Yeah and higher ceilings, bigger windows, nice wooden floors, ornate decorations etc. Turn of the century apartments are the nicest and most expensive.
Well, in Germany three politicians who had to resign because of corruption where they had made deals with companies manufacturing masks and made hundreds of thousands of euros. And this is just facts and no conspiracy theories, and I bet this goes on at every level. If you find a way to (legitimately) control people and peoples behaviours, of course it's lucrative.
You can't just say it's "lucrative." You have to say how. Are you saying that a controlling number of powerful politicians or their backers are heavily invested in mask manufacture, but not in any of the parts of the economy that are affected negatively by the lockdowns?
And "hundreds of thousands of Euros?" That's a pittance. There has to be more to be made (than maybe enough to buy a studio apartment in Berlin) in order to justify the shutdown of a large part of world industry.
That might happen, but when you think about conspiracies, always think who would be against them.
Ok, they make money from selling masks. But do you really think no shareholders in hotel chains, airlines, airports, etc. are trying to push back against that?
Covid is hurting a ton of businesses. A lot of powerful people are behind those businesses that feel that pain.
You realise that cancer kills many many times the number of people that die from corona, but we still continue to "sacrifice" those people just to have a functioning society, make profits and also just for fun, by producing cigarettes etc. How can you be part of such a society?
I don't understand this reasoning, it's such hyperbole, we are not sacrificing anyone. You are already part of a society that makes these types of tradeoffs and calculated risks all the time. We don't spend an endless amount of money on extending everyone's life at any cost. And people who are overweight and unfit have a personal responsibility as well, and can also isolate themselves, why do we have to traumatise a whole population of healthy people unnecessarily with lockdowns.
It's so unbelievable far fetched, that asymptomatic people should still transfer virus through contact surfaces and that this will in any significant way increase the infected health care professionals at the elderly peoples homes, despite them having professional equipment, and those elderly people, who are a part of the risk group, while another VERY large part of the risk group can isolate themselves, still would be enough to motivate a lockdown.
It's getting so incredibly unreasonable, everything will be impossible if you put an endless price to every second of a human life.
We could have had a hard strong lockdown in early 2020, but people like you made the arguments you're making now, and so we've had a see-saw year of restrictions being imposed and lifted, and here we are: the economy's fucked, huge numbers of people are dead, we have new variants[1] in circulation, and we're now saying "let's just kill off anyone who'd, or obese, or has diabetes, or asthma".
[1] Notice how all the worrying variants are from countries with inadequate lockdowns?
You don't know that. There are already plenty of examples of countries that have had hard lockdowns, no lockdowns and medium lockdowns, and the results are really inconclusive. The only pattern I can see is that the number of the infections is following the weather and the season, like flu viruses always do.
"huge" numbers of people are not dead, look at excessive mortality, adjusted for population, compare 15 years back. Lo and behold we have had several deadlier years.
In Germany all restrictions were lifted for six months and nothing happened, then suddenly infections went up when the weather got cold and OMG it's because we let people go out. Then we lift the restrictions slightly and now when infections go up again, following the next spell of cold weather, we are certain that it was because we let some people go to the hair dresser.
In Germany, the end-of-summer spread happened due to several factors, bad weather because autumn, lowered restrictions (as were all summer) and start of schools after the summer holidays. There is no single silver bullet to stop the spread (except maybe "prevent all contact"), but there are several factors that need to play together.
However, the lowered restrictions during German summer also had a visible effect, look at the numbers between June 2020 and August 2020 and you will see a distinct rise there. It isn't nearly as bad as in September, but it is there.
This is the winner right here, this is the manager who will get the most things done and deliver the most business value. This team would run in circles around a whole department of snowflakes. Focusing on being efficient at getting the actual job done, not wasting time on bullshit like figuring out how to have the perfect "one-on-one" to "make people happy". People on a team like this will be happy because they have a high level of purpose, craftmanship and impact.
