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My manager would ask everyone would to raise their hands from keyboard randomly in a half-joking manner... to ensure everyone is focusing to the meeting, and no

My manager would ask everyone would to raise their hands from keyboard randomly in a half-joking manner... to ensure everyone is focusing to the meeting, and not working. or, point out "hey you have something else on screen because white screenlight flashed on your face" Leaving this company in a month, although they're paying me 2x the local average SE salary here in Sweden.

saiya-jin 5y ago
There is nothing happy about working for control freaks, and slightly higher net salary won't magically turn it into a good place to work... sounds like a good idea to depart
- nine_k 5y ago
  2x is not "slightly". You can see it as the amount of premium an employer has to pay to get away with things like that. A well-prepared meeting is fast-paced and keeps everyone genuinely involved.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
While calling it out like that is crass, I do wish people wouldn't do other things during meetings. I get that these meetings are presumably over-long, but perhaps that's because half the participants aren't actually paying attention...
- mclightning 5y ago
  Having %100 attention of all participants is for sure an expectation to be had, in an ideal scenario where meetings are organized in an ideal configuration of members/agenda/duration. But if you invite everyone to every meeting, have no agenda, and have awkward silences in the meeting you called while trying to come up with stuff to talk about... then surely people will try to get some work done in parallel.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  There is an optimum somewhere on the line. Even if you have 5 people for 30 min on the call, it's totally understandable that one or two of them find it mildly boring but here and there relevant. For instance they are expert in one of the field touched by your project and they sometimes need to react. In your ideal state, the choice is for them to leave the meeting altogether and find something else they can focus more on, or to focus 100% on the meeting and spend half of their time religiously listening to stuff they don't really need to hear. In my experience the result of the second choice is people being more and more reticent to come to meetings, not just because of some hypothetical time lost, but because it's mentally painful. As an added bonus, instead of having one meeting with 5 people, you need to make 3 with only the parts each members fully care about, and eventually a few more down the line when what they each say in isolation doesn't make sense when assembled together.

saiya-jin 5y ago

There is nothing happy about working for control freaks, and slightly higher net salary won't magically turn it into a good place to work... sounds like a good idea to depart

nine_k 5y ago
2x is not "slightly". You can see it as the amount of premium an employer has to pay to get away with things like that. A well-prepared meeting is fast-paced and keeps everyone genuinely involved.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

While calling it out like that is crass, I do wish people wouldn't do other things during meetings. I get that these meetings are presumably over-long, but perhaps that's because half the participants aren't actually paying attention...

mclightning 5y ago
Having %100 attention of all participants is for sure an expectation to be had, in an ideal scenario where meetings are organized in an ideal configuration of members/agenda/duration. But if you invite everyone to every meeting, have no agenda, and have awkward silences in the meeting you called while trying to come up with stuff to talk about... then surely people will try to get some work done in parallel.
makeitdouble 5y ago
There is an optimum somewhere on the line. Even if you have 5 people for 30 min on the call, it's totally understandable that one or two of them find it mildly boring but here and there relevant. For instance they are expert in one of the field touched by your project and they sometimes need to react. In your ideal state, the choice is for them to leave the meeting altogether and find something else they can focus more on, or to focus 100% on the meeting and spend half of their time religiously listening to stuff they don't really need to hear. In my experience the result of the second choice is people being more and more reticent to come to meetings, not just because of some hypothetical time lost, but because it's mentally painful. As an added bonus, instead of having one meeting with 5 people, you need to make 3 with only the parts each members fully care about, and eventually a few more down the line when what they each say in isolation doesn't make sense when assembled together.