Yes, we had such a guy. The owner wanted to turn that guy into the CEO of the company. We rebelled. Suddenly, he was “no longer available for the job for health reasons”.
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting. 1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.
Happens way too often. The worst part is, that middle management listens to said asshole, instead of the people on the team, because they hired them to relay shit through. So when someone on the team complains or outlies the useless meetings, they are forever branded “not a team player”.
I once worked on a project with a 30 person team that was completely derailed by a PM who just had to hear the sound of his own voice all day long. But that wasn’t enough for him, he needed other people to watch him listen to the sound of his own voice all day long. So he called multiple hours long meetings for the entire engineering team, every day of the week. Obviously the engineering team failed to deliver the project on time due to being constantly held hostage at that PM’s meetings. So the outcome was that all 30 engineers were laid off, and that PM went on to terrorize another team. It’s pretty sick that the person who was responsible for the failure was rewarded with another project, while his victims lost their jobs.
See you’re open in the afternoon, so I scheduled a demo session there with the new VP, so he can get a better sense of the product. Let’s meet up 30 min before for a dry-run
Ideally he and the client will tangle in endless discussions about features and deadlines, and the rest of the team could squeeze some real work instead of spending it on fruitless meetings.
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