People having video calls at their desks. We have soundproof booths and conference rooms but no, people will just talk loudly in the open space area. It’s like people talking on the phone on a bus. Hearing only one side of the conversation is super distracting. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other will be on the same video call. I guess more people are bothered but not enough to do something about it.
That’s not actually passive aggressive, that’s just being sassy. The term “passive aggressive” refers to something completely different than what most people think.
Having to reserve conference rooms to have a semblance of quietude is a terrible system. I don’t miss that shit.
We had a loud talkative guy at my place. Fucking deep voice that he was projecting like he was on a stage or something. It was not possible to have a conversation near him when he was on Zoom. We barely spoke in the open area anyway, but some people just wouldn’t shup up. I can still hear their stupid voice when I think about it.
I didn’t have an issue with open offices before the pandemic. We barely had any video calls (everyone was at the office) and people kept it down. Then everything switched to video and a lot of people are assholes.
I did not really mind when I worked at a ~10 people company, it kind of made sense. Working on a floor with over a hundred people in an open office was miserable. There was always someone on Zoom or people having live meeting in earshot.
Blow my mind that all those office managers and floor planners and supposedly expert at organizing a work environment think that it make sense to cram in hundred of people working on wildly different stuff together at earshot distance. How hard would it be to create big divisions so that you only get to hear the 10 or so people which you’re directly involved with. Anyway, there was clearly an “everyone must be an extrovert” culture thing going on. The higher ups sure seemed to enjoy hearing and seeing everyone everywhere all the time.
For our office we’ve had to resort to this and it’s pretty miserable. There are simply not enough conference rooms and phone rooms to handle all the meetings. People are unfortunately typically in teams with people across the country so every meeting is a video call. It’s really annoying so many people just end up wearing noise canceling headphones.
This is the one. I hate being in the office for this reason, unless I’m just there to socialise. I can’t bring myself to take a call in an open plan space. It just feels rude to the people in the office, but also those on the call who will get a stream of all the calls everyone in the office are on.
When people message with a “hi” or “hello” and then say nothing more till I reply.
It annoys the hell out of me. Like, why can’t you just say what you want. It wastes so much of my time and mental energy to switch back and forth while I wait for your reply after replying to your utterly useless hello.
Especially infuriating when the other person is in a very different time zone. I once worked on a project with a partner company in a time zone 10 hours ahead of mine and it was common for trivial things to take days purely because the other person insisted on typing “Hi,” waiting for my “Hi, what’s up?” response (which they didn’t see until the next day since our hours didn’t overlap), and then replying with their question, which I didn’t see until my next day. Answering the actual question often took like 30 seconds, but in the meantime two or three days had gone by.
I came to believe they were doing it on purpose so they could constantly slack off and tell their boss they were blocked waiting for my answer.
I occasionally give people shit for this. Chat is asynchronous and I’m busy just ask me the question and I’ll respond back when I can. Some people just won’t learn though and I usually just leave them on read.
Omg… I have tried to sound the whistle on a major mistake no less than 3 times in the last 7 years and they have all been ignored. I have taken to doing what I used to do with my female friends who had poor taste in men, tell them what is going to happen and let them know the only reason I am doing it is so I can say “told you so” later.
Having to relogin every two weeks with two-factor authentication. Everything is a MS Office document, in particular ridiculous spreadsheets. Everyone writes in acronyms that they assume everyone else knows. Even though there is always a lot of new staff, every email assumes everyone has been working there forever. (“It’s that time of the year again! You need to complete your GRD before week 5 of the COG and send it to the OSYN. Probably you are already an expert in completing these forms after so many years, but if you need instructions, please go to our IDRN and enter your ICRJ.”)
I have to re-auth with AWS every goddamn hour and enter a 2fa code for every. single. command. I run from the CLI. It drives me up a fucking wall even though I have it entirely scripted now. Another great example of how overly tight security leads to worse security as people try to bypass it.
I hear you, but given that my “lunchtime” could be anywhere between 11:00 and 15:00 (and that’s not even allowing for timezones), that’s pretty impractical.
In my last two jobs in two different countries the unwritten rule is to not schedule a meeting between 12-13. Not everyone has lunch at the same time, and everyone is free to have lunch whenever they want, but this guarantees that you will have some time to have lunch even if you are booked by meetings around noon. But it doesn’t really solve the timezone issue.
May I ask why? This coming from the guy that has to facilitate them.
I’m especially curious about the stand-ups, since I have mixed feelings about retrospectives myself, they have their place and I think they play a part in a team’s growth, but at the same time I’d rather just cancel them if I don’t feel we’d get anything useful out of it and I don’t want to hold a retro just because the process says so.
