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by thisismyaccoun7 1524 days ago
Researcher/Engineer in government here. The project I've been on for the last year has me averaging over a full day a week in meetings.

The PM (who has been in charge of the project for five years now and at the research center 25+) is "non technical", so she likes to have multiple tech roles in each meeting for "backup".

It's exactly the hell you'd expect.

On the plus side (/s), when COVID forced us telework, they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did, so I have documented exactly why everything is behind.

Unfortunately this law won't apply to us though.
1 comments
Sohcahtoa82 1524 days ago
> they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did

Every day? Every week? You left out a word.

Every day would be awful. Every week isn't bad. At my work, we recently implemented a Slack bot that would ask you on Friday what you got done, what you wanted to get done but didn't, if you have any blockers, and what you hope to accomplish next week. Honestly, when it was first deployed, I hated the idea of it, but after a couple weeks, I had noticed that there were times when Friday came and I was thinking "I got fucking nothing done this week", but being prompted by the bot to answer the weekly questions made me stop and think harder on it, then I realized I actually was pretty productive.

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thisismyaccoun7 1524 days ago
Whoops. Every day. Goes to the PM and section boss. The latter doesn't look at it. My former PM also didn't look at it. Just a CYA type thing I guess.

Passing blockers and the like the way you do it seems decent.

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Sohcahtoa82 1524 days ago
Every day?

That's just bonkers.

I had a guy in a previous position that had a manager that started asking for those kinds of updated every Mon/Wed/Fri. After it became clear that he wasn't even reading the messages (The manager would ask about things he had just included in his report an hour prior), he started including gibberish in them.

It was a month before the gibberish was noticed. The boss was noticeably upset when he discovered the last month had been gibberish, but conceded that obviously the reports are a waste of time and stopped asking for them.

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