Don’t schedule a &$&% meeting during lunchtime without serving up lunch to us!
My lunch time is me time. I’d prefer no lunch meetings ever. That’s my walking time.
I hear you, but given that my “lunchtime” could be anywhere between 11:00 and 15:00 (and that’s not even allowing for timezones), that’s pretty impractical.
In my last two jobs in two different countries the unwritten rule is to not schedule a meeting between 12-13. Not everyone has lunch at the same time, and everyone is free to have lunch whenever they want, but this guarantees that you will have some time to have lunch even if you are booked by meetings around noon. But it doesn’t really solve the timezone issue.
People have died for lesser offences than scheduling a meeting over lunch time and not serving lunch.
“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
Yeah, I’m totally cool with being late sometimes, but I know various folks where it’d be an exception, if they’re not late, because they have meetings back-to-back all day long.
Always makes me feel like the official meeting start should be 5 minutes after or something, but I know that those folks aren’t late for the fun of it. They’d definitely overrun those 5 minutes, if they knew they had them.
My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person’s presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.
My place of business has this dysfunction with meetings—Zoom being the biggest offender—where people just keep talking through the end of a meeting. 30-minute meetings become 35-40. 60-minute meetings becomes 65-70. And, with meetings frequently being back-to-back-to-back, invariably one or another person is late to the next one.
I think it’s because scheduling a meeting with all necessary parties is so difficult that if you don’t finish the thought, the next chance is at least a week away.
To top it off, we had a company-wide survey that spawned a working group to tackle the problem of meetings, whose suggestion was to update Outlook settings to automatically shorten meetings by X minutes—to allow people transit time, bathroom breaks, etc. Almost no one set that setting.
Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
Everything: from 8am to 5pm I’m a steaming ball of anger that struggles to act polite while planning small acts of office terrorism.
I've got a lot of small pet peeves
like:
- A general lack of awareness in workplace safety practices
- People listening and sending audio messages when they could type instead
- People doing personal conference calls without a headset
- When they say “can you please grab that thing on my desk?” and their desk is a post-earthquake library scenario
and many others…
but the thing that bugs me the most is the general absence of people that “just do their job”.
There are a lot of people that do fuck-all and a lot of people that work their lives off and both of those groups expect you to walk at their pace. I’d like to meet more people in the middle.Slow computers and awful cheap Keyboards
By this point i spend 400 € for a quality keyboard and noise canceling headphones, money I earned in that very job so I don’t get nuts at that job.
I use it at home too.
When people message with a “hi” or “hello” and then say nothing more till I reply.
It annoys the hell out of me. Like, why can’t you just say what you want. It wastes so much of my time and mental energy to switch back and forth while I wait for your reply after replying to your utterly useless hello.
I just wait until they say more things. Hello is nothing.
I have tried this. I’m often reminded the next day that they still haven’t received a reply from me.
I love that part.
just answer them with https://nohello.net/en/
I occasionally give people shit for this. Chat is asynchronous and I’m busy just ask me the question and I’ll respond back when I can. Some people just won’t learn though and I usually just leave them on read.
Especially infuriating when the other person is in a very different time zone. I once worked on a project with a partner company in a time zone 10 hours ahead of mine and it was common for trivial things to take days purely because the other person insisted on typing “Hi,” waiting for my “Hi, what’s up?” response (which they didn’t see until the next day since our hours didn’t overlap), and then replying with their question, which I didn’t see until my next day. Answering the actual question often took like 30 seconds, but in the meantime two or three days had gone by.
I came to believe they were doing it on purpose so they could constantly slack off and tell their boss they were blocked waiting for my answer.
“Hi, we need to talk…”
What’s worse, after you “hi” them back, some people (looking at you project managers) just ducking call without any explanation. Drives me nuts
Reject call.
‘why didn’t you answer’
‘I’m not available for calls right now’
‘why’
‘that’s not your business’
I’ve wandered down this road a few times now.
Got reported to my manager for doing just that. My rule was simple: if you’re not my boss, I need to know what the call is about in advanced.
