My employer began letting us use MS Teams AI service to write our daily notes that are about two paragraphs. My longtime manager said my younger coworkers found it too arduous to write these fifteen original sentences each day. You’re kidding me, right? That’s normal now?
I’ve experienced the same meeting issue. I think a lot of it stems from people’s belief that scheduling standing meetings with a standing agenda is part of how you do management (either people or project). So meetings themselves become unimportant, and the people who call the meetings often do the bare minimum of prep, and pat themselves on the back for creating a space for the team to get work done.
And, in this paradigm, where everyone is overbooked, often with ineffectual meetings, those meeting schedulers view a cancelation as a gift: “look, I’m giving you your time back where you can get real work done!”
… if the meeting wasn’t going to be real work, who thought it was a good idea to take 8 people’s time for one hour each week???
My previous manager used to hold a monthly meeting with her entire team (about a dozen or so people) to keep us all caught up on status of various projects, organizational news, proposal pipeline, etc. After she left, her replacement started doing bi-weekly one-on-one meetings with each team member. And over two years later, she still is. Several of us have suggested to her in our one-on-ones that it might be a better use of everyone’s time to do one group meeting rather than a bunch of individual ones, but she refuses to do that. She also likes to cancel at the last minute, and does a terrible job of communicating what’s going on in the organization. I found out, six months after it happened, that one of our major contract wins got canceled by the customer about a year after the award due to nobody (on either side) knowing what the hell they were doing. It just happened to come up in a casual conversation with a coworker one day.
Me: “When did that happen?”
Coworker: “About six months ago.”
Me: “Jeez, you’d think my manager would have mentioned that at some point.”
Another rant about my manager. When she emails me with a question or pings me on Teams, the question is often vaguely worded with no context. (I had a former teammate a few years back who would do the same.) And when you respond trying to get clarification, the response is just as vague and confusing as the original question. Which is aggravating because then I start wondering if I’m just a stupid clueless idiot or are they really not being clear in what they’re asking?
I’m kind of the opposite - I may wind up providing a couple of paragraphs of background just to ask a simple question, but it’s because I don’t assume people know what I’m asking about. Maybe that’s just as aggravating to others…
I hate that. My son does that a lot. I often feel like I’ve missed half of the conversation.
Being the same way, I’d like to think it’s not. 
My Teams rant: I have a coworker who sends out one line messages. As in each sentence is in its own line.
From just this morning:
The constant “blurp” sound Teams makes drive me nuts.
I wonder if their Teams is set up so each time they press [enter] it sends the message? That can probably be reconfigured if you get my drift.
I had an employee contact me, telling me the company contribution to her health savings account isn’t there. The deposit that was supposed to have been made in January. So I check, and it turns out she never signed up for the HSA during open enrollment in 2024. I tell her she can enroll now, but she won’t get the full company contribution, it’ll be pro-rated for July, so she’s only going to get half the company contribution for the year.
She went over my head, my supervisor’s head, and my director’s head straight to the VP of HR demanding proof she didn’t enroll in the HSA. VP forwards the email to my supervisor because he doesn’t handle this kind of thing on account of being, you know, the VP. So my boss not only sent her proof she didn’t enroll, but also the emails we sent asking her if she meant to waive the HSA during open enrollment.
In the future, when this happens again, and it will happen again, I’ll just provide the evidence when I break the news.
Welp … We’re gonna need a bigger clue-by-four!
That’s the ONLY thing I have to make sure is done on my open enrollment! (Usually.) I get so paranoid that I check it like 10 times before I actually hit submit. What a maroon!
I don’t know about Teams, but Slack does the same thing, and you can’t reconfigure it. You have to use Shift+Enter if you want to go to a new line without sending what you’ve written so far. Of course, Maus’s coworker could just learn to write complete sentences - even if that came across as a single message the content & formatting would be annoying as hell.
Please ask the question clearly at the beginning, and then provide the context and other information that may be useful after that. If not, you’re just the evil of twin of the two brief problem, a 600 word essay where I have to try and figure out what you actually want.
Far too many of my replies start, “I think you want me to…but if that’s wrong, then clarify…”
Our budgeting process is a complete mess.
I write a budget using a form that is then sent in to accounting.
Accounting has to make changes because I don’t know what everyone’s salary is and our indirect cost rate changes each year.
Accounting does not make changes to the form I use. They have their own master form.
I need to track expenditures and time of employees charging to my projects. If we don’t spend our funds within a year they are lost.
I only have access to my own form, which I know is wrong.
On top of this our fiscal year does not line up with the fiscal year of our major funding source so I can’t even tell if what we have spent is tracking with our funds.
