Retro meetings are useful but I think some people do them wrong.

First off, who remembers shit from a week or two ago? We started a document at the start of the sprint so we could add stuff throughout the sprint as it happened. Made it easy to remember and actually talk about stuff.

Secondly, retro meetings should typically get shorter the longer you’re on a team. You use the meetings to find out what works for you and then most of the rest of the time it’s a short meeting unless there are issues to talk about.

And no one should be forced to participate. After a while there usually isn’t anything in particular to comment on.

So, a brand new team might have a lot to talk about for the first couple of retros because they do things slightly differently (how they go about determining risks, how people pick up peer reviews, etc) but after identifying those problem areas in the retros it should be pretty smooth sailing.

I know every now and then I have to reiterate to my team that they need to prioritize peer reviews. You can’t let 5-8 stack up just because you don’t want to do them or whatever other reason they have. Thankfully I finally have someone on my team who gets just as annoyed with them as I do so I don’t have to always be the broken record.

So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.

Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!

Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.

Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.

The problem is that there’s unequal pressure above and below the tiles, if your building has mechanics or even maintenance at a stretch they could fix this for you. I used to deal with little things like this pretty regularly when I did building maintenance.

Sounds like the soundproofed rooms are for people who want privacy, and/or quiet place to work

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.

I sometimes send them quotes from their own conversation on chat.

Passive aggressive ftw 😁

Open offices are a mistake.

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.

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.

Do you have enough rooms from everyone at the same time ?

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?

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.

For anyone on Linux: teams-for-linux is an unofficial client that works way better than the official client. It’s also in AUR

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.

Teams is garbage. This comes from someone who used it on windows, both on the app and web versions.

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.

What does 10-4 really mean then?

Well since 10-4 is a radio code meaning message received, I think they’re saying exactly what they mean.

I thought you meant armpits at first…

Off topic, but I love that you are here!

I always loved at the old place that there were people from totally random professions sharing their knowledge. At the beginning, it was not very…diverse here in that regard. I’m glad you are here!

Yeah my job has that too. That system has a “remember me” button, but it doesn’t work.

By this point i spend 400 € for a quality keyboard and noise canceling headphones, money I earned in that very job so I don’t get nuts at that job.

I use it at home too.