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Search - "#wk29"
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*Now that's what I call a Hacker*
MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS
This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.
xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"
xxx: You're gonna love this
xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.
xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".
xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.
xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.
xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those
Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT
The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...53 -
One of my worst meetings, as the sheer rage was unbelievable.
Backstory:
Architect: "Stop duplicating code", "stop copy pasting code", "We need to reuse code more", "We need to look at a new pattern for unit tests" etc.
Meeting:
Architect: What did you want to talk about?
Me: I built a really simple lightweight library to solve a lot of our problems. Its built to make unit testing our code much easier, devs only need to change a small bit of how they work.
Architect: I like the pattern a lot, looks great ... but why a library? can we not just copy the code from project to project?
... do you have a twin or something?2 -
Worst meeting I've been in?
The one where I was told by my lead and the senior that my new colleagues were having trouble speaking to me because I'm a "strong, independent woman" and that I need to make sure I don't scare them when I approach them.
-_-20 -
In my company we developped a tool where we enter the average salary of all members of the meeting and then let a timer run which would show how much money the company spent on that specific meeting.
Needless to say that meetings were way shorter after that12 -
Worst meeting ever? The one I am in right now. I am trying to post this rant but a guy keeps asking me questions ...2
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Our dear freelance web dev, you absolutely need to come to our office on the other side of the city during working hours when it's impossible to find parking space for an urgent meeting to discuss you copy/pasting to a web page a simple block of text we'll send you via email
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Worst meeting I’ve been in?
Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”
Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.
I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.
June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”
Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.
That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.
Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.4 -
Now there was this meeting where our boss called our team to reach at exactly 8:00 . One minute more and you will be fired.
Turns out he himself reached at 8:15 for the meet. And we were just staring him, wanting to say, "Hey boss, you don't need to come anymore. YOU ARE FIRED."9 -
meeting a client for small web project, we did not agree price of project soo I left...next week I saw him on tv, he was arrested as a pedophile6
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Worst meeting?
A tech review where a senior developer presented my code and slightly modified ui as his own.
Only things he changed were the button colors and title of the app. When he switched to the code, my comments were still there.
It was the worst meeting because my boss said, in all seriousness, "It looks great!" 😦6 -
When a customer said that I shouldn't be working with web development since I couldn't put 3D animations in her PDF document.6
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Worst meeting... Way back in 2008 at my first web development job, our VP of sales kept referring to a client that was "jewing us down."
I'm far from Jewish, but I didn't like this guy whatsoever so I began breathing heavy and furling my eyebrows in the meeting.
He asked what was wrong, and without hesitation, my coworker next to me yelled at the VP and said, "you anti-semite piece of shit. Can't you see that Lee is Jewish? Wow. Way to go dipshit. Now he's going to sue the company and we'll all be out of a job!"
VP began profusely apologizing to me while I turned my nose up and refused to acknowledge his existence. Then we hear a click followed by a dial tone.
It was the actual customer. None of us realized that our other coworker had already dialed the conference line with our table speaker phone and had been quietly waiting to start the meeting while our theatrics played out for the entire room to hear.5 -
Went to Vietnam to attend a client meeting. The meeting was in Vietnamese. Oh, and I don't speak their language.4
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The worst tech day if my life... In terms of broken things.
I went to London... For a meeting with a new client.
I missed the train being me I made sure I got the early one so I could get another if I missed it...
1st tech fail, the machine didn't print off my tickets just the receipt which is why I was late
Got to London thought I'd try uber I didn't want to be late...
25 minutes till destination ... Ok
2nd tech fail... Was 45 minutes 😔
Now I'm 10 minutes late!
So I rush out of the uber to try and get to the meeting ....
3rd tech fail 😔 I drop my laptop ... Screen was ok I got lucky .
Went to meeting it was in a coffee shop ! I was alone meeting 5 people in this charity.
This company didn't occur to them I'd need internet to show them websites 😐
4th tech fail no internet
Needless to say I didn't get the job. Sad because I would of done a good job . At least I got to chill in London. For a few hours.