When I started at my current place, they did “agile/scrum” but are limited because we do bill clients for changes. They need to know our hours. I don’t prefer it but I get it. It means pointing is by time instead of effort. My team was a bit “wild west” in releases. The dev would release when the BA told them it was okay. After a mess up, not sure where, they put in processes before a release. I agree with that, it’s needed*. That meant on my team, the BA had to fill out a quick checklist, as well as the release checklist they do, to show they had done their work before getting approval to push to PROD. The dev and BA did the release and the scrum master made sure to call out releases for the week and put them on a schedule.
We get a tech assessment, which I still haven’t seen, and it took a year but they finally are implementing changes. On the QA (my) side of things, even though we are late in the process. So many things went bad with this. The new team:
- Talked to me and my coworkers about how we do things. When we pushed back on proposed changes, they stopped asking us.
- Talked to my manager until she pushed back then stopped asking her.
- Implemented new changes to Jira without asking us, which stopped our ability to do our job. They had to roll that back and for two days, we couldn’t do things by our normal process.
- Expect us to read and memorize all documentation they create. I found out they have been using AI and web searches to create as much as they do. (Hundreds of pages of documentation across tens of documents.) The documents have links to other documents, all the way down.
- They want a document per release to PROD but aren’t clear what that should look like.
- Instead of providing much training, they do weekly hour long “coffee sessions” to answer questions. These are so bad.
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- They didn’t do a base training and jump into topics on their minds instead of what we ask them.
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- They assume that no questions means everyone has read everything and agrees with it. My wife, a trainer with over two decades of experience and education, says that’s not how people learn.
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- When asked for an example story to use in the coffee session, rejected all my suggestions.
- In the last training, they said that QAs will now be in charge of all releases. That includes:
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- Getting sign off from all involved and documenting it, which is what the BA does.
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- Running any meetings or discussions about a release, which is what the scrum master does.
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- Handling the check list, which is what the BA does.
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- Handling all of the extra documentation they are adding.
It’s been a nightmare. Anytime they ask for feedback and get it, they ignore it. I’m on Dev Support but we have Build teams as well. The documentation looks like it’s created for a Build Team where they create, or grab, a template of their Test Plan and update it as needed, which might be once or twice in the life of that build. They want all documentation done prior to a release. But. Build Teams might do two or three releases over the course of building the project. In contrast, Dev Support has already done two hundred and fourteen releases to PROD this year. That would be new documentation for all of them.
On top of all of this, it’s done to get KPIs so they have data. Except that they want us to attach the documents onto the stories. Documents which aren’t searchable in Jira. They will have to go into each story to the attached document to get the data they want.
On top of that, they want us to break the agile/scrum process. Anytime something fails, they want us to make a defect story. I have no idea how that works in a sprint when the team gets to fix things found during the sprint before a release. I think they created Jira defect reports.
When asked why they are doing this, the response I get is the tech assessment but no one will show it to me. The people in charge, as far as I know, have never been on a build team or support team, so are looking at documentation of a process they find online and creating their own process based on what someone else wrote for their process. It’s supposed to make it easier and more transparent when we already were. It’s doubling up the work on every step of our process and pushing responsibilities and procedures onto the QAs, when that’s not how our team operates.
We have a reprieve in that they are finally doing training for us in August. I will see how that goes.
Thanks for the discussion!
*I really try and stay in my QA lane after being a dev for over twenty years. It’s been tough because I do agree some meetings are needed. We need to know what to do and a meeting is for that purpose. I also believe in pushing back on meetings that don’t produce something (document, process, questions) as follow up items as a waste of time. I think they now use the Azure pipeline for releases, so I hope that means it’s automatic. That is new in the past six months.
This morning I got an email from corporate IT with a link to some form I need to fill out. And when I click the link I get an “access denied” page with a form to request access. This happens about once a month. It’s so frustrating because when I see one of these emails I know it’s going to be the same stupid shit again. If it’s so important, make sure the people you’re sending links to have access!
Today’s workplace rant is brought to you by some shitty network security software called zscaler. “Shitty” being relative - zscaler may very well do its job perfectly fine. But… I have plenty of other software running on my laptop that occasionally pops up a message box in the lower right corner. Outlook for example, or Teams, or many others. But zscaler is the only one that, when it pops up a message, takes my fucking focus away! And this happens a couple dozen times a day. Very frustrating and annoying to be in the middle of typing something and suddenly your focus has moved away.
We’ve got zscaler, as well. It usually pops up first thing, and then goes away.
Just had to lay off a smart, motivated manager. It wasn’t working out and on reflection we decided we needed to change things up. I hate it. I really liked this person.
What happened?
Ultimately just not a good match, I don’t want to say much more due to privacy concerns.
Sometimes that’s just the case. My director is an abrasive know-it- all with a “My way or the highway” attitude which is at odds with the general vibe of most of the company that values a consensus based approach. I honestly don’t understand how she’s lasted so long given that nobody who reports to her likes her and she’s even pissed people off outside HR.