Just spent 2 hours having a team meeting that was the most tedious waste of time. Even my gung ho team leader seemed defeated by the banality of it all. Anyone else have to go through this torture.

We have ( due to agile methodology ) a 20 min meeting every day when we are supposed to explain what we did yesterday and what we intend to do today.

I have come close to saying "I started the day by wasting 20 mins" – really don't think that it would be a good move by me to actually do it though.

It is supposed to help the flow of information within the team so we each know what is going on. In reality the permies don't really care, and the contractors feel that they must justify themselves, so mention every tedious detail of their work, just omitting decisions that they have made/changes to procedures/anything that would have any value to the rest of us.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I used to go to a team meeting every 2 weeks to talk through jobs and have a catch up, that was officially made 4 weekly a while back, now things are busy I've not been to the office for 8 weeks now. Working from home at it's best.

I play Bull$h1t Bingo on these occasions. Whoever can collect the most management buzzwords wins.

Alternatively, get together with a couple of like minded collegues and see if you can get the most song titles/bands/football teams/insert group of words here into whatever you say in the meeting, keeps me awake anyway…

as above with BINGO. I also find that if you just moan at your boss and on mass about something they just dont want to discuss and refuse to drop the subject then they also dont like them.

not since I went freelance to get away from that kind of crapola.

Oh you mean talk down management feel good sessions where the information flow is very much one way? At least we can justify the 'Investors in People' award type of thingy.

Total bobbins. We had a really big one a couple of weeks ago to discuss how we would better cope next year with increased workload. We had a consensus of how we could do it but it won't happen because it basically requires the senior management team to make changes to the way they work 🙄

Meetings? I'm only in the office a couple of times a month (but it can be 6+ months), and the times my boss and I are both in are very rare indeed.

Please tell me you fellas are using terms like "information flow" and "agile methodology" ironically…

🙁

@cranberry

That type of meeting ought to be useful, to force the tech team to actually tell each other what they are doing, as we are usually trying to deliver the moon on a stick for the price of a pork pie and a packet of crisps yesterday (bikeradar for example) we never really have the time to actually do it.

It'd be nice to have more of a process than "Do this, we go live in 3 weeks, and don't write any bugs, we haven't got the budget to fix them and make a profit" though

Cranberry, do you work in my office?
The dev team do the same thing in their 'daily scrum'
I used to have the same team meeeting every day but it started to extend to over an hour and so is now a weekly hour long prioritisation meeting plus a monthly group catch up which i usally try and miss by being out of the office on those days

I'm currently manoeuvring to try to avoid our quarterly meeting

For a couple of hours of 'the praise sandwich' 🙄 – I'll have to drive 600 miles & spend a night in a hotel

I am subjected to a number of meetings of this sort every week, mainly due to my boss being in the US and the highly dubious membership of a few "virtual teams" split across several timezones.

I'm almost getting used to people requesting 6pm friday meetings because it is morning in california.

I leave my job at the end of November and started counting down the remaining 8 most tedious Friday morning meetings you can imagine.

Then my boss announces there is going to be one every Wednesday AS WELL!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think the accronym NATO was invented for Team Meetings, No Actions Talk Only!
We had an initative called 'What makes XXXXXX a great place to work?', intended to find out what management can do to make XXXXXX better. The result of which was, after about 12 months and some workshops, a reminder of what already makes XXXXX a 'great' place to work. No Tax Payers money wasted there then!

Hilarious read – I'm a pm and my place of work is looking to implement DSDM/Scrum in an attempt to try and speed things up.

'I started my day by wasting 20 mins….

If you think you have to sit through pointless meetings as a developer you should think about your pm/manager. My entire week is filled with attempts at getting people to agree to things they don't want to, or get people to do things they don't want to….

In fact yesterday I sat through the exact same presentation (for 2hrs) as the day before….bascially to police the meeting to keep people from shouting at each other and storming out….

Anyone else in a job they hate?!

Our project manager? We'd love a project manager, or a production team manager who could tell the manglement they were being unrealistic without getting sacked for being "unconstructive".

Have you noticed that there only usually one enthusiastic person at these meetings, another 3 or 4 that reluctantly join in & the rest are totally bored?

We sometimes have a 'team meeting' in the pub. Seeing as we have only 4 employees it usually ends up in us just getting drunk and going for a curry.

Generally the one enthusiastic is pretending. It's their job to.

At the end of the day we'd all much rather be out riding our bikes

– this thread is like an interactive Dilbert storyline lol

The place I worked at a few years ago introduced DAILY meetings for the team leaders. This was usually very good cos when they weren't in the lab we got a lot more work done but eventually even Manglement realised that nothing useful was coming from daily meetings. So they made it Mon/Wed/Fri but that had the problem that at the 8.30am meeting on Monday none of the Team Leaders knew what had been completed during the weekend shift so they all sat there and said "We don't know what's happened until we talk to the teams".

Eventually they made the meetings Tues/Thurs, one meeting to talk about the actual work, one to talk about any other issues (safety/HR/"implementation and rollout of new strategy" etc)

We have a daily team leader meeting that seems to work ok, it's a maximum of 0 minutes and limited scope for bullshit bingo though. My team meetings generally consist of me trying to get a point across whilst 6-8 people take the piss. I get fed up after a few minutes and we all do something more interesting 🙂

3 times daily – 9:30, 12:30 & 3:30

Meetings need to be run by someone efficient, if they aren't just start standing in the meeting, hovering by the door.

Personally I like the phrase 'Nothing more for me to do here, I'll stop wasting time' then I can sit on here all day long 😛

Agile – haha, does anyone use it successfully?

I thought agile /scrum etc. was just a myth put about to keep product managers confused 😉

We used to all start our contributions to weekly team meetings with the words "this week I will be mostly" in Fast Show style but it didn't seem to help, we still had to do them…

It could be worse, it could be a conference call. 2 people talking with 10 others surfing the web.

does anyone use it successfully

yes

Strangelove – do you work in a very flat place in the intellectual property field?