They put me on a hot seat as such all asking me questions
I was 19 terrified stressed. And it's only been a year... I'm doing the same tomorrow!
Fingers crossed7 -
One of my top 10 worst meetings, was for an interview for a job I really wanted. The guy started off the technical interview by asking me about language features that had been replaced since before I started learning the language. Told him when I started learning and his reply was:
"Yeah I see that on your CV, but come on, you MUST know this stuff".
eh no asshole, because its been removed for 4 years, you MUST know its not relevant10 -
I studied at an Art School and my co-ordinator liked to screw with students. He set up a short-notice meeting with himself, myself and an audio guy (to work on our game).
I didn't know any of this however and my co-ordinator opened with: "He's a photographer looking for a lean Male to do a nude art shoot."....... I'm pretty confident person and I thought he was serious so I agreed to it.
He wasn't serious and it became an interesting start to the meeting.1 -
Worst meeting. Hmm..
Embarrassment wise maybe the one where my boss called me the queen of porn in front of everyone. Yes, classy AF. (Just have to know him to know his sense of humor I guess).
Most cringe worthy meeting was probably when our out of state national director came in and basically told us he has no clue what we do nor does her care to learn. We brought up salaries to him as well as we're in the bottom 8th percentile for the industry in our area with HUMONGOUS work loads, like 20 sites per developer at once. This is a huge multi-million dollar corporation, mind you. We told him some of us have to have 3 jobs to survive and he basically said well you're an at will employee so there's the door. He also took phone calls and sent emails during my one on one meeting which we never finished even though he promised to. But he bought us a shirt, so you know, it's all cool. 🙄10 -
Joined devRant a week ago...I use it almost all the time... Can't even think about uninstalling it...It feels like all my brothers in arms are here....I love this new home.3
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Recently had a meeting with the company that acquired my startup, where I was required to relinquish root/admin access across AWS, SSH, and database. It was decided that I held too much power, and will now only have read-only access to develop. I'm not entirely sure what I do for work now.5
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Uh...all of them? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used to work with a 'floor supervisor' who vaped excessively and obnoxiously. He had one of those things that made vapor like a space shuttle launch too. When he was talking during conference calls or presentations, rapt attention and respect were demanded. When anyone else was presenting, *whoosh*, big cloud of vapor, right in front of the screen, right in the presenter's face. It looked like the building was on fire ten minutes in. Opening the door was like getting out of a car that's been hotboxed. That guy was a douche.2 -
I've been in far too many "we're downsizing, so you won't be seeing some of your colleagues anymore" meetings. It's depressing.4
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Back in college.
We had this course in which we gathered in teams and worked the whole semester for another teacher building a product. We had roles, like QA, devs, PM...all the works.
I was PM and during our first presentation of the product to our teacher and the client we showed the work of our first month of work. At the end, our teacher asked our QA, who have been silent the whole project and hadn't answered my mails asking for tests, if he had found any problems. "Oh, yes. The whole site is broken. I can easily break throught it"
The faces of the rest of the group showed a level of surprise that made the teacher ask if he had informed us: "No..."
Our client, another SE teacher, started to laugh and that was that.
It was awful3 -
Wk29:
A 15 minute meeting to discuss what shade of yellow our product should use for warning. I had to attend because I was writing the product.
This was one of about 5 separate discussions on the colour, a few of which involved me showing them a colour wheel and telling them to pick.
I'm a back end developer, the colour is just 3 rgb floats to me, I don't goddam care!2 -
Was asked to pop down to my bosses office for 5 minutes, turns out I was interviewing someone. Not one word of warning was given to me prior the phone call asking me to come down.2
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The meeting where I was thrown under the bus by my colleagues for "not making enough progress" and removed from the project. It's all good though. That project was a piece of shit and now I'm doing something I actually enjoy with a group of people I actually like.
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When you are into Dota2 trying to forget everything after stressful day and your manager messages you if you have spare 10 minutes to discuss next weeks' upcoming tasks.
