How do people like this not get roped into countless meetings? Do workplaces exist in the digital space that actually communicate without a meeting culture?
Yep.
100% remote here – staff not permitted in the office (5 ‘hotel’ spots and a walk-in desk behind a buzz-door staffed by a rotating helldesk rep to receive deliveries and give/get laptops for repair/re-image/replacement. This from like 400 onsite) unless there’s a good reason.
We have a few meetings, but they typically go 15 min or so; CAB meetings, strategy, an hour’s status-and-plans that goes long at 30 min, a ‘watercooler’ meeting for breakfast and random chat, to build the team and get the nerd zoomies out. No one wants to prolong a meeting, and that’s awesome. It’s an interruption, but they block together what they can so it gets it out of the way, and Monday and Friday are kind-of a bust because it’s common for 9x9 ‘compressed’ time workers to take those days off. So Monday and Friday are quiet work-times.
Everything else is handled by a slack-like chat setup, but we light a call if someone needs to show a screen or we need fast chat between many people – crises and the like.
You should come work here. We have a few spots open but they go fast; and people only leave on retirement (thus the opening today).
This is the kind of automation I believe in: Bottom-up, with no permission asked and no goal but to hold down one thriving wage with minimal effort and maximum free time. My only critique is that they felt the need to brag in public. You teach this shit in secret so the bosses never twig.
tbh this story isn’t new, the IT guy who has scripted everything and works 1 hour a week even in the office has been around since like the 80’s
I used to shoot fireworks professionally as a side gig, and the guy running the show was essentially working full time, but he had another full time job and i eventually asked him how the hell he did it.
It was this same story. He automated his shit, set up catches and only he would recwicer the alerts so he had time to be where he needed to be when they finally called him to fix it
Yeah, but I do shut up about it. Doesn’t matter what we internet folk think is common knowledge. The majority of bosses only have a faint idea of what is going on. And we should keep it this way.
This is how I keep my boss happy. By keeping him in the dark ❤