I agree very much, I hate when managers try to pretend to be your peer when that's clearly not the nature of the relationship. It's actually a huge pet peeve of mine: managers who always want to put their own modern twist on being a manager. Like I'm your boss, but actually I don't like to make decisions and I'm also a cool guy who's just your friend. They try to avoid the negative stereotype of the manager, but just end up not doing their job and leaving people confused, and making for a very awkward environment.
I don't get it, doesn't everyone dislike/struggle with these things? Who likes context switching, office politics, sitting in meetings and having difficult conversations
The truth is that if you’re a manager who has no other marketable skills, you can only hate pointless meetings so much since without them you’d probably be putting your resume in down at the local Starbucks. Clear an engineer’s calendar and you probably make a more productive engineer, clear a manager’s calendar and regardless of the consequences to everyone else one thing is sure: that person’s job function is no longer obvious.
If you’re in sanitation, you have a more nuanced relationship with trash than those who aren’t, even though everyone dislikes trash.
Good managers should abhor pointless meetings as much as anyone else - their task is to make useful meetings. Anything else is just a waste of time and wasting everyone’s time is not exactly the hallmark of a good manager. Now, there’s people that hate all meetings and regard them all as a waste of time and if you’re one of those, you’ll never acquire the skill to actually make meetings useful - this is a skill which needs training like any other skill does.
If you work in an organization where such meetings are the norm, please share what led to such a magical place. I've heard Amazon is such a place but I'm very skeptical. My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them. Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values. In a large enough organization, this seems basically intractable to maintain. IMO the only way to win is to not play and move most meetings to short, unscheduled ones with timeboxes in conjunction with asynchronous communication tools.
> My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them.
I entirely agree with you here - I disagree with the notion that "managers" (should) like those meetings any more than other folks. Most large block meetings are ineffective, the more effective ones have a strict agenda and someone moderating them with that agenda in mind. They can be useful for announcements or large-scale alignment, but most of them should be struck from the calendar with no replacement - and good managers recognize this and strive to do so.
> Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values.
The person leading a meeting can make a substantial impact -
being prepared, making an agenda and a plan, setting a clear goal for the meeting, deliberately limiting the number of people attending, requiring others to come prepared and enforcing that (possible adjourning the meeting if it turns out to be ineffective), time boxing. There's no magic place where all meetings are effective or feel effective for everyone, but there are places that try to improve and there are techniques that make improvement possible.
Point taken - I think to drill into my point more is that very few meetings are objectively "pointless" - and managers are much more likely to see a meeting as having "value" than the engineers, in part because of the effect I mention where their jobs are defined by meetings, not in spite of meetings. (Sometimes this is not the case, eg a manager may see the latent value of literally just having two people in the same room together and talk to one another who would otherwise not, for political purposes, that the engineers cannot understand.)
To cut it in the other direction, your average testing engineer will have a much harder time agreeing with the idea that most of your test suite is useless and should be thrown out, even if it is useless, because to do so would be to admit that their entire job is less credible as a concept if it is true.
I disagree that a managers job is (or should be) defined by "meetings". A mangers job is to facilitate certain aspects of shared work, for example alignment on goals, ensuring availability of resources (financial, time, expertise, ...), recognizing and possibly removing obstacles. Meetings are one tool that can be put to use, but they are not an intrinsic goal. The same holds true for a good QA engineer - their goal is not writing a test suite. The same should hold true for a programmer - the code is not the goal. Removal of useless code is a good thing. However, there are people that fail in all of these professions - I've seen enough coders that write complex code for the love of complex code, DevOps folks self-managing kubernetes where a simple virtual machine would have been sufficient and managers hiring people just to increase the headcount of their department and increase their perceived standing.
I don't think implying that QA engineers being biased in favor of having unnecessary automated tests is the same thing as saying that QA engineers have a goal of writing tests. It's just the nature of the beast. My point is jobs inherently favor artifacts or actions which (perhaps ceremoniously) justify their existence, and often resist attempts to remove such things since they've integrated those things as core to their job function (even if their motives and goals are in fact not to create those artifacts.)