Hell NO!! Let me play and chill.5 -
Every scrum meeting where I can't figure out what I should claim that I did yesterday...
"Scrolled devRant and 9GAG" obviously isn't an option!5 -
Never had one due to this trick I borrowed from an old friend.
So we all know about those meetings where its all crap flying around right?.
First go in there with your alarm clock set on vibration every 7 minutes(trust me on this-makes you look important and you ought to be somewhere else)
Actually the alarm is a reminder that you need to bring yourself back online.
At this point just listen to the speaker for a couple of seconds(especially if its marketing dept) and being the engineer your are; rephrase parts of their presentation in a question-comment hybrid( at this point you're the wisest looking person in the room)
Now go back to thinking about that pizza slice you left in the fridge as they discuss the "lean production" methods that they can use based on "your opinion"..
To more happy meetings..cheers3 -
I'm a founder of a small startup. We had a board meeting on a Friday, and Thursday night I sent a strongly worded email to the chairman and point investor, both of whom are worth well over $100 million, expressing my concern that we were undercapitalized and they were taking advantage of our youth and inexperience in order to make a quick return on their investment. The board meeting the next day was 2 hours of me getting railed.1
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Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
I wouldn't say worst, becaues I enjoyed it, but it was definitely the most expensive one. Our team is spread across the EU, then the manager said "Fuck skype. Let's have a meeting in Germany."2
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Once during a standup, I mentioned that I needed to fix some unit tests before the build would be ready. Our tester then said "no time for tests, we need the build now". That was a dark day.
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The one they called to announce I was being dismissed after promising a promotion witch led me to refuse a better job opportunity the week before...2
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So the dev team got invited to a management team meeting. First order of business: Happy Birthday Betty!!! Yey!! Second on the agenda: How's you son Dylan doing at school? Yey!?!? After fucking around for 25 minutes: why are the development team here? OHH! We didn't mean to invite you, must be a mistake. WELL FUCK YOU, AND YOUR SON DYLAN AND YOUR BIRTHDAY BETTY, YOU THINK WASTING OUR FUCKING TIME IS FUN!?
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5 years ago, I spent two days in a conference room championing a service oriented architecture, which we had started down the path a year before. The other guy wanted to undo what was done and take the monolith approach. Not making any progress, I walked away and decided to let him have his way. A year later I left the position and quit programming. That whole experience played a major role in the decision to just give it up.2
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I one sat through an hour and a half long meeting about how to have a meeting. I missed a deadline because it went over.
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During my internship.
Got wonderful opportunity to present a project to a senior Director of a different team.
And just moments before meeting, my project stopped working.
Was a disaster.
Later came to know there were internal issues in the service I was using in my project.
Though not my fault, but during the meeting, I managed to show a video of the project.
Let me know if folks wants to know what happened later..3 -
The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.
So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.
Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!5 -
Hmmm let me think ...🤔
Is there really a need to distinguish ? Are there any useful meetings out there?🤗1 -
The meeting where your boss over promises a ton of features that are not only completely out of budget, but also completely out of our abilities - so that he can get the sale to pay his 2 month behind office rent...2
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When our company (past employer) got acquired by another company and everyone got to have a meeting where you got a black or blue envelope. One indicated you were being let go, the other indicated you were being offered an "opportunity" if you would relocate to NJ. What was an awesome company -- they destroyed the soul of it in one day.
Oh well their CEO got let go after a US Congressional investigation earlier this year. Karma, bitch! -
So this company wanted their site launched early..so I coded for 3 days straight, hardly a wink of sleep and I launched it by the new deadline they gave me. Then they send me screenshots of a million problems with CSS and I'm like...THATS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUSH YOU STUPID PRICKS2
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I was asked to come to client with the product owner and the marketing person. They told I just need to answer technical questions. But, in reality both the product owner and the marketing didn't even understand what our product is. I need to explained and carried on all the presentation. And the worst part, while I was struggling explained everything, the marketing and product owner was chatting and browsing random website5
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I don't know what to chose.