LE: Gonna just edit this to say thank you to the people who replied, gave me some new perspectives to think about.
I think the value of standups depends a ton on the team’s composition and maturity.
On a team with a lot of junior or low-performing devs who don’t have the experience or the ability to keep themselves on track, or a team with a culture that discourages asking for help as needed, a daily standup can keep people from going down useless rabbit holes or unwittingly blocking one another or slacking off every day without anyone noticing.
On a team of mostly mid-level and senior devs who are experienced enough to work autonomously and who have a culture of communicating in real time as problems and updates come up, a daily standup is pure ceremony with no informational value. It breaks flow and reduces people’s schedule flexibility for no benefit.
When I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to advocate for or against daily standups on a team, one angle I look at is aggregate time. On a team of, say, 6 people, a 15-minute daily standup eats 7.5 hours of engineering time a week just on the meetings themselves. The interruption and loss of focus is harder to quantify, but in some cases I don’t even need to try to quantify it: when I ask myself, “Is the daily standup consistently saving us a full person-day of engineering time every week?” the answer is often such a clear “yes” or “no” that accounting for the cost of interruptions wouldn’t change it.
I’ve just had some unlucky jobs, I think. Think 30-45 minute stand-ups for a team of 4, because the team lead or PM or “Scrum Master” feel like they have to prove their worth or something when ultimately the standup provides little to no value after the first 4 minutes (if any).
For jobs with a single ADO or Jira board, just look at our ticket status and comments.
I had one job that had daily stand-ups, a single ADO board, a requirement to send EOD status update emails, and a requirement to copy those updates to individual ticket comments EOD as well. I rage quit that job after 2 months because, frankly, that’s absurd (it had other issues too).
My favorite standup at a job was one with 12-16 people and it took no more than ~6 minutes. It was no BS. The manager got his quick update notes across all supported clients (and separate ADO/Jira boards) and everyone got to go about their day. If you talked too long you’d get cut off.
But generally, daily stand-ups are just an interruption and a thing where I end up having to make up some BS to appease management. If my update is too long, team members hate it. If it’s too short, management thinks I’m not doing any work.
As for retrospectives, of 15+ jobs in my life, only 2-3 of them ever even did anything with the feedback. Thus, it typically felt like a waste of 1-3 hours (yes one job had 3 hour retrospectives every two weeks, it was brutal). If none of the bads or nexts are ever going to happen, then don’t pretend like we even have a voice.
If your stand-ups and retrospectives aren’t BS, provide understood value, and don’t waste time then I’m fine. But if all they exist for is to check a “we’re agile!” box and allow management to flex, then I’d say it’s doing the exact opposite of agile and merely annoying the engineers.
For stand-ups you really need at least one person that keeps it on track and limits the time each person has, cutting them off and telling them to talk after.
In my experience I feel like I’m basically talking to myself during the stand ups. No one is actually listening to anyone’s status except maybe the scrummaster. I’ve said things in the standup to have coworkers be surprised later on when they’re actually carried out.
I deliver pIzza and all of our in-store routing software is tied to Google. It’s a good GPS but it gets so much wrong. During rushes it’s the job of the managers to route us on doubles or triples and I’ve gotten routed on badly-chosen doubles (i.e. 3 miles from each other) because Google thought the addresses were right next to each other. Sometimes it’s a customer issue, like a typo on the website but most of the time it’s Google being dumb.
You can submit corrections to Google and most of the time they accept them. When I delivered pizza in a rural area I had to do it multiple times a week and most were accepted. Helped fix mileage and stopped me from getting lost the next time.
I feel this one. We have a partner who says “you know” before and after almost everything he says. It’s so distracting that I can barely hear what he is trying to say. I now do my best to avoid interacting with him or his team in any way.
literally everything. I hate the work, I hate the pay, and I absolutely hate the people. I’m quiting in December to travel the world for a while, which will be great, as long as they don’t kill me first
Teams! It literally never works on Linux and you cannot change a single thing about it. I’m so tired of having to tell people that today my teams cannot share shit, which worked flawlessly yesterday.
In teams, people above you get reports on all of the time you’ve spent in teams and can see all of your “private messages”! There’s a whole-ass dashboard for it!
Hmmm I hope that’s not also the case with private messages on teams some 5 years ago. Pretty sure there was some condescending chats about uni teachers over private messages.
Oh well, I’ve graduated anyway and never again used the messaging function after that.
Teams is shit. I use it at work on Windows, and it’s still shit.
Searching something in the chat? Complete dogshit. Half the times it just straight up doesn’t work, the rest of the times it shows only the message where searched word is present and not the point in discussion when this message happened.
