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I had a fun tool at my last company. It took the average salary or corporate title, looked at the people invited to the call, and let you know what it’d cost.
It’s a great bit of info to share with the meeting fanatics.
I was not popular for doing that at an old job haha. After like the second time people just seemed mad about it.
We had “stand-ups” in the morning where about 25 people had to stand around for 30 minutes every single day. I forget what I’d calculated that to cost but it was absurd and rarely brought any value to anything.
That’s a great idea! How’d you estimate the salaries?
I had access to the data. But you can also just Glassdoor it.
You know, I’ve worked a lot of blue collar jobs in fast paced environments and if you told me I was getting paid to sit my happy ass down for 3 hours I’d be just fine with that. It’s their money after all.
Greener grass, I suppose.
I was a blue collar worker who said very similar things early in my career. After about a decade working in warehouses and carrying paint across fields by hand and hanging doors I could not imagine a sweeter feeling than sitting at a desk.
I’m on the other side now and have been for more than a decade.
I would fucking kill to go hang a door most days.
I hate it. I’d rather be working cause time goes much faster that way.
It’s their money after all.
Only of you’re hourly. If your salary, then it’s your time.
It’s still their time since that’s 3 hours less of actual work to be done. If they expect me to stay 3 hours longer because of it, I expect them to gargle my balls.
They don’t expect you to stay 3 hours longer.
They expect you to finish before the deadline.
And if that happens, I’ll tell them next project better have fewer meetings then. If they want to fire me, it’s up to them to prove I’m incompetent and if they try to do that, I’ll have screenshots of my calendar the moment I hear a complaint about my productivity.
I am of course incredibly privileged both because I live in a country with good employment laws and because I’m a fairly desirable employee.
IF however it’s my own ADHD causing me to not get shit done all day every day for weeks at a time and there’s a deadline, I’ll pull an all nighter and get a week or 2 worth of work done in one night. Because that’s on me and my disability which I fucking hate having, but it’s made me who I am and is probably also partially the reason for my former success. When I was salaried, I made a high enough salary to justify doing that occasionally when shit really hit the fan and it was my fault.
These days, however, I’m a contractor. A long meeting just means more hours paid. If something takes more time than expected I’ll pull all-nighters AND bill them so I’m getting paid more since, you know, I had to work for more hours. But again - incredibly privileged. I could probably find more clients if I really wanted to, but I’ve got two that tolerate my eccentricities, pay well and generally love me. Both knew what they were getting into with me so it was easy, starting with a brand new client I have no prior relationship with would be a pain.
Im salary + commission, salary is just high enough for me to to convince myself to show up on time. My main issue is a lot of the work I do is not compensated by the commission. Only sales pays commission. So I try to trick myself into thinking the salary covers that type of work. Issue then becomes I would not do that work for that salary. Shitty loop my brain gets into.
We also have departments that do what my “extra” stuff is, they are just bad at it, so the teams I support send a lot my way because they know I can do it, and do it (generally) more quickly and effectively.
Double edged sword city
If you’re salaried instead of hourly it super sucks, because those 3-hour meeting keep you from doing the rest of your work and you end up working nights and weekends to catch up with no overtime pay.
Problem is, those unexpected 3 hours may fuck you in whatever you were actually supposed to be working on. Electrician being late may delay the whole construction crew. A report being late may upset a customer who was waiting for it.
And honestly, even if that doesn’t happen, I’d rather go take a shit or something more productive.
As long as they pay me, they can “meet” me for any amount of time they wish. In the working hours range, of course.
I had a job once where they said “it’s OK that we have meetings all day because you have all night to finish your code”…
“It’s okay that you pay me to code all night because you pay me to sleep through meetings all day.”
I’ve had this happen before, and it was terrible. It was with the most insufferable member of upper management. She basically started working while I was on the call and narrated her work as she went.
I would have loved to do anything else, sure I was getting paid but it was less enjoyable than my actual work
Yes as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to zen out in meetings. Just act pleasant and answer questions if needed. Life is good
yeah i quit a job I had because it was always meetings where nothing got done but people just wanted to socialize and jerk each other off w/ the pretext of ‘productivity’. or go on these rants about totally unrelated nonsense.
my current job has one meeting that’s 45m every two weeks. and maybe once a month it goes to 90m if a major policy change is active. It’s so productive, and nobody at my company needs to inject their weird little ego trips either, it’s actually 100% work focused.
