The meek "please call me" was after the manager found out from upper management that they were far more replaceable then Caleb was.
Exactly. If Caleb had it in writing that he was going to be paid regardless then the dude had some serious leverage.
Nah, "call me" always means "let's make this a real-time social hierarchy game, because I'm good at exploiting verbal cues and expectations to shove people toward my desired goal."
And also a way to move something to where there’s no proof of what was said.
There's also the "oh shit, I'll get this fixed, but nothing I say can be in writing or I'm definitely getting fired" possibility.
Nah boss, I just apologized for my misunderstanding, I have no idea why $Insubordinate_Contractor is saying that I said he'd better come in or I'm going to blacklist him in the entire industry and ensure he never works again ... I mean, why would I say that?! I don't have that kind of power!
Yup those of us who are not good at bad faith conversations need to get good at recognizing when one is about to happen and insist on written.
"We need to take this conversation offline" is a near-universal precursor to ethical dispensation.
No, "call me" means "I'm going to say some things to you I don't want to put in writing that could be used against me later."
In my experience "please call me" is more often business speak for "you've really got a problem now" than a statement of weakness. Like they've got too much shit to say to you to fit in an email, and they maybe don't want what they're about to say to be written down
Yes. But then the “no” is a full sentence response. I love it.
No. It’s a way they try to cover their asses so it’s not in writing so it can’t come back to bite them when they inevitably do or say something illegal and he comes back with a lawsuit.
In my experience it means managers want to discuss something without a paper trail.
I can.
I was stuck in a job I hated for over a decade, and not only that, I was the guy on the team doing the shit jobs no one else would do because many of the older, tenured people didn't want to work weekend hours ever.
I remember the slight panic in my boss's eyes when I put in my two weeks, but it wasn't half as sweet as my former coworker's panicking when they realized that they'd have to figure out how to do my job without my help. One even had the balls to say something to me about selfishness.
You see, they'd also declined my offer to train them on the functions I was involved in and the items I created.
Glorious.
The irony is that, for the job I have now (which I LOVE!) I spent the interview talking about the databases and resources I'd created in the former shit job, and that work got me hired. My new employers treat me like absolute gold.
"I was just informed you weren't on the morning stand up call this morning" implies that this person wasn't there either.
It's a middle manager whose presence isn't needed in daily stand-ups, as evidenced by the attempted micromanaging. We don't invite those fuckers to stand-ups because they just talk about useless metrics the whole time.
They also may have just not checked to see if everyone was on the call, especially if that meeting has a bunch of people on it.
I don't know, call me skeptical or whatever, but this feels like one of those "and everyone clapped" kind of stories
It does seem probably fake, but being able to set boundaries and say no is definitely a major saving grace of freelance work, even if you have strong reasons to be professional about it.
It does, and it's old, but it's still a good story.
In my experience, daily standup meetings are largely pointless. It is yet another meeting that should have been an email or slack thread.
It makes sense if you're in an industry with hotspot flare-ups. I work MSP IT and those morning meeting are the way my team asks for help on pressing issues, or rings the alarm bells on business impacting outages. Additionally, Tier I helpdesk and Tier III projects never communicate, so the SUM is where T1 hears about where projects are at (in case they get the breakfix for that item) and T3 knows how swamped T1 is and what mobile techs are out, and T2 gets a chance to tell us if the flow from T1 and T3 into the "escalation sandwich" is too much. And we genuinely have it down pat to 5-10min.
Don't get me wrong, I've had shitty SUM requirements, but when they're done right, it's better than a state of the union email/Teams message.
I disagree, we're all remote so most of the time we have no idea what's going on with other people. Dailies are basically "Ok where are we? What are we doing?" and we're done in 10-15 minutes. Daily really is one of the most useful meetings for me. We experimented with thread approach but it was horible, no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly
Unfortunately there are many juniors that you give the job of doing A to C, and if you come back a week later they'll report they're still stuck at job A, point 1 and didn't want to message anyone, and is something a senior can fix in 5 minutes. Even worse you message them and they just report everything is ok, they're working on it. Of course they never update the status of the project so you never know if they're stuck or just not updating.
That makes daily meetings necessary so they don't lose the entire week and delay the project. Unfortunately more senior members also get dragged in those meetings. It's a frustrating part of working with mixed teams and a "just let me code" mentality.
