A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.