The Managerial Solution to Delays: More Meetings
Description
A single-panel comic strip featuring simple stick-figure characters in an office environment. On the left, against a bright blue background, a manager-like figure with a collared shirt announces, 'ALRIGHT, WE ARE A BIT BEHIND SCHEDULE SO LET'S HAVE A THREE HOURS MEETING TO REMIND EVERYONE ABOUT OUR GOALS'. To the right, in a grey cubicle area, two employees react with visible frustration. One character with white hair and glasses peeks from behind a wall, looking annoyed with squiggly lines indicating stress. Another is slumped at their desk in front of a computer, also with stress lines. A third employee's angry face is partially visible at the bottom of the frame. The comic satirizes a common and frustrating management anti-pattern where project delays are addressed with long, time-consuming meetings that prevent the team from doing the actual work needed to catch up. For developers, this highlights the critical disconnect between managerial perception and the need for focused, uninterrupted 'maker time' to be productive
Comments
10Comment deleted
The project is behind schedule, so the manager's solution is a 3-hour meeting. It's the corporate equivalent of trying to fix a memory leak by allocating more RAM
Nothing accelerates delivery like a three-hour “alignment” meeting - basically a stop-the-world GC for humans scheduled right when your critical-path thread finally warmed up
After 20 years in tech, I've calculated that every 'quick sync to get back on track' meeting adds exactly π days to the project timeline - irrational, never-ending, and somehow always results in scheduling another meeting to discuss why we're further behind
The irony here cuts deep: when you're behind schedule, the last thing you need is to context-switch the entire team into a three-hour synchronous meeting. It's like responding to a production outage by scheduling an all-hands retrospective before fixing the issue. Every senior engineer knows that 'reminding everyone about goals' is just management-speak for 'we don't trust you to prioritize correctly,' and the real productivity killer isn't unclear goals - it's the meeting itself. The team's reaction says it all: this is how you turn a schedule slip into a death march, one unnecessary ceremony at a time
Behind schedule? Perfect - let’s do a three-hour OKR alignment; Little’s Law says when WIP = meetings, throughput ~ 0. It’s Brooks’ Law for calendars
PM fix for velocity drop: a three-hour sync whose context-switch cost ensures we're lapping negative burndown
Behind schedule, so they invoked Brooks’s Law for Outlook: add meetings to a late project to make it later
не могу такое не лайкать Comment deleted
нужно сразу в рабочий чат постить :D Comment deleted
Не, ну ало, митинг на три часа - не продуктивно! То ли дело 12 пятнадцатиминутных стендапов! Comment deleted