No. Some people like relationship building and diplomacy. Building the business. Having meetings fleshing out direction and staffing needs. And many others will put up with it for the increase in compensation and tell themselves it's not that bad.
I really honestly dont mind context switching all that much. It makes me less productive or course, but it does not make me angry or annoyed.
There are plenty of meetings I honestly dont mind at all. Some I do mind, but it is more about how those meetings are moderated then hating on meetings in general.
I don't doubt that it's possible. Except from having these creepy "one-on-ones" and review meetings, I have no idea what the engineering manager is even doing all day, never seen any transparency around this. "attending meetings" is what they say, but what meetings and why, I have no idea. Nothing is delivered and nothing comes out of it, I really think it's a bullshit job. "Sets tone, handles career growth, shielding the team" lol, do some coding instead.
One on one meetings are not "creepy" - they are a chance to have an open conversation about your goals; your concerns; and anything else that needs to be discussed about your career, the organization, etc.
Do you know what the sales people in your organization do? What about the legal department? Procurement? HR? Your lack of knowledge is not evidence.
"lol, do some coding instead"? And what should I code? How do you know what _you_ should be coding? Where does that work come from? Who makes sure that you're writing quality code and not some shit spaghetti mess? When the lawyers come knocking who answers the questions about security and compliance? You're just going to write some code for that?
Your myopic complaints do nothing to further your own goals - rather than make baseless accusations, look into the problems yourself and try to solve them. You might get some career growth out of it. At the very least you'll understand that not all problems can be solved with code.
I mean, I understand why 1:1 are considered necessary, but I still get the creepy vibe. It's probably mostly my introversion speaking, but this is honestly how I feel about it.
> conversation about your goals; your concerns; and anything else that needs to be discussed about your career
What goals exactly? We do sprint planning every spring, plus all that backlog refinement and other stuff.
Long-term goals? Well, they don't change that often (that's what "long-term" means). Neither does my career. So having this kind of debate once or twice a year would be quite enough.
The two people in the meeting decide it. I'm sure if either of them are creepy then you will end up with a creepy meeting. Otherwise it's just a professional meeting with an agenda and a desired outcome, like any other.
If you have no goals that's your failing, not the meeting's. If you lack the imagination to see where you want your career to go or the introspection to see where it's headed then, again, your fault - not the meeting.
Questions I get in my one on one's with people who care and are going places:
-Why is the organization failing at x/y/z? How can I make that better? Is it worth fixing?
-I am having trouble accomplishing e/f/g goal - I've hit q/r/s roadblock. What do you recommend I do about this?
-I want your job, how can I change what I am doing to get me closer to what you do?
I also use them to get information I need from these people:
-How is your team doing? Is anyone under/overvalued?
-Are your commitments on track?
-Is there anything I can do to make you or your team more effective?
I mostly have these meetings monthly. A month is long enough for things to change. 6 months is too long - too many things have changed, too many have been forgotten.
I feel the exact opposite, as a dev I don’t want to have to explain why my team’s work takes time, why we can’t do 50 things at once, and why we have to set priorities to the product teams or external stakeholders, I just want to write code. The engineering manager should enable the engineers to not have to get distracted by all the organizational chaos around them, their entire focus should be on developer productivity.
I've never seen any team where Senior Dev / Tech lead have had any power to make "arch level" decisions. And I have a very hard time imagining a team where the other junior/mid level engineers would accept to have such decisions made over their heads, by a member of the team.
Well, that’s how we do it. Senior devs make arch level decisions (how could you expect ownership otherwise?). It’s also not made over others’ heads but by involving them in the discussion, hearing their input.
I don't care about any of these points, and I especially dislike one-on-ones. I just want my manager to do one thing: make decisions. To resolve conflicts, and make sure discussions wrap up and reach conclusions.
I would agree with that. But the problem (already mentioned) is: how could a manager help you grow in the technical field if the manager is out of touch with it and didn't do coding or dev work for years?
In any case, if I have to choose (and more times than not I wished I could) I would choose the option of the first comment.