The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;
The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;
The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;
The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;
The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;
The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);
The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;
The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.
I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.6 -
On Friday. Client and Project Managers arranged a meeting and wanted me to be there. Client said the meeting will be max 15 Minutes but it was around 2 hours. This client project was due the following week. I was happy because everything was done and excited that the client might be coming down to say how awesome the work was.
The table turned around. They came changed the designed and functionalities. The client said, it won't take long to do it, right? and my Project Manager said No! No! No! don't worry its very easy thing. It will take him around 1 day to do it, it's just all cosmetic changes.
It took me more than a week to get it done, test again, check on browsers. The client was pissed and they fired us. Guess who was blamed for it?1 -
Instead of watching our (software) product demo, the client asked why not build something like Amazon Go? The whole meeting was debating with him.1
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Recently attended a meeting about lessening the frequency of meetings and making them more productive. After three hours, it was decided that we needed to block out three more meetings in the future to follow up on this topic.
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Had a meeting with a customer living 60 km away from where I live. We agreed that I would travel to their place since they had something they wanted to talk about. Furthermore, they said that the content for their website was too large to fit a mail and Dropbox was a foreign country. Got there, they had no particular thing they wanted to talk about and they have made no content at all. 2 hours of my day wasted for nothing.2
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Worst meeting:
Trying to decide which front end JavaScript framework to use.
Debated about Knockout, Angular, React, etc.
Decision: Too fat frameworks, DIY using jQuery. I wonder how big and unstable is our DIY framework. Is it even a framework? Just few organically written script files.6 -
Our teacher always tells some funny facts while coding. Today he mentioned auto stereograms. Someone who can read this?18
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Project leader: Okay guys this is the week we go into fifth gear. Meeting at 6.
*Only 2 people show up to meeting* -
Ok I need a second post for this week. A tech lead decided to have a one on one meeting with me in public on the clients' floor where he decided to get angry at me (in public mind you) about using too many design patterns and inheritance because that "makes the code too hard to read. Instead use a lot of if-else's like I do." So not just is he an idiot, he did this in public on a floor with people who didn't know programming so now I look awful. I was furious.2
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My boss called my team for a meeting, where he pointed out the difference between "doing what we can" and "doing our best".
He later said he was dissatisfied with our lack of commitment with our latest, biggest project , and expected an improvement.
That would be all fair and well, were it not for the fact that, because of his delivery date of said project, we returned home four times. In the previous two weeks. -
When I met with my friend and tried to teach him basics of Java - I haven't taught nobody for long time after this.1
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Too many to name. In general though any meeting that could have been a short email and meetings about planning future meeting.1
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So I'm in a meeting with the Company director where I'm contracting for a few months. She is explaining the company history, goals etc. I can feel my eyes drooping, my head tilting and my body sloooowly sliding of my chair. Im literally fighting to stay awake. She is about to explode and go crazy BUT the business manager flies in explains to her that I have a medical condition known as narcolepsy...meaning I could be half way through a conversation and I fall asleep and it's not anything more than that
....When she said my name is thought to myself yep I'm outta here...4 -
The annual end of year meeting that takes a 3 day offsite so we can list 21 new enterprise projects to be completed the upcoming year - hehe 😅
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The meeting I will go in few minutes. Our app went in production 2 weeks ago, the managers invite us (devs) to have a drink with 'important' people I don't even know. We will celebrate the success of the project, after 6 months of pressure with everyone telling we will fail and that we are losers. Hypocrite meeting.2
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The 'farewell great manager Jim' party on Monday.
The [insert name of a department] Christmas party on Wednesday, which you shouldn't miss because they want the company to be more integrated.
The [insert name of your department] Christmas party on Friday, which is separate from the other party because they want the company to be more inte... wait.
The hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, because coding all night for free to create buzz around the company's name is always fun.
The team meeting where the product manager presents all the shinny new things they're thinking about presenting to the client while our deadline is still a couple of weeks away. "And the engineering team knows exactly what to do, right?" Yeah, sure, if you say so. -
Monday we had an hour-long meeting with the only purpouse of deciding when was the next metting.
