A sidestep into Meetings

I was going to continue on about unit testing but have decided to make this quick little detour about how much meetings suck.

Meetings suck.  That's pretty much the whole post. You will hate meetings with a passion.  Most of the times you get things done and effectively collaborate as a group.  The rest of the time involves people arguing over inane details that do not concern them.

The meetings I am forced to go to typically have nothing to do what I've done or what my project is doing.  They area  a waste of time.  No one pays attention, they either email at their computer or continue working on what they were doing before.  When there is collaboration it can be good but sometimes it is just people not saying anything useful.  They have to voice their opinions about things.

For example I was in a meeting from hell recently.  It was over the discussion over caching all the files I make for my tests or creating them on the fly from a  script.  My point was that I've already made the tests, I don't want to make them again.  Creating a script to create all the necessary files would be some what difficult as I must insure that it is 100% correct to make the existing tests run correctly.  I modify lots of those files in such a manner that takes far too long to do.  Creating all those files takes far too long and increases the wait time before execution of testing can begin.  The files might get messed up as they are created.

The other side claimed that pulling down large files when using "svn checkout blah de blah de blah" will take too long and it clutters up the repository.  And how are we ensuring the existing files are correct.

Well, the test group had to chime in about it wanting to know when their tests would be ready (missing the point completely) and how it will mess up their testing by creating files they would have to test.  The development team (my team) was split over the two ideas and argued with test over something that was interrupting my work.  They never reached a consensus and eventually I will have to rewrite a lot of code.

So while sharing code with the team and everyone has input is a good thing, when it comes down to issues that don't really matter everyone still has input over things that are of no concern to them.

Meetings suck but you still get paid.