I just explain the same as above.
If you’re not paying me for my time, you’re not entitled to it, nor an explanation of what I do in my own time.
If we’re talking about time on the clock, that’s a different story.
That we all accept that working our butts off for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with only around 2 weeks of vacation a year in the hopes that we can save just enough to retire at 65+ is normal. The social contract is broken, and everyone except the top 1% of earners is paying the price.
Any microsoft application. Constant bugs, crashes and a tendency to break everything if you accidentally use them in any other way than microsoft intended.
Also, ads in a fucking operation system? I don’t see how anyone can find that acceptable.
I think MIUI was its pioneer. Even the settings app had ads.
At least they use that to sell you the hardware for cheap. Microsoft doesn’t provide anything of value like that. In fact, they charge people for the OS and then have the audacity to add ads.
Linux includes ads built into Firefox in a lot of the popular distros.
I’d say firefox doesn’t qualify as OS but I get your point, distros do ship it by default.
The good thing is that those ads are just defaults, not permanently baked in. I can get rid of them in about 2 minutes. Mozilla doesn’t sell your usage data so they need another way of funding themselves and I don’t think there’s a better way to do it.
The same can be said about the Windows ads. It’s just a checkbox to turn off tips. Tips are useful a lot of the time so people don’t want to turn them off. The second a tip isn’t useful it’s seen as an ad.
First of all, tips will automatically get enabled during some updates.
Secondly, tips notifictions telling you to use microsoft crap are not the only ads. You get fullscreen ads for office after booting that are made to look exactly like an installer, you get edge literally spamming you with popups when you try downloading another browser (that’s closer to malware than an ad but I’ll let it count).
You get ads in the settings menu as well and if you try to edit a video like you could on windows 7, you get the “fuck you, pay a subscription”.
You also get ads in your start menu and of course, don’t forget the start menu search that will rather show you a bing page full of ads than actually search for your files.
Please stop defending this bullshit, it benefits no one but microsoft and is actively making the world a worse place.
I’ve literally not seen any of the ads you are talking about (besides an office 365 install prompt at the end of an install) but I run a windows debloater tool on every install since windows 7. I also never had an update mess with the debloater stuff or turn ads back on.
The guy who gives safety meetings says “um” between every phrase
I feel this one. We have a partner who says “you know” before and after almost everything he says. It’s so distracting that I can barely hear what he is trying to say. I now do my best to avoid interacting with him or his team in any way.
An absolute lack of consideration in regards to chat etiquette. Man now that I think about it, it’s chat threads/notification in particular.
People who carry on side conversations in threads. You’re giving everyone else who has participated in the thread the choice of “disable notifications for this thread and risk missing something relevant come back around, or get a notification for every single side message they’re sending”. Especially when someone is chiming in like 4 hours later. “Glad you guys got this sorted out”. Yes, all 12 of us on-call people in this thread needed to get that message direct to our phones at 3a.m. 4 hours after the outage has been resolved. Thanks for that. Very fucking helpful. High value communication.
People who will not use threads. I don’t need a new fucking notification every 20 seconds because you guys are deciding to have a chat about e-bikes. Make a goddamn thread or use a room made for chit chat, we’re all on the same team, we’re all in on-call positions. I’m paid to respond when this thing makes a noise. I am NOT comfortable muting the team channel.
It’s addressed elsewhere in these comments, but +1 to folks who just message you “hi”. Go get stabbed.
On the topic of notification fatigue:
People who will just not finish a thought. Before hitting their enter button. So they end up like doing this thing. Where you get a notification every 15 seconds, because they are just absolutely addicted. To their enter key I mean. They are addicted to thier enter key. their* Oh. I guess I could have just edited that message instead of sending the correction with the thing. Asterisk? Asterisx? I forget what it's called. LOL. Anyway, that thing.Also, when I’m helping you I am 100% going to stop what I am doing every time I get a message and read the message. There’s no way for me to know whether or not you’re messaging me “Oh never mind, I had a typo” or “here is more relevant info to make your work easier”. That message may very well have immediate impact on what I’m doing, and affect the course I take. Of course I’m going to stop what I’m doing to read it. So maybe don’t wait 5 minutes to send me the message “k” after I kindly, thoughtfully provide you with the status update “I think it’s the fizzibob, let me verify in the logs real quick” of my own volition so that you are not only aware of what’s going on, but don’t have any question as to whether or not your question is still being looked at.
