Hey, I have a counterpoint to one of your comments wrt attitude concerning meetings: if I sit in a Teams call with 50 other people, mic muted, camera off, listening to some person I haven't seen before talk about some business development I haven't heard of before, it's not going to matter what attitude I have. No-one will notice "what energy I bring" into that meeting. None of it matters. It's just one more day of boring corporate dystopia where nothing matters.
I hear you, company wide status meetings can seem pointless.
I've worked at places where there were large "company update meetings" for the whole company. They were only once a month but still frustrating to lose an afternoon to listen to every detail about who the sales team pitched to this month. Seemingly we had to have every detail of their job explained but the entire software development team had 5 minutes at most to say what they'd done.
It was a source of friction between the development team and the management team especially during crunch times when we really couldn't afford to be losing an afternoon for the whole team.
We managed to persuade our boss to let us remote in to the meetings from our desks instead, so we could listen along while getting on with work.
With covid normalising remote work, large meetings can be both easier to deal with due to not having to have physical presence but also more of a strain as it's harder to get meaningful output from them.
Can you skip that meeting?
If attendance is mandatory and recorded can you make objections to being made to attend?
If not, and if the meeting is genuinely a waste of your time, can you just mute the meeting / take off your headphones and get on with your work?
If you have retrospectives, then be sure to call out that 50 person meeting as a waste of developer time and don't be scared to keep hammering the point that it's taking away a large amount of resource. Be sure if (when) there is pushback from higher ups that you listen to why they think it's important that you attend.
If it's genuinely taking up a whole day on a regular basis then there may be a culture issue. In general culture problems are worth an attempt at fighting, but be aware that most of the time the culture won't change and you might find you're no longer considered a good culture fit and nudged out if you fight too hard.
All companies are different, and it's worth spending a while job hopping to better understand the company landscape and where you best fit. Don't listen to people who say that job hopping looks bad on a CV, especially early on in a career. That's a myth peddled by people who grew up in a different time and who are largely in charge and don't want people to job hop because it costs them money to recruit.
> company wide status meetings can seem pointless.
Not just seem, they are. But if you can turn off your mic and video, you can play videogames or bake a cake in the background. Everyone wins: Some feckless manager feels important and you do something you actually enjoy.
yah - our weekly 'all hands' seems to basically be: The Marketing Team marketing the marketing team to the rest of the company.
It's frustrating; and worse, we've had our CEO several times send group messages to scold people for having their camera off, or worse (my sin), camera on, but obviously doing work and not paying attention. It's pretty gross.
