As a contractor of software development, I often have to deal with deadlines. That’s not a problem. I contract for a state agency – both the state and the agency shall remain nameless – and, well, let’s just say it’s difficult sometimes. I wonder how people survive in this atmosphere. For instance, people don’t walk down the hall; they saunter, with the “I’ll get there eventually” attitude. This isn’t such a big deal until you’re stuck behind a group of four people inching down the hallway when you’re either trying to make a meeting or about to pee in your pants.
Speaking of meetings, if I had another dollar an hour for every meeting I wasted my time in each week, I’d be making twice as much money as I do now. That’s mathematically impossible, I know, but you get the point. These people have meetings to set up meetings. It boggles the mind. As a peon, I was required to attend a meeting between supervisors and upper management about why another contractor was no longer working on his contract (um, it had expired?). The guy had been picked up by another department within the same agency, so he was still holding a cube there, but the originating department wanted to know why he was no longer working on “their stuff”. I certainly understand them wanting to have an answer to that question, but that developer was not me. Why the hell was I there?
We also have meetings to talk about .Net 2.0 development and using AJAX. Personally, I learned AJAX at home, on my own time, because, well, it was cool stuff. It wasn’t anything new per se, but it was certainly a new and much easier way to do a lot of the things we were doing with JavaScript. At any rate, AJAX has been around for – what? – two years? They are having meetings on learning about .Net and AJAX. I’m all for learning more, but let’s face it, if they are already two years behind, they aren’t going to catch up by learning Visual Studio 2005. They may as well start learning VS 2008, right? Duh. In these meetings, they sit and discuss when they are next going to meet so they can set some policy for something that’s already outdated. UGH.
Another meeting that I’m “required” to attend is the bi-monthly IT manager’s meeting. I am not an IT manager, nor do I aspire to be one at this particular place. I don’t go to the meetings.
State agencies wonder why software is not delivered on time. At least part of the problem is meetings. I would say about 5% of the meetings I attend are either useful or productive. The other 95% are a complete waste of time.
Oh, and TGIF.