Our management wants daily, camera on, pre-shifts. My supervisor, audio only, once, maybe twice a week. Once she goes over all the stuff she needs to cover she asks if anyone has anything they need to go over. We have a few gossips on the team and they will proceed to take over and spend the next hour making everyone listen to what they think.
I’ve told my supervisor to say, anything work related, and then when they start that she should cut them off and say I said work related, if you want to discuss non-work related things you can start your own group chat as long as you are not falling behind.
She has so far refused to stand up to them hijacking our meetings like that, so even though I’m required to stay in the meeting until it’s ended, I just stay silent for a while and eventually leave then set myself to red so it looks like I’m on a call with one of the people I regularly interact with. Nothing has been said and if it is I’ll point out that being in that meaningless meeting is hurting my productivity.
Can I have your job please
18 minute daily stand-up frequently goes to 90 minutes
Plus clients that think that talking to you is a good use of retainer - you don’t need to spend an entire hour describing a PowerPoint presentation to me, you can actually just use PowerPoint to add the blue box you’re talking about yourself.
What sort of psychopath schedules an 18 minute meeting?
“If you set meetings at an unusual time people have to be on time! That’s why we set it at 18 minutes before 9! It’s not so that we can check you’re definitely working by 9am! AND it allows us to discuss all important company matters every day. OK so order of business number one is my daughter had a school play last night and let me tell you not one of those recorders was played in tune…”
This meme has layers:
+41 is the country code of Swiiiiitzerläääänd… 😆So…?
Ever had a telephone call with a Swiss person?
“Grüüüüütziii Muuuuultipleeexer… Thiiiiiis iiiisss Johaaaaan speeeaaakiiiing, let’s staaaart it sloooowly, will weeee?”
Sometimes, stereotypes are just true. ;-)
I used to work with a Swiss guy. Never experienced this.
Maybe depends on region.
I had a tech project with a local ski equipment supplier, and he and my other contacts at his company all spoke in a heavy, really slow going dialect, just like from the movies.
Also, they often tackled problems differently. Slower paced, but more deeply thinking about the next step to be taken.
Collided somewhat with my more agile way of wild brainstorming and quickly start doing stuff…
But that quite certainly might not be the case for more urban Zürich inhabitants, who probably are just totally annoyed by this stereotype. :-)Maybe depends on region.
In Switzerland the same stereotype is specifically about people from Berne.
I recently had a Bernese guy on the phone who was super quick and when I didn’t understand him (due to being in a datacenter room at the time) he apologized for being too fast haha.
Tbf I only worked with the one guy, so maybe my experience was the exception. Worked with plenty of Germans though, and they don’t seem to do this. Though the Swiss have many other linguistic influences obviously, so I wonder where they get it from.
I am German, so I may also have a different experience, based on the common base language the Swiss and I are speaking.
Schwytzerdütsch seems to posses a tendency to use long vowels, and this also bleeds into Swiss people speaking “normal” German, which gives a very distinct stretched kind of pronunciation.
This might have caused part of the stereotype.
Might be that they are additionally often speaking extra slow on purpose when speaking German to a German, so that we have a better chance to understand what they are saying.
| Sometimes, stereotypes are just true. ;-)
Have worked with multiple Indian contracting groups. The stereotypes bleed through different facades of life.
i used to have a boss that would never set meeting lengths, everything in the calendar was just the default 10 minutes. and boy was he a talker. there were at least two occasions where we had to break off the daily status update after 90 minutes without anyone but him having relayed what they were doing. he spent the time reviewing the core values of the organisation and shouting.
Every 30 minute meeting is 47+ minutes. One hour meeting… the director just showed up. That’s like 3 hours…
People who complain about meetings should be forced to manual labor for atleast a week
Damn a lot of entitled babys in the replys
Hey, fun fact, I work in construction and most people who attend weekly meetings also complain about them!
There’s only so many meetings I can attend in a day, and still get shit done.
So maybe take your gatekeeping somewhere else?
I’ve done both, 8 hours of manual labour goes by faster than 8 hours of meetings, not that I’ve had so many meetings in one day lately.
I would take a week of manual labour over a week of just meetings. Zoom fatigue is real. After a long day of meetings I’m exhausted but not in a good day. After a day of manual labour I feel exhausted but feel great and sleep well.
