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| My second-favorite Dilbert story has to do with the two different times that I was required to attend off-site team-building exercises and ended up building machines out of Tinkertoys instead of generating value for the US GNP. The first time was almost interesting, the second time was pure unadulterated pain. The only saving grace of the whole exercise was when we were assigned a PhD organizational psychologist to help with our group dynamics and we were able to band together as a team and goad him into losing his cool, yelling at us, and threatening to quit. That was fun. | ||||||||
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| < < | -- TobyCabot - 19 Oct 2001 | |||||||
| > > | I recently had an experience which can only be described as Dilbert-esque. I was working on a contract job with a very self-impressed software "architect". (Note: for the non-technical reader, "software architect" is a very vague and pretentious term but it typically refers to someone who draws pictures but doesn't write software). For some reason he decided that the entire development team needed to stop what they were doing and spend 4 hours watching him draw a document that we had been given weeks before on a whiteboard. The beautiful part was that any questions about how the thing was supposed to work were answered with "I'm not sure, that might change" or "that's a detail that we'll work out during the implementation." We were also told that the drawing was partly obsolete and that it would probably change before we had to code it. In other words the meeting was a complete waste of an afternoon for the entire project.
But that's not even the good part. After 3 1/2 hours of this, the "architect" suddenly said "I've got to go wash my hands" and walked out of the room. Again, this is with the entire development staff sitting there, wondering whether the meeting was over, or whether he intended to continue wasting our time. Eventually one of us (ok, me) asked the project manager if we could get back to work but even he was so dumbfounded that he couldn't tell so we all sat there for a couple of minutes waiting for the "architect" to wash his hands and come back into the meeting.
-- TobyCabot - 19 Oct 2001 - 21 Nov 2002 | |||||||