Later this week, the same day of the meeting, it got cancelled. -
Do telephone conferences count ? Where you have to talk to 18 guys in the big meeting room via phone explaining a feature - never know who's talking to you or all talk at the same time and you can't understand a single word because of the crappy connection or the echo of death. Same rules apply to video conferences as well plus jerky pictures.
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The meetings for SEO.
The SEO guy is really, really nice. He's patient, comprehensive, he's quite good looking and everything, but my boss is a total moron when speaking about internet stuff. He makes us repeat everything at least three times, he will note everything on a sheet of paper that he will lose and write again... these reunion last 2 hours and we have one twice a month. Uuuugh... -
Worst meeting I've ever been in.
Everyone texting, then complaining about the number of meetings. If this is terrible let's make it useful and have one good meeting! -
Group project meetings in uni. All of them. Noone ever speaks and you're trying to suggest ideas. Noone disagrees with you and when it's time for the next meeting, apparently everyone just did their own thing.. fml1
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The long talk about the site's design and updating it according to the recent events...
Turned out the client wanted to add the snowflakes on the site.2 -
Well I was not actually in this meeting but I had to prepare everything so the CEO could show the new software to the employees and when I saw him clicking on stuff and it wasn't working... I was like: it works on my machine! After a little while I found out that I didnt push it to demo so it was still not updated..
Oh that embarrassing moment when I had to go to the room and say: refresh the page please!! -
I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...
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That meeting where everybody apoints the mistakes of the organization and how nobody was going to do a shit about it.
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IDK if this counts as a meeting
Last year, I was in my first uni year. In this subject, we had to do this project and then have to meet with our teacher to talk about what we've done in it, as a way to see if we really did the work and/or if we both had done it.
So me and my colleague get to the room and sit down. He starts asking questions. My colleague answers. I freeze.
I'm a bit socially awkward and anxious to the point it kinda incapacitates me when I'm subjected to some sort of social pressure (read: evaluations). At some point, the teacher turns to me and says "you haven't been talking. Did you let your colleague do it all by himself?", and I faintly respond "No", so he redirects his questions to me.
To tell the truth I was kinda off the loop for the second part of that project, I barely could get anything done and I felt so bad about it. I'm used to doing all the work so not being able to do anything is so frustrating.
He starts asking me stuff and I forget what I studied for it. I just... forgot. I do not cope well with evaluations where I have to actually talk to people. I do fine on tests.
So he turns to us after the trainwreck that were my answers and says "your work is not good. At all. You may fail the subject. I have to see the first part again, but this isn't looking good for the both of you" (the work was to be delivered in 2 parts). I was crushed. I went home and I just cried out of frustration and fear.
We had a 13 in the work. We both passed the subj. I don't think there was any moment I was so scared to see a grade and so relieved to see that I've made it. -
Every unholy, directly sent from hell, refinement-planning i ever had since dealing with scrum.
Refinement: Good
Plannings: Fine
But the juxtaposition of both kind of meetings...
... destroys nerves
... desintegrate teams
... destroys lifes
*shivers* -
First meeting with a client, who wants a programm to organize the produced data they have collected.
Interviewing their "technical director":
Q: "How do we get access to the data?"
A: "Yes, the data is stored as (insert really unknown data type) files on our servers.
Q: "Ok, but how can we access the data from you? FTP?"
A: "Umm, I will give you the link to something... I mean the folder".
If I had a rubber duck in my hands at the moment, it would have been it's last, but loud quack5 -
When I was literally sat down by two women VPs old enough to be my mom in an actual corner of a room like I was a child and accused of messing up a project when what really happened was the project manager saw me as a threat to her upward mobility and made up stuff about me. That went on for 2 solid hours. All that was missing was the bright lamp and the threat of no dinner before bedtime.2
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Three hour meeting attempting to explain that the specs I received weren't clear, and that the calcs I was given weren't consistent with the rest of the reports we built.
