21–30 of 119 posts
I think the best way I've found to combat these types of meetings and cut through the talk is simply to ask "Why" Find out pretty quickly (generally) what they are actually wanting and nobody needs to print things in transparent ink... (usually)
Direct YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
============================================================
My favorite bit...
PHB: "That's it. Now you've confused everyone. So what exactly is stopping us from doing this?"
Anderson the Engineer: "Geometry."
Client: "Just ignore it."
PHB: "We have a task. Seven red lines. It's not 20. It's just seven! Anderson I understand you're a specialist of a narrow field; you don't see the overall picture. But surely it's not a difficult task to draw some seven lines."
Walter the PM: "Exactly! Suggest a solution. Now, any fool can criticize --no offense-- but, you're an expert. You should know better."
I think it's like being a man in an all-girls gathering. You can either be awkward or the center of attention. It depends on your perception and how you would present yourself.
> You can either be awkward or the center of attention. Or you could, say, not radically alter your behavior based on the genders of the people around you.
Moving beyond the exaggeration of the sketch, the irony here is that being the only engineer in a business meeting puts you in an incredibly powerful position - if you see the opportunity and know how to take advantage of it. Learning to interact with non-technical stakeholders and finding ways to deliver solutions perceived as adding value to a business is one of the best ways to make real money in this industry. Fo…
Some engineering teams so effectively resist meetings that they worm their way right out of any decision making beyond "how do we deal with the mess we've been handed THIS time?"
At one marketing-overrun startup, the suits were calling two hour meetings every afternoon and then wondering why I wasn't getting any work done. So I installed a cuckoo clock in that meeting room. The CEO loved it; he even helped wind it. I knew I'd succeeded when one of the marketing types looked at the clock and said, "I hate that thing." I don't remember if the meetings got any shorter or less frequent, but they…
Love it. A few years ago at a place I was helping out in, one of the devs had built a clock for the conference room that, at the start of a meeting, you punched the number of people in the meeting into. It knew the average company salary (this was a ~15 person software house) and would count up the "money spent" given the number of people in the room and the time on the clock. Very motivating.
However, this is illustrating a particular problem that only[2] affects engineers -- engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality. This particular weight doesn't fall on any other role. It's easy for anyone, including engineers, to misjudge a problem when simply talking about it. This makes non-technical meetings about technical problems particularly difficult.
But yes, it's true, every role has stereotypical flaws, and it's healthy to be able to laugh at them[1].
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/YiuSeRE.png
[2, edit to address comments]: Only affects engineers, of all the roles in a work pipeline involving engineering.
I think it's like being a man in an all-girls gathering. You can either be awkward or the center of attention. It depends on your perception and how you would present yourself.
I think the best way I've found to combat these types of meetings and cut through the talk is simply to ask "Why" Find out pretty quickly (generally) what they are actually wanting and nobody needs to print things in transparent ink... (usually)
The video sketch shown here isn't so much an illustration of what it's like to be the only technical person in a meeting as it is one of what happens when you put technical and nontechnical types together with no way of establishing a common language and understanding. The project leads and/or engineer are incompetent.
