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Nope, I mean.. I would definitely like to work at a place where there is an all-hands and I actually appreciate it. They exist. Spend any significant portion of

Nope, I mean.. I would definitely like to work at a place where there is an all-hands and I actually appreciate it. They exist. Spend any significant portion of your life at any of the 50k+ employees companies and you'll end up cynical about this kind of thing. We have one scheduled for today (Yay!) and I'm already looking forward to the incompetent mucking about with the mute buttons (or lack thereof) and enjoying twenty minutes of "Can everyone please put the call on mute?" screaming children and people doing the dishes in the background) followed by a bunch of delusional execs handing each other "awards" for stuff that in reality never happened (but we pretend to because contractual obligations). Ok enough cynicism for today. Back to coding!

VLM 10y ago
"50k+ employees companies" Funny I was going to mention exactly that, having been there. 1) In my experience it doesn't scale past 1000 or so people and once you literally have offices all over the planet you run into timezone issues. So state/city/country whatever it takes to get attendance below 1000. 2) An appropriate party game is something like duct taping 1000 envelopes of gift certificates underneath each chair, no matter how little, and then surprising people halfway thru when about a quarter of the attendees are asleep, and opening a trading market to wake everyone up. Or a raffle halfway thru to wake people up. An inappropriate party game is watching the execs have a rap battle, or watching the execs play blackjack, or trying to get the audience involved in anything "teambuilding" 3) Speaking of "no matter how little" above, that doesn't count for food. People drove across entire states for hours and rearranged their private lives extensively to attend... serving cold pancakes and cold breakfast sausage (but only two per person!) is a false economy WRT morale. If you're standing in line for food and the primary comment by coworkers is "thank god I stopped for breakfast on the way here" then your meeting failed. 4) OPs article correctly mentioned top line metrics. Oh god help me I've spent hours in meetings listening to production managers of a plant I'll never see or visit spend fifteen minutes talking about the inner details of how they modified a grease gun to better match the viscosity of a new dielectric grease and you've got an entire auditorium of a thousand blank expressions tuned out. If you think the entire company cares about how you reorganized the pencils in supply room #35 in plant #51 you are simply wrong. If you're around long enough you'll attend all hands meeting where no amount of caffeine can save you. Just awful. 5) Front line supvr will use all hands meetings as a punishment. You broke the build you have to go. Its enough to make people go postal or at least call in sick the day of the meeting. If all hands meeting sick/vacation days are 10% or more than non-all hands meetings, you are doing meetings wrong. 6) Likewise don't tell the execs, but anyone attending remotely or calling in, isn't paying any attention.

VLM 10y ago

"50k+ employees companies" Funny I was going to mention exactly that, having been there. 1) In my experience it doesn't scale past 1000 or so people and once you literally have offices all over the planet you run into timezone issues. So state/city/country whatever it takes to get attendance below 1000. 2) An appropriate party game is something like duct taping 1000 envelopes of gift certificates underneath each chair, no matter how little, and then surprising people halfway thru when about a quarter of the attendees are asleep, and opening a trading market to wake everyone up. Or a raffle halfway thru to wake people up. An inappropriate party game is watching the execs have a rap battle, or watching the execs play blackjack, or trying to get the audience involved in anything "teambuilding" 3) Speaking of "no matter how little" above, that doesn't count for food. People drove across entire states for hours and rearranged their private lives extensively to attend... serving cold pancakes and cold breakfast sausage (but only two per person!) is a false economy WRT morale. If you're standing in line for food and the primary comment by coworkers is "thank god I stopped for breakfast on the way here" then your meeting failed. 4) OPs article correctly mentioned top line metrics. Oh god help me I've spent hours in meetings listening to production managers of a plant I'll never see or visit spend fifteen minutes talking about the inner details of how they modified a grease gun to better match the viscosity of a new dielectric grease and you've got an entire auditorium of a thousand blank expressions tuned out. If you think the entire company cares about how you reorganized the pencils in supply room #35 in plant #51 you are simply wrong. If you're around long enough you'll attend all hands meeting where no amount of caffeine can save you. Just awful. 5) Front line supvr will use all hands meetings as a punishment. You broke the build you have to go. Its enough to make people go postal or at least call in sick the day of the meeting. If all hands meeting sick/vacation days are 10% or more than non-all hands meetings, you are doing meetings wrong. 6) Likewise don't tell the execs, but anyone attending remotely or calling in, isn't paying any attention.