End result: BA said he was right. I coded to spec. Told me finished report was all wrong and I had to redo it. -
So I'm in college and I work as a web developer for a company inside of the college. I get out of my four hour class on mondays early to get a call from my PM saying that he totally spaced on the fact that we have a meeting in a half hour. Needless to say I quickly brought up what I had done, ran back to the office, and then proceeded with the client meeting when I got there.
The meeting went fine. Client was happy with the progress I had made. My IT lead however went on an hour rant with me on some of the things I said in the meeting and then berated for over an hour. (There's more context go look at a my other rants and you'll find it. )
Needless to say I was pissed. I had made the deliverable the client was pleased and I showed up to an unscheduled meeting. I was this close to decking my IT lead he made me so mad. -
Rant
The rumour goes that, with meetings with the highest staff, attendees lay their tokens (to enter the building) on the table in case they get fired and have to leave that very moment.
I once had to attend such a meeting as a simple application engineer. They had heard I could "do stuff with SharePoint".
The part about the tokens was a myth but that people get fired right away was not! One did get fired! I shit bricks back then. Especially when I got asked something very ridiculous and impossible... how would I say no?
Luckily I came up with an alternative.
But Damn. .. glad I left that place -
When a client told you how easy the feature is and he could've gotten a cheaper price from other developers but prefer to let you do it.1
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So I'm in college and I work as a web developer for a company inside of the college. I get out of my four hour class on mondays early to get a call from my PM saying that he totally spaced on the fact that we have a meeting in a half hour. Needless to say I quickly brought up what I had done, ran back to the office, and then proceeded with the client meeting when I got there.
The meeting went fine. Client was happy with the progress I had made. My IT lead however went on an hour rant with me on some of the things I said in the meeting and then berated for over an hour. (There's more context go look at a my other rants and you'll find it. )
Needless to say I was pissed. I had made the deliverable the client was pleased and I showed up to an unscheduled meeting. I was this close to decking my IT lead he made me so mad. -
A meeting with an external event organizer, who just so happened be a rather attractive woman. I've never had so many superfluous colleagues (all guys) show up and show off.
That meeting went long.1 -
Being in a meeting my colleagues "caused" by not meeting an impossible deadline for a project I wasn't assigned to...
I just sat there not being able to say anything because I didn't know what the hell was going on.... -
Traditional meeting when sales says "I need a technical guy for this meeting" and I ended up being the only "technical" guy in the room. Best of these meetings was when the customer would ask me about sales questions, disguised as "technical" ones...1
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All of them...I'm a dev, I'm supposed to be planted in front of a machine, typing... Not sitting in a room talking
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Today. Today was my worst meeting. We had to meet to work on our website together. I said I couldn't make it, because I have other important things to do besides the website and we still have plenty of time to work on the damn thing. "You can't f'ing skip meetings." "I know you have other things, but you made a commitment." Right. But you can decide when to have f'ing meetings based around your schedule.1
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Once had a meeting for PHP update plan. Somehow the decision was made to 'update' to an older version than we started with as it was 'more stable'.
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Lots of worst meetings where they need someone to "translate the lingo" (ie "dumb down") the techie talk so that they can understand what's it all about. And they end up either having their ego hurt because I dumbed it down too much or they still didn't get it because I dumbed it down too little.
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I had a meeting 5days after accepting work from a client (the project was basically a mirror version of your typical job board with extra features).
The client and our project manager joined forces in labeling my progress/project/work "untouched" because it was simply still undeployable.. fml -
The worst meeting I was in I didn't know how bad it was until later. It was my first week at a new job, and I mostly just spent that week pulling tickets off of the top of the backlog and getting acclimated to the build environment and the project structure.
The meeting was a "sell off" where we would "sell" our efforts to the product owners, which were executives. After my project mentor went over the things we had accomplished, an executive asked why we accomplished those things but not the things that were asked for. I don't recall everything that was said, the basically our project manager threw us under the bus.
