I’m Ashamed of This Meeting
Photo by Estúdio Bloom on Unsplash
At times in my career, I’ve been a great developer. I’ve also been a poor developer and an embarrassment to everyone. I would say I haven’t felt embarrassed to work for my company. Until now.
The Setup
I’m working from home, so I went to log in at my usual time of 08:59. I knew we had a meeting with a third-party supplier, so I prepared some snacks, breakfast ramen, and a nice pot of coffee.
One of our colleagues got locked out of their machine. Not an uncommon experience but also not something where our management doesn’t care — if you can’t work during the working day you need to make up for that in your own time.
The rest of us dialed into the call. I go first as I’m the one who is on time. I keep my camera off and munch on my breakfast. Maybe I’ll learn something?
The Meeting
The senior developer is who going to run the session with the third party doesn’t arrive. They can’t seem to log into the meeting. Nobody knows what is going on and the external party suggests that we use any other video conferencing system that people can use (for this call we just needed a passcode). Our tech lead doesn’t make any impact to take control of the situation and time ticks down.
10 minutes into this 30-minute session our senior developer joins. They seem quite flustered. The third party helps with some queries from the team, but they need some clarifications. Unfortunately, our senior developer is asked if a library is dynamic or static and they don’t know the difference between the two. They are rescued by another developer.
Discussion continues with constant interrupting and speaking over the third party. The time finishes with nothing agreed upon and nothing learned.
I’m glad the meeting is over, but unfortunately, there is another meeting to discuss what happened.
Post Meeting
We go straight into the next meeting.
A senior developer announces that they don’t understand some of the code. They said the best approach was to copy-paste the code into Copilot and get it to explain. They don’t seem to understand that Copilot has full access to the code.
I manage not to cry.
A Constructive Approach?
I know that other developers would be more effective in this situation.
Talk to the manager about the situation
Be helpful to other developers and add value to the team
If things are that bad, leave
But I get to WFH so what are you going to do?
Conclusion
It’s easy to criticise so I guess that is why I do it. Anyway, in my defense the one thing I do when I have a meeting is that I prepare and make sure that I’m ready and go on time.
I guess my standards are too high for my current company. I think I need to go back to having low expectations.