Once again, at potentially the worst possible time for my team, we are being forced to adopt a new company-wide process. My boss is encouraging everyone to participate early and get involved, that way we can provide feedback that will hopefully push this new process in a direction that will work better for everyone involved, but I could see the exhaustion and loss of morale on my coworkers’ faces as what was supposed to be a quick aside turned into an hour-long discussion. To be entirely fair to my coworkers, the only reason I wasn’t having a bad time is because it didn’t impact me and I’m already a heavy user of the tool being forced to fit everyone else. You see, the tool in question is a software development and bug tracking product with a well-built database and plenty of customizability, one that the software developers and testers have been using for over half a decade, to the degree that we barely think about it anymore (I’m not going to name names or get more specific than this for reasons of plausible deniability and keeping my writing away from my work life). What sucks for me specifically, though, is that there is rumor going around that all of the people who HAVE been using the tool in a way that works really well for us are going to be forced to use it this other way, that everyone else is using it, just so everyone uses the tool the same way.
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Talking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
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