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> "- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity" Sounds like Amazon alright. I was

> "- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity" Sounds like Amazon alright. I was there for two years and this defined so much of my time spent. We'd have endless meetings with endless stakeholders. This would cut deeply into development time, and all scheduling revolved around PM schedules with no regard for the productivity cost of pulling engineers into meetings every other hour, all day long. Which would of course result in more meetings to discuss why we're not shipping things quickly enough, and more meetings to remediate the situation... By the time I left that godforsaken wasteland of a tech company I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day, all spread out naturally, because fuck concentrating and getting work done.

pja 12y ago
I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day I just wanted to pull this bit out and highlight it in dancing neon. 3 hours of meetings per day? Not even in a single block? It's astonishing that anything got done at all!
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Oh it gets worse. I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people. So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem. As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time. So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day). I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...
  - pja 12y ago
    Consider my flabber appropriately ghasted. Sounds like getting out was the right move! I guess those managers had never read the Mythical Man Month?

pja 12y ago

I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day I just wanted to pull this bit out and highlight it in dancing neon. 3 hours of meetings per day? Not even in a single block? It's astonishing that anything got done at all!

potatolicious 12y ago
Oh it gets worse. I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people. So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem. As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time. So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day). I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...
- pja 12y ago
  Consider my flabber appropriately ghasted. Sounds like getting out was the right move! I guess those managers had never read the Mythical Man Month?