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I typically don't like to nitpick articles like this, but the author is specifically requesting it, so here goes. 1. From tech lead to "Senior Manager" is quit

by pc86 5y ago

I typically don't like to nitpick articles like this, but the author is specifically requesting it, so here goes. 1. From tech lead to "Senior Manager" is quite the jump. And to have multiple teams reporting to him as well? 2. I'm willing to be the senior director staff meeting is worthless 90% of the time. 3. 30 minutes for a standup is a long time unless there are... 35-40 people on each team. 4. The 15 minute ads meeting definitely could have been an email. 5. NPS surveys are a waste of time by themselves. Do you really need 2 hours to review them? 6. The App/platform boundary meeting could/should have probably been a document. Nobody will remember any specifics from the discussion within 48 hours. 7. Tuesday morning's standup presumably has more (~2x) the people but has the same time window, proof positive you're just wasting time the other standups. 8. Team 2 has two standups on Tuesday? 9. You have a scrum master. 10. Monthly status updates can/should be documents. 11. I would love to know what the "sync up" with an SEO consultant entails. That sounds terrible. 12. Virtual happy hour at 3pm? 13. 6.5 hours worth of "production post mortems" in a week. If you're spending 15% of your week discussing production problems, you have structural issues that need to be emergency-level for your team. Imagine having to take ten minutes out of every hour, every day, all week, for production problems. Lots of stuff here that should be persistent documents/Wikis, emails, etc. rather than 30-90 minute meetings. But I don't think that's going to surprise anyone reading this. It seems like one or two meetings each day are actually needed, best case, not including the 1-on-1s (which I think are super important).

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
13: its curious how long production problems can be tolerated/ignored. My son just quit a job where he got moved to a group of 12 that fought a certain fire whenever it occurred (multiple times daily). Had been going on for years. Action was initiated by an email on a certain account from the field. He immediately set up a notification for this email - something nobody else in the group had done. On the first notification he waited to see how long it took for the group to respond - almost an hour before anyone noticed. Then they went into action and hand-edited database entries to 'fix' the issue. And went back to reading comic books or whatever. So he looked into the problem, found the root cause, submit a change order to be tested and deployed. And put 12 people out of a job his first week there. He quit shortly after. It was not a culture he had any interest in learning any more about. It's astonishing how many of these 'Dilbert' groups exist inside large organizations.

by pc86 5y ago

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

13: its curious how long production problems can be tolerated/ignored. My son just quit a job where he got moved to a group of 12 that fought a certain fire whenever it occurred (multiple times daily). Had been going on for years. Action was initiated by an email on a certain account from the field. He immediately set up a notification for this email - something nobody else in the group had done. On the first notification he waited to see how long it took for the group to respond - almost an hour before anyone noticed. Then they went into action and hand-edited database entries to 'fix' the issue. And went back to reading comic books or whatever. So he looked into the problem, found the root cause, submit a change order to be tested and deployed. And put 12 people out of a job his first week there. He quit shortly after. It was not a culture he had any interest in learning any more about. It's astonishing how many of these 'Dilbert' groups exist inside large organizations.