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Bob is speaking the expected bullshit lingo, make sure he is only talking to clients and not bothering the dev team ever.
Five minutes later: Your calendar is bombard with recurring face-to-face project progress meetings
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting. 1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.I dont even work in corporate and reading this makes me yearn for the sweet, merciful embrace of death
It really is alarming how entire teams of smart folks can be sidelined by one self-important asshole.
I once worked on a project with a 30 person team that was completely derailed by a PM who just had to hear the sound of his own voice all day long. But that wasn’t enough for him, he needed other people to watch him listen to the sound of his own voice all day long. So he called multiple hours long meetings for the entire engineering team, every day of the week. Obviously the engineering team failed to deliver the project on time due to being constantly held hostage at that PM’s meetings. So the outcome was that all 30 engineers were laid off, and that PM went on to terrorize another team. It’s pretty sick that the person who was responsible for the failure was rewarded with another project, while his victims lost their jobs.
Happens way too often. The worst part is, that middle management listens to said asshole, instead of the people on the team, because they hired them to relay shit through. So when someone on the team complains or outlies the useless meetings, they are forever branded “not a team player”.
Well, there’s my daily panic attack taken care of early
Only one panic a day?
See you’re open in the afternoon, so I scheduled a demo session there with the new VP, so he can get a better sense of the product. Let’s meet up 30 min before for a dry-run
This nearly gave me an aneurysm.
Kind reminder: you didn’t fill the KPI matrix for the last 15 minutes. Please do it asap :)
Tell me everything that I could easily extrapolate from Jira tickets, but tell me in a meeting, and let’s do that 7 times per week.
talking to clients
you want him to define features and deadlines?
Ideally he and the client will tangle in endless discussions about features and deadlines, and the rest of the team could squeeze some real work instead of spending it on fruitless meetings.
do people actually fall for this stuff? it seems like so many business management types are working overtime to make sure they’re always up to date with the latest in corporate jargon. why? do people actually think these people are saying anything?
I dunno, I think business jargon exists for the same reason it exists in any other field. When you spend a lot of time focused on a niche topic you come up with really specialized vocabulary to describe it. Plus it probably qualifies as a form of code switching.
Apparently most of my chain of command at work falls for it.
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Yes. Most people use just a bit of business jargon nonsense. Not enough to really sound like they’re talking completely from the wrong end, but just a nonsense word here and there. Usually they use them wrong, but because it’s so prevalent it starts to fade into the background.
When people use almost nothing but buzzwords it’s pretty transparent though, and almost always falls apart on questioning.
Wait where’s the talk about creating Value™ for the company? That needs to be mentioned constantly and incessantly.
Wow, I’ve never wanted to punch a comic strip before.
This sounds like the landing page for half of the enterprise product home pages I’ve ever visited.
“No, fucking seriously, what does this product DO?”
It just kills me because surely it makes for worse sales and you’d think that’d help avoid buzzword vomit. It’s one thing when it’s your boss, but another when customers say “your marketing pages suuuuuck”
I have a theory that people who talk like this either;
Don’t know what they do themselves, or
Know their job is bullshit and use this language to feel better about it.
I’m a product manager and I want to punch this comic strip!!!
We have one of those at my work, and he talks just like this. I’m honestly not sure what he does all day.
I’m honestly not sure what he does all day.
He talks like that all day. That’s his job
I have a project manager who sits next to me, and she is the most plainspoken person in the room. “why are we doing this? Seriously what’s the point?” type questions and as blunt as they can be.
I also don’t know what she does.
I am a project manager and I too don’t know what I do all day.
Hush, you’re gonna make him nervous
His best friend is the Scrum master
Reading this thread makes me feel like I need to update my blood pressure prescriptions.
I’ve worked with some excellent SMs, they just do all the organisational crap like wrangling people in different teams together so I don’t have to bother. Definitely seems like a job where a bullshit merchant could thrive though!
Yes, we had such a guy. The owner wanted to turn that guy into the CEO of the company. We rebelled. Suddenly, he was “no longer available for the job for health reasons”.
I swear all my previous managers took the same manager class.
When they treated me like shit, every one of them tried to make a personal connection with me by asking about something I was wearing.
“Oh you like x band? I see youre wearing a shirt”
“Hey what does your bracelet represent”
“Sweet hat, I like fried chicken to.”
Like the first thing they saw they said something about it. Oh you’re trying to get to know me now after you’ve fucked me and I’m leaving?
Sweet hat, I like fried chicken to.
Without any additional context, this is the greatest sentence I’ve ever read.
Bonus panel: they rip his mask off, and he turns out to be an AI.
The one guy I met IRL who talked like this for real, got caught embezzling from the company. lol
Why are you trying to make us throw up inside our own mouths?
Jabberwocky
Que’est que c’est?
Dans ce contexte, ça vient d’une série appelée Better off Ted, satire sur le monde corporate ; les protagonistes doivent faire une présentation sur un produit dont ils ne connaissent rien et qui s’appelle Jabberwocky
The boss creamed his pants
Relevant music video:
You can always tell when middle management has recently attended a seminar or bought a new “How To Be Successful” book because they start talking like this.