After the meeting, I looked at the backlog, and nothing that the Executives talked about was in the backlog, nor anywhere to be found. Our project manager, expected us to just "know" what we were supposed to work on, and create our own user stories. Apparently, what I found out after, was that the project manager went to one of the executives and complained that we, the developers never did what he asked and that we were just rogues working on whatever we wanted to work on. He was our project manager for another month, and he never created any tickets for us, even after two hour long meetings with the project owners. I honestly don't know what he did all freakin' day. He was always in work early. I'm sure a quick brush through his browser history would reveal some interesting things.
The results of that meeting led to this developer to not receive a bunch of RCUs with the rest of the developers amongst another things. Turns out those RCUs were golden handcuffs for everyone else. He left sometime after that and found another place. I interviewed at that place, too and got the job. Now I have the shortest, most productive meetings ever. -
At a job ten years ago, I had a manager who thought it would be a good idea to lock us in a meeting room all day with a 45 page BRD reading it line by line and analyzing what each line means until everyone was on the same page.
Every time I do an agile project without a BRD I think of her.1 -
Once I had a meeting with a employee. He asked for some bonus money and I wanted to fire him. Was weird.1
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Client was on a budget and it couldn't go past CMS dev work. He wanted A MILLION EXTRA FUNCTIONS and didn't believe me when I told him I'd have to code from the child theme and disregard his pre-installed full theme... fml
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A client once asked us to quote rewriting one of their back office applications. He later came back and told us our rates were too high. He was going to look for someone one cheaper but wanted us to manage the development since he valued our opinion.
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I was the new guy in a meeting where we had to decide who works on which projects.. I was last pick and had to take one for the team.. Build a freaking WordPress plugin... Fml
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The one where they told me that the project I have been working on from day one was going to be handed off to an offshore team.
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Today. Where the senior developer got into a schoolyard yelling match with one of our owners. And then the only thing we accomplished in an hour was that we decided we needed another meeting next week.
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Scrum-meetings-and-process-planning meeting. Not a joke!!
It was actually called like this and took 2 days. We planned how we are going to try scrum... In the next retrospective, we were back to the way we were doing it before. -
The one meeting that will come next...
That will be by definition the worst and the best...
Because it will be the first one. -
When the client you did a huge project for goes bankrupt and you have to fire up your (questionable) legal skills to get the latest 35% of the money -.-
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That meeting about the integration of a new service in your app and you know more about the service to be integrated than the guy representing the service to be integrated and none of your questions about the integration issues were answered... One of the worst time wasting meeting.
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Working at a large insurance company part of a larger organization and and said organization wanted all of the plans to call into a conference call meeting....
Started off, the meeting organizers phone cut out halfway through to roll call...
We all call back in, and start the roll call again...from the beginning...
Half the meeting was just a roll call >< -
Since I am a contractor, I will have 2 one on one's.
The one with the client,who is an architect,will be nice.
But the 1:1 with my company's manager,whom I gotta report to ,sucks. -
4 meetings a week for update and then everyone will talk about cars, movies and what not except project update. Wow.
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War rooms meetings are the worst kind of meetings. And it's not because everyone is there or everyone having an opinion about the problem at hand, it's because of the irony of it all. On the meeting that is organised to join forces with others and efectively resolve blockers, for every hour that you spend on resolving blockers you have to spend at least an hour giving status reports and answering off-topic questions to managers.
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1 week after being handed a project, and another week before it's launch. I had to sit in a meeting presenting the project, where I found out my boss had done 0 requirements gathering from the stakeholders. Of course they all yelled at me about how shitty the project was, and my boss was nowhere to be seen...2
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Client wants an update, set meeting at 9 o'clock. My client's tinezone is 3 hours ahead, so i have to join the meeting at 6. 😬
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I only attend to meetings where free food and drinks are available. I promise the meeting can't be that bad.
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Any time there is a meeting it is the worst.
Suddenly, there's a voice in my head that constantly says, "shut the fuck up!"
I want to let that voice out but that'd just be poor "soft skills."
Oh well.
When I sit down at look at code again the voice will go away.. Or will it?1