Not using threads is fucking driving me insane too.
Also when somebody just says “hi” and waits. Don’t you fucking dare to do that. Type in what you want so I can decide if I want to reveal that I’m currently actually there and want to deal with your bullshit. Sometimes I just don’t write back. And then 3 days later they ask me in the office whether I saw their message. And I say yes, saw that, I just thought that was all because you haven’t continued.
Also you don’t have to say “Hi Golem” every single time when you start to ask something on the same day. Sometimes even 5 times a day. Geez. Just say what you want and be done with it.
Introduce them to the wonderful world of No Hello!
uncompensated driving, commute times, etc
people don’t realize how much their car is costing them. IRS rate is like $0.60 a mile. running errands for work all day? 45-minute commute? yeah you’re effectively making less than minimum wage now
very difficult to get people to understand though
Freedom with a cost to every imaginable part of it.
More like… feedom
2 mandatory office days even for consultants. If you want to be at the office, fine. But don’t make everyone be because of some so-called fairness. Catering to some imaginary average person isn’t fair, it’s hurting everyone a little or a lot. Alas since I’m working via an agency, I got to follow client directives. Luckily I have good rapport with both my agency and my project team lead so I can kinda toe the line.
Also the inability or rather unwillingness of my fellow devs to follow protocol. Ticket not approved by business? You don’t touch it. Yet the geniuses I work with went total yolo mode on a project I’m not on. So I wasn’t there to remind them and now they’re upset they got told off they spent a week on tickets that they were asked to discuss with the business. And that they aren’t getting praise for their efficiency. It’s government work, not your hobby project. That’s a week of budget spent on work they may need to reverse because they didn’t even put it on a branch. Maybe when they hear it from higher up they’ll listen because I really get the impression when it comes from me it is seen as my personal opinion. No, I just figured out early how the office politics work and play the game I’m paid for. I voice my opinion plenty but here it actually aligns with the organisation expectations.
Standups and retrospectives.
May I ask why? This coming from the guy that has to facilitate them.
I’m especially curious about the stand-ups, since I have mixed feelings about retrospectives myself, they have their place and I think they play a part in a team’s growth, but at the same time I’d rather just cancel them if I don’t feel we’d get anything useful out of it and I don’t want to hold a retro just because the process says so.
LE: Gonna just edit this to say thank you to the people who replied, gave me some new perspectives to think about.
I think the value of standups depends a ton on the team’s composition and maturity.
On a team with a lot of junior or low-performing devs who don’t have the experience or the ability to keep themselves on track, or a team with a culture that discourages asking for help as needed, a daily standup can keep people from going down useless rabbit holes or unwittingly blocking one another or slacking off every day without anyone noticing.
On a team of mostly mid-level and senior devs who are experienced enough to work autonomously and who have a culture of communicating in real time as problems and updates come up, a daily standup is pure ceremony with no informational value. It breaks flow and reduces people’s schedule flexibility for no benefit.
When I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to advocate for or against daily standups on a team, one angle I look at is aggregate time. On a team of, say, 6 people, a 15-minute daily standup eats 7.5 hours of engineering time a week just on the meetings themselves. The interruption and loss of focus is harder to quantify, but in some cases I don’t even need to try to quantify it: when I ask myself, “Is the daily standup consistently saving us a full person-day of engineering time every week?” the answer is often such a clear “yes” or “no” that accounting for the cost of interruptions wouldn’t change it.
I’ve just had some unlucky jobs, I think. Think 30-45 minute stand-ups for a team of 4, because the team lead or PM or “Scrum Master” feel like they have to prove their worth or something when ultimately the standup provides little to no value after the first 4 minutes (if any).
