Be like Zammo. Just say no.
some days you just don’t feel like working, and a well placed question-turns-meeting can make that happen.
Every time
Many years ago I was working on a large engineering project as a lowly draftsman, and the C.E.O. (or some other high muck-a-muck, can’t exactly remember his title) would call an all hands meeting at the nearby Marriott hotel with a free buffet breakfast every 6 months or so, so it was a pretty nice paid alternative to working. We’re talking a couple of hundred people at these things.
Except this dude loved the sound of his own voice and could waffle on endlessly about anything and nothing, and would do so at these meetings with a captive audience. Annoying, but a reasonable price to pay for a rather nice breakfast.
At the end he’d ask if anyone had any questions, and anyone that knew the guy knew to not fucking do that because we’d be standing there for another 5 minutes listening to the answer, except for the new guy, a very nice and earnest Dutch guy that was standing next to me. I tried to stop him with a subtle shake of the head, but he wasn’t playing attention. Cue another 5 minutes of waffling. I so wanted to give him a swift kick in the shins.
There are 4 people at my job who refuse to just type me a response.
I ask them a simple question, and it’s either a meeting or “call me at x time tomorrow to discuss”
Like THERE ISN’T ANYTHING TO DISCUSS, ANSWER MY QUESTION, TYPE THE SENTENCE THAT TAKES 20 SECONDS AND WE CAN MOVE ON!
My wife is a project manager and she deals with this shit all the time. That and people who won’t even give her a thumbs up on something that’s literally a yes or no question, but get upset when the thing they refused to confirm doesn’t get done.
"A call is fine but I’ll still need a summary in an email from you before I’ll action it.’
I’ve been in the same situation, drives me nuts.
This is why it’s best to avoid asking questions and rather send messages that inform, when possible. Say things like “I’m going to do this unless I hear otherwise” instead of making it a question. I try to put the burden on them to change an action or simply give them the option to not reply at all.
Of course, sometimes it just isn’t possible.
“I’m going to do this unless I hear otherwise”
Don’t. We need to discuss it. I’m setting a meeting Monday morning with the 4 involved departments so we can settle that down. Is 9 to 5 ok for you or do you think we will need more time?
Oohh we have a guy similar to this at work. When you ask him to document what he wants to do so it can be officially approved, he would rather spend several days arguing back and forth on email with essays (multiple paragraphs) explaining why it shouldn’t be his responsibility to document it, instead of spending 10 mins to type in several sentences in the documentation.
People will work much harder avoiding the thing than the time it takes to do the thing.
The copilot in outlook feature is super handy for summarizing mails from one colleague who writes half a novel each time. That’s about the only handy use I have found for it, for the rest it’s annoying.
When you ask a binary question and they return a string
[ { "respid": "00001", "content": "response", "value": "0" } ]
The head of a related department at work kept bragging about his plans to make a brand new tech doc for months to the higher ups but the problem with that is he didn’t have enough people to back it up. Upper management wants results already but the guy has too much pride to say it’ll need to be delayed until the headcount climbs back up. Instead he’s dragging my manager and by extension, me, into his plans. Now I’m being forced to bail out the other manager while not having the background necessary to produce a good doc on time. It’s so bad that we’re having twice a week workshops to cover this shit.
Because someone files a bug, which you are expected to fix. But they missed a bunch of shit in the use case. Because whoever originally implemented it sucks. So in doing the investigation for the bug, you uncover like ten other worse bugs. And your manager is like “why didn’t you just fix the bug?” Yeah. Then it’s fucking meeting time.
I had this happen to me. The program was only used internally but it was possibly the worst code that would compile. My personal favorite was the “login”. When launching the program it accessed a local sql server. On that server was a table named “login” which you would assume had a list of all users and their passwords right?
Now that would be bad because you could launch ssms directly and just look at the table but when you did that there was 1 entry user “admin” password “admin”.
But that’s not all… When you look at the code these values are hard coded in. There is a linq query to check the login table for an entry with username “admin” and password “admin” and return the values in password. Now you might be thinking what the hell but here’s the kicker…when it got the response back it checked len(password) => 5
Yup… Didn’t check if password was correct just that the length of the password was equal to or greater than 5.
The actual username entry box? Yeah it didn’t validate anything. You could just bang your hand on the keyboard and log in… Really you didn’t even have to do that. You had to click or tab into the field and then click login. It didn’t require you to enter anything just that the username field was active at some point.
I thought my work was bad… I’d raise hell if I found that
To make it worse it was in a medical field…in production for atleast 7 years… To my knowledge still isn’t fixed…
When you ask a simple question and it turns into a whole P1 war room