When I was a manager of a small team it was all junior guys. I had to hammer into their heads to message if they had trouble making progress.
A few times I got the feeling one of the guys was having issues (based on messages). So I called them up on Friday afternoon and they admitted they were way behind because they couldn't get past an issue. But they said "don't worry, I'll work through the weekend to get it done".
I told him "no, you're not working on the weekend. We'll connect on Monday morning and work through the problem together. Just let me know sooner next time so we can get you back on track quicker."
After a couple of those they got the message that it's ok to ask for help and isn't a sign of weakness and they're not gonna get fired for asking.
Generally true. We have a daily 30m “standup” but mostly it’s just us shooting the shot because we’re all remote, and it’s a way to socialize a bit. It’s pretty much optional but most of us usually show up just to chat a bit.
We do our real meeting on Monday mornings
There was a part 2 to this. They told him he wasn't actually fired and to finish the job. He obviously declined
https://twitter.com/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208
Here's part 2 for those who don't want to click links.
Appreciate it! I literally clicked on the link and got confused by all the spam comments promoting dick pills.
Nice, Nitter link in case someone prefers: https://nitter.net/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208#m
Fucking awesome lol. Sorry pal, you can’t just “forget I said that” and walk away 🖕
I worked with a woman when I worked for the federal government who was quite unpleasant. She left and went to work for a major contractor. I was on a call with her when several of her people didn't show up for the call. She was raging and asked me where they were. I told her that I had no idea where her people were. She finally had had enough and demanded that I go find them and get them on the call. I said, "I'm not going to find YOUR people on your call with me, THE CLIENT. I don't work for you anymore, Diane." and hung up on her
I love this person so much. Good god I would pay hundreds of dollars for an intensely realistic VR game where I can just go absolutely apeshit on middle managers for hours every day.
We do what I call a shotgun standup twice a week. But it is done async 99% of the time.
Every Tuesday and Thursday we have 30 minutes that conveniently coincides with opening of the coffee shop in the office (two of us are onsite, six remote) prior to which the team is intended to write three bullets in the meeting chat:
If nobody posts a blocker, then we get 30 minutes on the calendar where nobody from outside our team can schedule anything. And the onsite folks get the freshest coffee before everyone else gets down there.
If there is a blocker; the person who called it out and the most experienced person in dealing with that type of blocker will join the call, as will anyone interested in the outcome. Once the blocker is resolved, the solution is put into the same meeting chat.
I understood most of those words, and still have very little idea of what is going on. Something to do with coffee?
I have no idea what a prio is, or a blocker in this context.
Where I am a contractor we have successfully petitioned to delay a "morning standups" until 1:30 p.m. - Which is a much better time to have it because it gives everyone time to A actually wake up, and be there, and B let's me actually read emails.
So many times things don't get covered in the morning stand up because no one's read their emails yet, and then you have to have another meeting at about 11:00 in order to discuss the contents of the email.
Ha ha ha ha.
However, I guess in that position I would still be more cautious with wording. No need to burn bridges to make a point.
Depending on the work and the contract, it may be the company burning a bridge. Specialized labour can be both difficult and expensive to find.
A lot of contractors (good ones) know how to play the game. You can get away with a lot when the companies vertically integrated sales app that only they can fix goes belly up. Saw this before where an easily replaceable manager goes up against a long time contractor (ya know, with a contract) and leadership gets to decide how to resolve the situation....
I've been in similar situations. It boils down to "You hired contractors to do this work because you don't have the skills internally." I cancelled a customer's quarterly release because they didn't hand over their requirements doc by the due date (after 2 months of prodding). The customer got really nasty with me. Got a call from my own VP after a few hours. He started to chew me out for not "working with them". I showed him the dozens of emails and several meetings I had with them being clear about their responsibilities and timelines. He just said "Oh... I'll talk to them." The call with the customer's PM the next day was hilarious. After he had chewed me out in front of 100+ of his people, he had to fall on his sword and take responsibility for messing up their release since it was his responsibility to manage their requirements and get them to me.
I know nobody cares, but it feels good to get that story out!
Typical “manager”. Everyone show up to these useless meetings that don’t get work done or you can’t work here 🙃
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