For jobs with a single ADO or Jira board, just look at our ticket status and comments.
I had one job that had daily stand-ups, a single ADO board, a requirement to send EOD status update emails, and a requirement to copy those updates to individual ticket comments EOD as well. I rage quit that job after 2 months because, frankly, that’s absurd (it had other issues too).
My favorite standup at a job was one with 12-16 people and it took no more than ~6 minutes. It was no BS. The manager got his quick update notes across all supported clients (and separate ADO/Jira boards) and everyone got to go about their day. If you talked too long you’d get cut off.
But generally, daily stand-ups are just an interruption and a thing where I end up having to make up some BS to appease management. If my update is too long, team members hate it. If it’s too short, management thinks I’m not doing any work.
As for retrospectives, of 15+ jobs in my life, only 2-3 of them ever even did anything with the feedback. Thus, it typically felt like a waste of 1-3 hours (yes one job had 3 hour retrospectives every two weeks, it was brutal). If none of the bads or nexts are ever going to happen, then don’t pretend like we even have a voice.
If your stand-ups and retrospectives aren’t BS, provide understood value, and don’t waste time then I’m fine. But if all they exist for is to check a “we’re agile!” box and allow management to flex, then I’d say it’s doing the exact opposite of agile and merely annoying the engineers.
For stand-ups you really need at least one person that keeps it on track and limits the time each person has, cutting them off and telling them to talk after.
only 2-3 of them ever even did anything with the feedback
Exactly this. Nothing ever gets done with the feedback so what is even the point? Just to make it look like we care?
In my experience I feel like I’m basically talking to myself during the stand ups. No one is actually listening to anyone’s status except maybe the scrummaster. I’ve said things in the standup to have coworkers be surprised later on when they’re actually carried out.
Both are totally useless. I feel like screaming into the wind would be more useful.
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Depending on where you live it and the job you do, you may be possible to get an exception to the rule against wearing headphones.
If you’re in the US or UK, I know it would be your right to request reasonable accommodation for ADHD - either under the ADA or the Equality Act.
Obviously if there’s a good reason to disallow headphones (for example, if there’s some danger that you wouldn’t be able to hear) then this wouldn’t help. But if it’s just the company being controlling, you can probably get an exception.
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It doesn’t need to be a confrontation - just have a chat with your manager, mention that you have an ADHD diagnosis and that you have been recommended some things to help improve your focus, attention and performance at work, and that one of those suggestions was listening to music or white noise through headphones, and ask if it could be considered as an adjustment due to your disability. If you frame it as a collaborative and positive action that you can take together, rather than something you’re demanding to be different, I don’t think there’s any reason for your manager to be offended by the request.
Pet peeve: no “stay logged in” option for a system I use multiple times per day
Yeah my job has that too. That system has a “remember me” button, but it doesn’t work.
Having to relogin every two weeks with two-factor authentication. Everything is a MS Office document, in particular ridiculous spreadsheets. Everyone writes in acronyms that they assume everyone else knows. Even though there is always a lot of new staff, every email assumes everyone has been working there forever. (“It’s that time of the year again! You need to complete your GRD before week 5 of the COG and send it to the OSYN. Probably you are already an expert in completing these forms after so many years, but if you need instructions, please go to our IDRN and enter your ICRJ.”)
I have to re-auth with AWS every goddamn hour and enter a 2fa code for every. single. command. I run from the CLI. It drives me up a fucking wall even though I have it entirely scripted now. Another great example of how overly tight security leads to worse security as people try to bypass it.
I’m so sorry. I will hug the IT team now for only making me login every 2 weeks.
I have to login every 8 hours…I’d kill for every two weeks.
God I wish I only had to use MFA once every two weeks!
We only have to use it when connecting from off-site.
Best way is to VPN in (requires MFA) then everything via VPN.
Some admin stuff has more strict checks, but the staff access is use the office network or use MFA.
Conditional access rules. If the admins cared it’s easy to apply
Seriously, anything through SSO requires me to do 2FA every time I log in.
