Solve for x
Thursday, January 6th, 2005 | Personal
Our status meetings here at work are really just managers gathering the development team together in a conference room, interrogating us and trying not to look panicked.
Maybe it’s a cross between an interrogation room and my seventh-grade math class. Being interrogated about the status of my tasks feels like being called to the board to work an algebra problem in front of the entire class. Hell, math was easy compared to this. In algebra, there’s only one right answer and everyone agrees on it. Here there’s a correct approach to solving a particular problem, but that’s rarely the right answer to give in a meeting. It’s very tricky trying to figure out what each individual manager needs to hear in order to get that warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
Manager A thinks the best way to cut down a tree is to use a stainless steel butterknife because that’s the tool he’s comfortable using. Manager B agrees because he’s fond of the word “butter” even more than “steak”. If I mention a chainsaw, both of them question the idea: “Wouldn’t a powertool be overkill?”.
Then there would be no warm fuzzies. We can’t have that, can we?
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Monday, October 10 2005