Keybinds. Non-customisable. Keybinds. Who in their right mind does that?! I once heard that keybind customisation would confuse “normies”, which is complete moot. So-called “normies” won’t go to the settings (or at least, to keybinds) anyway and will be either satisfied with defaults or won’t use them at all.
It also cannot restrict how many notifications it displays in the corner - so when things are getting spicier at work, it spams whole right side of your screen (gods help you if you were working on the laptop with small screen atm, cause getting shit done will be impossible). So your 2 options will be to mute everything or continue getting spammed. And then the whole point that it is even worse on Linux. And it’s web version is crap, too. And that it is a bloted, laggy mess that is more in my way when I work than helps me.
Rant over, I guess?
the rest of the times it shows only the message where searched word is present and not the point in discussion when this message happened.
Uh, I just click the message and it sends you to the conversation where you can check what was said.
So your 2 options will be to mute everything or continue getting spammed.
You can also mute only the chat that’s being spammy, but I agree with this one because I can’t mute it for X mins and such.
It’s curious how when the pandemic started people around me were super happy with Teams, comparing it to Google Meet and other meeting software, because it was one of the best services that simply worked, and over time they became more angry with it for all the bugs and weird decisions.
Can they? I don’t really care, I don’t use the corporate chat for personal things. I will act without regard to that, and if it comes to my knowledge that they did read them for the sake of controlling me, I’m going to fucking leave the company after talking to HR, that’s an issue with the boss not the tool.
I do find that useful in a corporate scenario, where if someone leaves the should be able to retrieve all the information shared on those chats, and if you suspect that someone is saying things they really shouldn’t to clients or colleagues, being able to check it is good.
I use Teams very sparingly at work, but it occasionally decides it wants to auto-start when Windows turns on (ignoring my settings that disable it on startup).
Teams also occasionally decides that it wants to disconnect/break my Bluetooth headset connection. I don’t always need Teams to do my job, but my Bluetooth headset is always required for what I do. The only way to restore functionality when this happens is to close Teams. I haven’t figured out why it happens only some of the times, but it’s annoying as fuck. I don’t have that issue with any other programs doing that to my input devices.
If I had to guess, Teams is getting small updates when that happens to you. You have it turned off on startup, but if it gets an update and the end of that update is a restart of the program. And poorly designed updates tend to reset connections or settings. And Teams loves its updates. I wouldn’t turn off the auto updates though if I was you. Usually they are security updates.
I miss Teams. It was so bad, that anytime I forgot something, I was able to blame teams and no one questioned it. Since then I changed jobs, so can’t do it anymore.
Any microsoft application. Constant bugs, crashes and a tendency to break everything if you accidentally use them in any other way than microsoft intended.
Also, ads in a fucking operation system? I don’t see how anyone can find that acceptable.
Oh shit this makes me have flashbacks to the one - and only - time I got a phone with MIUI. I could not believe how bad that Android skin was. As in, even Samsung in their pre-One heyday could not even come close to this bullshit.
At least they use that to sell you the hardware for cheap. Microsoft doesn’t provide anything of value like that. In fact, they charge people for the OS and then have the audacity to add ads.
I’d say firefox doesn’t qualify as OS but I get your point, distros do ship it by default.
The good thing is that those ads are just defaults, not permanently baked in. I can get rid of them in about 2 minutes. Mozilla doesn’t sell your usage data so they need another way of funding themselves and I don’t think there’s a better way to do it.
The same can be said about the Windows ads. It’s just a checkbox to turn off tips. Tips are useful a lot of the time so people don’t want to turn them off. The second a tip isn’t useful it’s seen as an ad.
First of all, tips will automatically get enabled during some updates.
Secondly, tips notifictions telling you to use microsoft crap are not the only ads. You get fullscreen ads for office after booting that are made to look exactly like an installer, you get edge literally spamming you with popups when you try downloading another browser (that’s closer to malware than an ad but I’ll let it count).
You get ads in the settings menu as well and if you try to edit a video like you could on windows 7, you get the “fuck you, pay a subscription”.
You also get ads in your start menu and of course, don’t forget the start menu search that will rather show you a bing page full of ads than actually search for your files.
Please stop defending this bullshit, it benefits no one but microsoft and is actively making the world a worse place.
I’ve literally not seen any of the ads you are talking about (besides an office 365 install prompt at the end of an install) but I run a windows debloater tool on every install since windows 7. I also never had an update mess with the debloater stuff or turn ads back on.
Pizza parties, “lunch and learns”, lunch at a restaurant with the boss…
All of that condescending shit that is intended and expected to deprive people of time away from the office, building, worksite, whatever if they need it.
I value my personal time and it’s not easily replaced by free food.
Some of the other comments in the thread are great too…
Overabundance of redundant or unnecessary meetings in general is another one for me.