kept interrupting her CEO and our team's developers when trying to discuss an issue. Her reason? "I'm bored and you talk too much".

A meeting between me, the CEO and the owner of a company. The subject: they asking me about my friend who decided to dropped their shitty company.

Special work area meeting. Partners from around the globe came in. Call in or you flew in. Close enough, have to attend in person. Hundreds of people there. Starts at 9, broke at noon, picked back up at 1, ended at 6. Focus? Improving sales. About 98% of the people there did not make sales. About 70% did not work on bids and proposals. It was extremely painful and boring. And my project manager didn't know why we were so upset the next day. It had been extremely "informative" to her.

Our project using Agile methodology, we have every day stand-up meeting(scrum meeting) that normally end around 10 to 15 minutes with 7 ppl.
One day The Project Owner came and join our stand-up meeting that cost us like sprint planning
And The Project Owner did not stop there, he come again next day for the 1 week.
Because of that our product backlogs and Sprint Planning goes haywire.
We failed to delivery what we planned for that project.

- the 2 hr meeting called for every day of a week, to prepare for a PPT which is to be presented to a higher up exec within 5 mins.
- the sprint planning meeting, where all the stories of that sprint are already weighted and assigned to the devs, but it still goes for 2 hrs
- the backlog grooming meeting, where instead of looking at the sprint backlog, the current sprint is looked at and discussed.

In summary, we're all agreed that we should have a meeting next week, to discuss what we should talk about in the meeting the week after.

AHHHHH!

// long rant sorry

A few jobs ago I had a meeting that was scheduled for 15 mins. It was not going to be a bad meeting. I was looking at the people that were invited a few dev's, few pm's, and this one guy (Fuck!!). This one guy we will call him R.

So R is a pm but not just any pm he is the pm that will keep asking why like a 5 year old trying to understand how a car works. To top it off he loved to debate in the work place anything and everything. How something worked or why something was the way it is.

So this one meeting was about a project that I had started on my own and turned in to this huge project. I was super excited it was one of those project that you are excited to work on and love to add new things to it. The meeting was to talk about how it was going to be used and what customers sites this was going to be added to in the coming weeks. 15 mins not bad.

Well the meeting comes we finished in about 10 mins I was trying to get out of the room before R started. Well I waited a little a little to long and sure enough he asked the question. "What about this drop down?". Instantly I thought "FUCK!!! Here we go." Now I don't remember what his exact question was about said drop down but it ended extending the meeting by another 30 mins with me almost cussing him out and walking away.

There was a heated debate about this thing and R continuing to ask questions and want to debate this. I was only saved by the lead dev and lead pm say that they think that this is something that could be talked about at a later date. Lucky for me I was leaving the company in the following weeks.

meeting was about how we as developers should abide by the rules that compliance set forth. we argued that we cannot do our jobs if they block access and configuration on our development systems. they dont realize that our dev boxes are configured organic in nature to allow for those stupid deadlines.

Meeting just after given a vacation to the whole company. We had 1 week of no work. Everyone of us including the boss went on a vacation together. He sets up a meeting the very next day at 8:00 fucking AM . Sent at 10 PM. Like nigga . Let me reset and prepare my mind ffs. That was a ridiculous meeting recently just for the sheer fuck of it.

Last year we had a meeting to discuss lessening the frequency of meetings and let people work more of the day. After a three hours, it was decided that nothing was getting solved, resulting in three more meetings to be added to the calendar to follow up.

Oh that happens every week... sometimes twice

That one client wanted to hire me and a friend for a small 2 month C# school project basically reformatting and redistributing incoming forms. In the last meeting before we were supposed to start the project he told us that it was supposed to be a sharepoint thingy.
We declined as we never worked with sharepoint, not to mention the Clients indecisiveness​ regarding what he wanted.
The ridiculous part was really that a lot had already been set in stone and we had to find another contract in 3 days time.

I was an intern in a company. They invited me for a meeting where they discussed whether to clone-edit-push or fork-edit-pr.

A parade of planning meetings every Monday where the whole executive team (including the CEO) sits in. Each meeting was an hour long and it took up their whole day.

It was ridiculous how unproductive that was. Continues to this day AFAIK!

@dfox The wk57-search and other searches are not working correctly.
On top of the search list there are wrong results, because the search algo also accepts similar terms.

Pretty much anytime we talk about having a meeting during a meeting. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Discussed about a even dumber downed manual and told me it was to difficult for non dev or testers to understand. Asked him which part, he didnt answer. Well, FML.

That time when the head of the developer team had the fuking idea of having the meeting of a meeting (he didn't understood the point of the previous one...) Half day lost in that shit. At least he is gone now