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> Are you an engineer and think I’m wasting time? Well, yea. You're a manager :) > Which meetings would you cut? Well, 30 min standups seem long for what I a

> Are you an engineer and think I’m wasting time? Well, yea. You're a manager :) > Which meetings would you cut? Well, 30 min standups seem long for what I assume are two groups of 4 people. I'd probably shave off 5 minutes from those every so often until you get it to 15 minutes each. That will net you 2.5 hours a week. pro-bono project during business hours: sounds silly if you're feeling stressed about time management. "50 days of learning": continual learning is good idea, but I save this for after work hours, and probably you need to do the same. Especially since you're already doing multiple training sessions a week during the work day. Going-away get together for team #2 member / virtual happy hour: shouldn't these be happening during "after work" hours? Finally, 9-5 is banker's hours. A typical 40 hour work week would involve working from 8-12pm, an hour break for lunch, and then from 1pm-5p. If the daily operational review meeting is running from 7:30am-9am you're doing it wrong. It reads like you want credit for attending an early meeting but aren't accounting for the 8am-9am hour?

kragen 5y ago
The reason we stand up in standup meetings is specifically to keep them short. Unless you're Russian Orthodox, you're likely to get impatient after standing up for more than five or ten minutes. The standup format exploits this impatience to create social pressure to keep the meeting to no more than about ten minutes by the simple ritual of remaining standing during the meeting. From the 30-minute "standups" on the calendar I'm guessing this person is not actually standing up in them. Why is a manager involved in standup meetings at all, though? It seems like that could interfere with communication (as people censor themselves in order not to look bad or make others look bad) and create the potential for the manager to become involved in decisions that properly belong to the individual contributors. "Standup" meetings where people don't stand up seem like the perfect emblem of Fake Agile: they've adopted our rhetoric, but not only don't they understand our practices, they don't even carry out the motions without understanding them; they just use the words. (Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian".)
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian". Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians. https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime
- kragen 5y ago
  To the flagged dead person who said, "Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians," I actually did get smeared as "racist against Russians" only a week ago here on Character Assassination News by this other flagged dead person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591684 The comic you linked also makes an excellent point about the nature of racism: https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime
deleted 5y ago
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jameshart 5y ago
Strong disagree on pushing personal development out of working hours. I always tell engineers I work with that they are 100% allowed to take working time and spend it learning skills they need to do their job. I don’t see why that doesn’t apply to managers too (though if it’s cross training prep for a career move that might take you away from the company I might question you doing it on company time).
- jldugger 5y ago
  FWIW, I do support some working hours personal development. My strategy: schedule an hour a week for on the clock training. This works out to about 50h (versus Target's 50d program). This hour is used for: 1. Mandatory "trainings" from HR 2. Reviewing recordings from internal training sessions 3. Attending live training sessions Critically, these are the things I can only get from the company, and probably wouldn't do if not employed by them. OP is already doing more than 1h per week from what I can see of the schedule. They're also usually directly related to my job in some fashion. Beyond that, I have also done some conferences, weeklong training sessions and 'work through a book on a tech I'm about to use for a work project' on about an annual basis. The stuff I do outside work hours: 1. 3-5h/week of reading journal articles and books, on a Kindle at night. 2. About 1h/week of Anki, split between adding new cards based on #1, and daily reviews. 3. As they become available, conference presentation recordings. 4. Like, a lot of podcasts, usually at 1.5x-2x speed. This is basically how I avoid 'screen time' an hour before sleep and would be counterproductive to move to the workday =)

kragen 5y ago

The reason we stand up in standup meetings is specifically to keep them short. Unless you're Russian Orthodox, you're likely to get impatient after standing up for more than five or ten minutes. The standup format exploits this impatience to create social pressure to keep the meeting to no more than about ten minutes by the simple ritual of remaining standing during the meeting. From the 30-minute "standups" on the calendar I'm guessing this person is not actually standing up in them. Why is a manager involved in standup meetings at all, though? It seems like that could interfere with communication (as people censor themselves in order not to look bad or make others look bad) and create the potential for the manager to become involved in decisions that properly belong to the individual contributors. "Standup" meetings where people don't stand up seem like the perfect emblem of Fake Agile: they've adopted our rhetoric, but not only don't they understand our practices, they don't even carry out the motions without understanding them; they just use the words. (Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian".)

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian". Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians. https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime
kragen 5y ago
To the flagged dead person who said, "Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians," I actually did get smeared as "racist against Russians" only a week ago here on Character Assassination News by this other flagged dead person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591684 The comic you linked also makes an excellent point about the nature of racism: https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jameshart 5y ago

Strong disagree on pushing personal development out of working hours. I always tell engineers I work with that they are 100% allowed to take working time and spend it learning skills they need to do their job. I don’t see why that doesn’t apply to managers too (though if it’s cross training prep for a career move that might take you away from the company I might question you doing it on company time).

jldugger 5y ago
FWIW, I do support some working hours personal development. My strategy: schedule an hour a week for on the clock training. This works out to about 50h (versus Target's 50d program). This hour is used for: 1. Mandatory "trainings" from HR 2. Reviewing recordings from internal training sessions 3. Attending live training sessions Critically, these are the things I can only get from the company, and probably wouldn't do if not employed by them. OP is already doing more than 1h per week from what I can see of the schedule. They're also usually directly related to my job in some fashion. Beyond that, I have also done some conferences, weeklong training sessions and 'work through a book on a tech I'm about to use for a work project' on about an annual basis. The stuff I do outside work hours: 1. 3-5h/week of reading journal articles and books, on a Kindle at night. 2. About 1h/week of Anki, split between adding new cards based on #1, and daily reviews. 3. As they become available, conference presentation recordings. 4. Like, a lot of podcasts, usually at 1.5x-2x speed. This is basically how I avoid 'screen time' an hour before sleep and would be counterproductive to move to the workday =)