Techie Pointed Out Meetings Are Pointless, And Was Punished For It
The Register, Monday, February 17th, 2025
This week, we venture into the realm of office politics with a reader we'll Regomize as "Palmer." Palmer once worked under a newly minted manager who considered Dilbert comics as useful training, and the Pointy-Haired Boss as an inspiration.
His big managerial innovation was to stage a weekly meeting during which all members of the IT team were required to share what they had done in the past week.
"Most of us were specialists," Palmer told Who, Me? "I did mainframe performance, someone else did network configuration, a couple of people did Linux. I knew no one else would understand what I had done, so I kept it short and said things like 'I am working on two customer problems.'"
But others would describe their recent work in great detail, and even squabble about it.
These meetings were scheduled to occupy a single hour but often stretched to 120 minutes or more.